Coconut in the Pot: The Jamaican Kitchen of Cahuita

Two dishes on this coast are made of rice and beans. Only one of them is called gallo pinto.

Gallo pinto is the national plate. The rice and the beans are cooked apart, then fried together. There is no coconut in it. It is eaten in Guanacaste, in the Valle Central, and in Limón as well.

The other dish is called rice and beans. English name, Spanish menu, no translation given.

Rice and beans

The beans go into coconut milk and stay there. Thyme goes in with them. Then the rice goes in and drinks what is left. What comes out is paler than gallo pinto, faintly sweet, and heavier.

The beans are usually red. They can also be gungo peas, which the rest of the Caribbean calls gandules and the seed catalogues call pigeon peas. In rice-and-peas cooking the two are swapped without comment. Same pot, same coconut milk, different legume.

This is the point most visitors miss. Rice and beans is not the coastal version of gallo pinto. It is the Jamaican dish, cooked in Limón since the railroad years. It stands next to the national plate rather than descending from it. Two plates of rice and beans, side by side, from two different countries.

The Lizzie

On 20 December 1872 a ship called the Lizzie tied up at Puerto Limón. She had come from Kingston with 123 workers aboard, the first organised group hired for the Atlantic Railroad.

The railroad had one purpose. Coffee grown in the highlands needed a Caribbean port, and the line from San José to Limón was built to carry it there. Building it took labour the country did not have, so the recruiters went to Jamaica.

Within about a year, more than a thousand Jamaican workers had reached Puerto Limón. Between 1900 and 1913, roughly twenty thousand Jamaicans made the crossing, alongside smaller numbers from other West Indian islands. Costa Rica is often described as holding the largest Jamaican community outside Jamaica after Cuba and Panama.

The railroad ended and the bananas began. Bocas del Toro on the Panamanian side and Limón on the Costa Rican side worked as one English-speaking corridor under the United Fruit Company and its Chiriquí Land Company. People, work, families and recipes moved along it. The line on the map was not the line that mattered.

Cahuita sits inside that corridor. The Afro-Caribbean settlement here traces back to Jamaican fishermen who came by way of Panama on annual turtle-hunting trips, and eventually stopped going home. Panamanian and Nicaraguan turtle hunters had been working this stretch of coast a generation before the big migration wave of the 1870s to the 1910s.

Then the country closed the door. Until 1949, Costa Rican law confined Black residents to Limón province. They were not allowed into the rest of the country. From the railroad years until 1949 this cooking stayed on the coast, because the people doing it were not permitted to leave it. Afro-Costa Ricans are about 8 per cent of the population today, some 400,000 people.

Rondón

Rondón is the long dish. Fish and shellfish, cooked down in coconut milk over root vegetables. The roots go in hard and come out soft. The fish goes in late, so it survives the process.

The name is English underneath. Rondón is how "run down" comes out after Jamaican Patois and a Spanish spelling have both had a turn, and it is also written rundown. The words describe the sauce. The coconut milk runs down, reduces, thickens around everything in the pot.

Nothing about it is quick. The milk has to lose most of its water before the dish is finished, and it will not be hurried.

It travelled the way the people travelled. Out of Jamaica, along the labour routes to Panama and to Costa Rica, in the hands of the migrants who dug the canal and laid the Atlantic Railroad. The same stew is cooked today in Limón and in Bocas del Toro, under a name that started as two English words.

Patí

Patí is the one sold by the piece. It is Limón's version of the Jamaican beef patty, baked, and eaten in the hand. Jamaican families brought it in during the railroad construction years, roughly 1890 to 1895.

The patty was already a mixture before it got here. The British brought the Cornish pasty to Jamaica, by way of colonists and Cornish sailors. The Spanish had already left the empanada. The two folded into each other. The spicing is African. The result crossed the sea a second time and landed on this coast with an accent on the final letter.

Recipes vary, and some of what gets written about the filling online is modern rather than old. So the honest description stops at pastry and spiced meat.

Mekatelyu

The language arrived on the same boats. Limonese Creole is English-based, grown directly out of Jamaican patois, and it is still spoken in the province. Its own name for itself is Mekatelyu, from "make I tell you".

This is why the food keeps its English names in a Spanish-speaking country. Rice and beans, not arroz con frijoles. Rondón, from run down. Patí, from patty. Nobody translated them, because for most of a century the people eating them were speaking English at the table.

The tell is on the menu board. A Cahuita kitchen writes its prices in colones and its dishes in a language that came from Kingston, and the two sit on the same board without anyone remarking on it. What sounds like a translation error is a shipping record.

What is in the pot

Rice and beans. Red beans or gungo peas, coconut milk, thyme, garlic, chile panameño, rice. Cooked in one pot.

Gallo pinto. Rice, beans, onion, sweet pepper, coriander. Rice and beans cooked apart, then fried together. No coconut milk. Not the same dish.

Rondón. Fish and shellfish, which can mean crab, lobster or shrimp. Coconut milk, yuca, ñame, plantain, green banana, thyme, garlic, chile panameño. Slow.

Patí. Baked pastry, spiced ground meat inside. Sold by the piece.

Chile panameño. The habanero-type chile of this coast. It seasons all three of the dishes above.

Cahuita, the park at the end of the street, and what sits within walking distance of both are described on our page about the place.