Remembering Sidney Mintz
I was two years out of
graduate school in 1983, barely clinging to an insecure position as a visiting
lecturer. A classmate who had found a job in a business school decided to bring
some anthropologists to the annual meeting of the Association for Consumer
Research, held in Toronto that year, to talk about consumption. I was excited
to be on the same panel with Sidney Mintz, whose work I had read in a seminar
led by my advisor Bob Netting. At Yale as an undergraduate, Bob had taken
classes with Sid, who he held responsible for his decision to become an
anthropologist. Before graduate school, I had also read Sid’s work in an
undergraduate seminar on the Caribbean taught by Connie Sutton at NYU. I was
really looking forward to meeting the man who was my intellectual grandfather.
Unfortunately, by the time
I got to Toronto for the meetings I was very sick, and barely managed to
stumble into the hotel. Trying to save money, the session organizer had put me
in a double room with someone I didn’t know, and through my coughing and
wheezing I insisted on a single room so I could go right to bed. The clerk gave
me another room that had been reserved by the session organizer, and he told me
that they would sort out the mix-up later. I took a couple of cold pills and
sank into a deep sleep. Sometime after midnight I woke up to the sound of
someone unlocking the door and coming into the room; a very tired and angry man
who wanted to know why I was sleeping in his room. In my groggy state I could
barely speak, and before I could explain he turned around and marched out.
The next day I found out
that my angry visitor was famous anthropologist I so admired; I crept into the
session, dripped and wheezed through my paper, barely able to even glance at
our distinguished discussant. I remember nothing about my paper, but I do
clearly recall that Sid said nothing about it in his comments. I left the room
with a sick feeling that I had just alienated one of the most prominent
anthropologists in the world, while I was desperately searching for a secure
job.
I know that I passed him in
the halls at the AAA meetings many times over the next decade, and because he
never recognized me, I convinced myself that he was still angry. It took
sixteen years before I met him again at a small workshop at the Hagley Museum
in Delaware, where I brought my first paper on the globalization of food. When I
saw Sid in the hotel lobby, I asked if I could buy him a drink. For some reason
I remember that we ended up in the bar of a Howard Johnson’s, and that he
ordered vodka. After fifteen minutes of my elaborate apology for the incident
in Toronto, he stopped me and said he had never even seen the person in the
bed, and had no idea it had been me. He was happy to meet one of Netting’s
students, since Bob had died unexpectedly just a year before. We sat for a
couple of hours and reminisced about Bob, and I learned a lot about his early
career. After that talk, Sid gently took over a part of the avuncular role that
Bob had played in my life.
RECIPE: BELIZE BOIL-UP
Some
recent conversations with Sid concerned his chapter in a book I co-edited about
rice and beans in different parts of the Atlantic world. He wrote about the
food he ate when he was doing his first fieldwork in Puerto Rico. He said that
the everyday diet of the cane workers was monotonous and starchy; and how he
realized that his own meager daily fare was extravagant in comparison. We
talked about why root crops and breadfruit remained low-status food in much of
the Caribbean, and I mentioned a starchy dish I often ate in Belize that was
slowly becoming popular again as “authentic roots” food. This is a
generic template for Belizean Boil-Up – in practice cooks substitute freely and
use whatever they have on hand, and they do not weigh or measure ingredients.
Assemble an assortment of
root crops and bread-kind (plantain) including at least four of the following:
Use as much as you need to fill up your guests or family.
Cocoyam (also called
Yautia, malanga – it’s the white fleshed slightly hairy one)
Irish potato
Sweet potato
Sweet cassava
Green or yellow plantain
Green banana
Yam (not sweet
potato – white fleshed Dioscorea)
Taro (also called Dasheen)
Carrot
Boil-Cake - plain flour
dumplings (add a little baking powder if you like them lighter)
At least a quarter pound of
salted pork or beef; pig tail is best.
Fish is optional – you can
use salt fish that has been soaked 24 hours, or a firm fresh fish fillet or
steak you have salted overnight
The sauce:
Two large onions, 3 or 4
tomatoes, whole allspice seed, habanero peppers if you like
A few tablespoons of
coconut oil
Cut all the roots into
pieces that will barely fit on a tablespoon – some people like big chunks,
others smaller. Peel plantains and bananas and cut into 2-inc pieces.
Boil the salt meat in water
and then discard the water – you may have to do this a couple of times to get
most of the salt out. Cut it into chunks.
Boil a large pot of water
with the salt meat in it. Start adding the ground food and bread-kind, in the
order of the slowest cooking (cassava, yam) to the quickest (cocoyam, ripe
plantain) so they all get soft at about the same time.
In the meantime fry cut up
onions and tomatoes in the coconut oil, along with garlic if you like, and the
allspice seeds (four or five at most). Some people add catsup. I don't.
If you have fish, simmer it
in coconut milk in a separate pan. I like to add some coconut milk to the
boiling roots when the ingredients are about half cooked-through. Most
Belizeans don’t put coconut milk in the boil up – but they do add a few
tablespoons of coconut oil. This is my version, and I like coconut milk)
If you like it hot, cut up
habanero peppers into small pieces (no seeds!) with some thinly sliced onion
and carrot, and put to soak in clear spirit vinegar (you should actually do
this the day before, but who remembers?). Optionally you can cook a whole habanero
in the pot, as long as you don’t break it, and then you take it out whole
before you serve.
Take a big bowl and ladle
in a sampling of all the ground food, plantain and dumpling, and add a piece of
the salt meat. If you made fish, add a generous portion to the bowl now. Serve
with a side dish of the tomato-onion sauce. Add a sprinkling of habanero and
vinegar if you want. Nyam i’ uol (eat it up!)
