THEIR OWN SPECIAL SAUCE

Linda and I finally took our long awaited cruise to the Caribbean. Wunderbar. The cuisine? Breakfast and lunch were hardly fine dining. So what. The vaunted “around-the-clock-buffet” was mostly soft-serve ice cream and corrugated-frisbee pizza. But, the suppers were marvelous, whether you were metro-kosher or all-out treife. I did not venture into the frozen strictly kosher offerings.

The typical cruise fastidiously avoids exposing the voyagers to the native Caribbean fare. No, it’s strictly scrambled eggs for breakfast, American-style lasagna for lunch, bloody-rare filet for supper. Even the somnambulating tours point you to lunch at generic restaurants, from which the guides receive significant baksheesh. And don’t get me started about phony tequila factories. The free Anejo was too good to resist.

The guides also try to gross you out by regaling you in local custom of dining on iguana, turtle, and alligator. Nu, again, so what? After all, it “tastes like chicken” anyways. Janelle the Guide was also quick to offer that the female iguana’s soup was “very tasty.” Right, and hush puppies are really matzo balls in disguise.

The closest that I came to native food was somewhere up the Belize River. Being kashrut-virtuous that day, I noticed a putative national delicacy on the menu, a mélange of red beans and rice – and it was even vegetarian.

Really quite good. By its side was a pill cup of a yellow-gray gunk that the server presented as “special sauce.”

“And is the sauce vegetarian?” I asked.

“Oh no, mon. You better be careful of it.”

“Why?”

“It’s rendered chicken fat.”

I had traveled 1,253 miles just to be served schmaltz.

Moments earlier Danelle had told us that no Jews had lived on Belize. Wrong. I Googled and discovered that a Jewish family had lived there in the 19th century and that a Brooklyn guy had been a major landowner in the 1950’s, and was buried there. Ah, the origin of schmaltz on Belize.

After lunch, we traveled on to a Mayan village. Asking one of the women about their native food, she told me that in her town they broil iguana liver, chop it up with onions and turtle eggs, and bind it with their own “special sauce.”

Mystery solved.