I have always loved the plantain, that not so long distant cousin to the banana, which often finds itself at so many tables in the Caribbean islands, especially my homeland in Haiti.
When I was a little girl growing up in Haiti, sometimes—when I was lucky—I would eat plantains three times a day. For breakfast, I'd devour them boiled whole and covered with herring chunks in a thick tomato and onion sauce. For lunch I'd leisurely chew them ripened and sweet, deeply fried and flattened by a special wood and leather tool sold and created just for that particular purpose. My Aunt Denise's sweet plantain lunches would be served either with fried chicken, goat, or pork and I always ran from the school on days when I knew she was serving them during recess. For dinner, we'd have plantains grated and boiled into a viscous nutmeg and cinnamon-flavored brew called labouyi bannan.
"You know a plantain is excellent when it clings both to your ribs and your heart," my Aunt Denise liked to say. The fact that in Indian Indu legend the banana was the original forbidden fruit of Paradise adds some credence to that theory.
For as long as I can remember, plantains have been a part of my life. My female cousins would make lewd gestures with the plantains when they were forced to peel them even as my male cousins would use the plantains as metaphors to describe a girl's adolescent demeanor and shape. You were "green," if you were studious and cold, "ripe" if you had budding breasts and were at least ready for kissing. My pubescent male cousins could barely wait for the yearly carnival to meet-up with seasoned girls who they would push up against in the massive crowd during the dance and musical celebration, where most people would have in-hand a sugar-covered banana fritter called benyen.
Plantains, not salads, were the first course of every meal in my Aunt Denise's house. It was also part of the "extra meal" that she kept safely hidden in the kitchen in case a hungry visitor came by.
When I moved to the United States from Haiti, it was hard to find good plantains easily. The pickings were fewer and the quality never as good. I remember once commiserating over this with my college best friend, Frances, a native of Haiti's neighboring island nation, the Dominican Republic. Living in a vast Dominican community in New York, Washington Heights, Frances always seemed to have better luck at finding great plantains than I did in my own Caribbean section of East Flatbush.
"It's like good men," my friend Frances would say, "you have to know where they are."
My search for the perfect plantain—and the perfect man—continues. My dream is to find one, a plantain that is, which could as easily lend itself to breakfast, lunch, or dinner. In stores all over Brooklyn and Washington Heights, I am that crazy woman who is filling her grocery carts and baskets with dreams of the next plantain meal. Even though the plantains I run across are never quite as fibrous or as ripe as the ones I remember from my childhood in Haiti, I am always very grateful to find them because somehow it feels as if they've traveled on an enormous journey across time, space, and borders to find me.
Recently I went to a reading by an African-American writer named David Lamb, who had published a book called Do Platanos Go With Collard Greens? The book is about an African-American man who is having a romance with a Dominican woman. Their romance is often misunderstood by their friends and family who ask themselves if platanos (plantains) and collard greens can ever harmoniously mix. The book made me think of Frances, my college friend, who slipped out of my life sometime ago. I kept thinking of how Frances would have answered that question.
Do platanos go with collard greens? Or anything else for that matter?
I'd like to think that I know what my friend Frances would have said. Like the collard greens themselves and the rest of us cultural hybrids, of course, platanos are seductively flexible. It is exactly that flexibility which makes the plantain a staple in so many poor and rich homes all over Haiti and the rest of the Caribbean and even here in the United States. Yes, these plantains, they do possess an enviable extendibility that haunts you and sends you searching helplessly for a sampling of their smell, their taste, and the memories they evoke even on cold empty sidewalks and very cold New York streets. And they not only stick to your ribs and heart, but to your deepest memories as well.
Copyright © by Edwidge Danticat