We are in the land of happiness and spousal ancestors now, at the beach in the southern Caribbean coast. I have been looking forward to being here for months, but as usual I spent the first three or four days trying to stop feeling inexplicably late. I would sit on the beach for a while, remark on the waves, sunset, trees, you-name-it, and bound up to demand what’s next. Yesterday I finally unsnapped and took a two hour sprawling snoring sticky nap with the baby in the afternoon while V worked. (He’s staying on top of things, though I’m not getting much done. Next time we will arrange for a babysitter in advance.) Afterward we went to a little place near the beach to drink Campari and snack happily on french fries and a “carpaccio” of raw fish. On Saturday we went to the little farmer’s market where we bought, among other things, some of the most complex and delicious honey I have ever had. It tastes first of pure honeyness, then flowers, then like a fruit reduction of cas and lime and passionfruit and some other tropical fruit I can’t identify. (I have eaten up half the bottle already in an effort to understand the flavor.) The farmer and his wife from whom we bought it have a workshop up the hill north of town, which we visited two years ago. I will go back and buy banana vinegar, cacao butter, coconut oil, and lots of chocolate in a variety of forms before we leave. We tasted a snake fruit and spoke with Ancel Mitchell. I bought her booklet on local plants and food and lots of her dried fruit for Aure. The booklet describes local produce and edible wild plants. For someone from a temperate climate, the riotous fecundity is dizzying, the vivid colors and mad shapes all look suspiciously fleshy and potentially poisonous. (I’m pretty sure I wrote once about tasting some fruit at the beach that numbed my whole head, throat and hands. Tasty! Lethal! Yesterday a Canadian woman was telling me how to know when you’ve eaten a piece of fruit recently sat on by a poison dart frog. She claims it feels about like that.) It’s impossible to know where to start. (Ancel describes people who come to the farmer’s market, look around and end up sheepishly buying an apple from Washington state.) In fact, maybe it’s that way for the Costa Ricans too. I’ve always wondered at the simple and mostly quiet food here. The common dishes rely on a few consistent ingredients. Made indifferently, they taste, well—indifferent. Though there are exceptions: the grilled pork belly on a corn and flour tortilla with a heap of pickley vegetables and carroty hot pepper sauce on the street, spit roasted tepesquintle downstairs at Le Monastaire, a sticky-tender-crispy pork chop in chocolate sauce in an anonymous Caribbean soda, a simple fish tartar and a tropical fruit flambé at La Parcela, some astonishing fish tacos and cold avocado soup at a tiny hotel south of Dominical, brothy corn and pork tamales wrapped in banana leaves, cheeses and raw creams from Turrialba, a very spicy patty from a covered basket on the arm of a fat old lady who waddled out of the forest like an arthritic good fairy in the park at Manzanillo, Torta Chilena (not Chilena at all, but very Costa Rican and dreamy and easy to find), lots and lots of chicharron and gin with gingerale. Oops– now I am just listing good food I have eaten here and I will stop because it is easily findable in the same ways it is elsewhere.
