Feb. 18, 2008 — A sea of cars filled the field across from the Agriculture Department fairground Monday as much of St. Croix and hundreds more from St. Thomas and the wider Caribbean came out in droves for the third and final day of this year's Virgin Islands Agriculture and Food Fair.
All over the sprawling grounds, people milled from area to area, many looking at the dozens of booths and tents set up by businesses, government agencies and schools. BizVI's booth showcased its new job-search website, career.vi, which posts resumes and jobs, much like monster.com and other job sites, but with a local focus.
The V.I. Energy Office had a working solar electricity demonstration and information on tax rebates and incentives for alternative energy. Elaborate informational displays were offered by the V.I. Water and Power Authority, Innovative, Hovensa, the University of the Virgin Islands and many others.
But local food is the focus of the fair, and like every year there were traditional cooking demonstrations. Monday morning Clint Ferris made ice cream with fresh local fruit and, in the afternoon, Archie and Lethie Castor and Germina Joseph showed how to make doucana from scratch. Doucana, or ducana, is popular throughout the Caribbean, especially Dominica and Antigua, but less common on St. Croix. It's a sweet, starchy and fragrant dish made with sweet potato or cassava, cream of coconut, sugar and spice, often served with saltfish and maybe some sautéed peppers and eggplant.
As they began their demonstration, a small crowd began to appear, largely composed of mothers and grandmothers of West Indian heritage, but diverse others showed up as well, curious to see something new or something they remembered from their youth.
On the table were fresh cassava root, coconut meat, calabash bowls and ladles, as well as a simple, timeless and effective homemade grater made from a piece of tin mounted in a frame and poked hundreds of times with a nail. They used this to grate cassava root, wrapping the pulp in a cloth and squeezing out starch and water.
"I never made it with cassava," a lady watching the demonstration said. "We always made it with sweet potato."
"You can use both," Lethie said. "We want people to see what we can use cassava to do, instead of potato. Everything you see is made or grown right here, the coconut and cassava, banana leaves and calabash bowls. This simple grater is what they would have used hundreds of years ago."
"There is a lot of excess starch," Archie said. "The liquid is full of it. We used to use that water to starch our clothes."
They grated fresh coconut meat, making thick, milky cream of coconut by simply straining the creamy pulp with a bit of fresh water. Lethie mixed the coconut cream, sugar, anise, cinnamon and almond extract into the squeezed-out cassava pulp, stirring it all together while Archie and Joseph checked on a pot of doucana that was already cooked, and put a second pot on to boil. Archie warmed segments of banana leaves over a flame.
"You have to heat them to make them flexible," he said, passing the leaves to Lethie, who spooned big dollops of cassava, coconut and spice mixture onto the leaf segments, folding them up and tying them with long strands pulled from the large long central vein in banana leaves. Each one looked like a little letter in a leaf envelope — much like their savory cousin, pasteles.
"Some people use paper for this and for pasteles, but the banana leaf gives it a more natural taste," Archie said.
Delegate Donna M. Christensen popped by during the demonstration, trying a bit of the sweet and filling doucana steaming hot, just out of the boiling water, resting on its leaf wrapper. She asked the Castors an interested question or two and chatted with Malcolm and Providencia Evans, old friends from way back on St. Croix.
"My oldest daughter can make this," she said. "I've usually seen it with sweet potato, so this is a little different."
Further west, all day long parents and their children strolled around the rabbits and fowl, fat pigs, goats, sheep and cows at the animal pavilion. Behind the main pavilion, in a smaller cordoned-off section, an unending stream of younger children with curious — and sometimes wary — faces petted goats, rabbits and other small, fuzzy animals.
Shoppers packed the long causeway, browsing through handmade jewelry, paintings, folk art, ornaments, piles of calabash bowls, T-shirts, music CDs, cosmetics and all manner of goods. The thirsty lined up for a ginger beer, limeade, sorrel, maubi or perhaps a peanut punch from their favorite purveyor.
This year there was a contest for best maubi. Lorimas Galloway won the blue ribbon with a crisp, bittersweet entry with perhaps a touch less sugar and a bit more anise than some of the entries. Eleanor Sealy at booth No. 17 was the only one selling Galloway's winning brew, but many fine versions, each one different, were to be had at dozens of locations. It often costs as much as $5 a glass the rest of the year, with only a few regular locations to buy if you don't make it yourself, but at the fair it was a mere $2.
If people got tired or hungry from walking around so long, they would get a plate of rice and peas, roast pork and saltfish — or whatever their preferred traditional food — fresh from the pot of their favorite cook and sit down for a picnic at one of the fairgrounds' many shady tables.
"My favorite is Mrs. Francis's," said Richard Nicks, researcher for Sen. Neville James. "I'd eat her food blindfolded."
Mrs. Francis is Alda M. Francis, born and raised on St. Croix. She was cooking along with Evie Bascombe and Rena Hendrickson.
Nicks said he's been coming to the agricultural fair for about 35 years now.
"Mrs. Francis's conch and butter and her salmon balls are my favorites," he said. "Mrs. Myers across the aisle is great, too. They are my personal all-around favorites, but everyone has their own."
Francis's food stand won for best pig-foot souse this year. She also entered this year's open competition for best pig-tail souse, but that winner had not been announced as of Monday afternoon. Pig foot or tail might seem a little scary to the uninitiated, but it's really all about the broth.
"It's good for a cold and good for the stomach," Francis said. Her broth, with celery leaves floating here and there, was nearly clear, accented with a little hot pepper and lime you could taste but not see.
Though a world away geographically, the broth of this Caribbean original is reminiscent of the Vietnamese soup called Pho, found in cities across the U.S. Braised in the spicy broth, the lime and pepper cut through and balance the fatty pork, making the dish come together.
Diners could wander off to themselves a bit, in the shade of a mango tree, or watch and listen to a band at one of the fair's three stages. Sometimes it was a mellow steel-pan band, sometimes a DJ spinning reggae and R&B, and sometimes a soca band. When the Stroka Band struck up the tunes Monday afternoon, the crowd gathered quickly. Young men and women of St. Croix pushed forward toward the stage. The area calmed down for a little while between bands, then the Digital Band hit the stage and the young crowd gathered in again, jumping up to the music.
As dusk fell, the food stands and gift stalls began to pack up and the bands stopped playing. The crowd reluctantly began going home, too, filling Queen Mary Highway and all the adjacent roads for the next hour or so with slow-moving lines of cars full of tired, full and happy families.
On Tuesday, plans for next year's agriculture fair begin.
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