“The Sweet Lime”
“Is it ‘liming’? Or ‘to lime’?” I ask Kildane, my charismatic bartender at the Coral Reef Club resort in Holetown. The sun is just thinking about setting on my first day back on Barbados and I’m taking advantage of the welcome drink offered by the resort to find out about a local tradition.
— By Amie Watson
— Photography: Kenneth Theysen
There’s plenty to do on the lush island, from beaches to snorkelling, hiking to markets – not to mention the exceptional restaurants – but there’s one thing I’ve never done before. I’ve never limed (gone liming?), which is why I have plans with Chef Rhea Gilkes of Fusion Rooftop the following Saturday… and I have no idea what I’m getting myself into. I think there’s macaroni pie involved and, honestly, I don’t know how I feel about that.
But Kildane sets me at ease as he twists an orange rind around the rim of my drink. “You can say it any way. You’re going liming, you’re going to a lime, you’re going to lime”, he says. Grammar issue resolved, I lob in the obvious follow-up: what does liming actually mean? “It’s just hanging out, having a few drinks, listening to some music”, he explains.
Come Saturday, Rhea fleshes out that definition. “Maybe y’all would call it hanging out with your friends. It’s not a party. It’s not a fete. It’s liming. The whole point is to do nothing. There’s going to be a group of you. You’re just going to wait a few hours chatting, drinking and whiling the day away. There’s no point to the entire exercise. There’s no rush. There’s no pressure to be somewhere else. This is what you do on Barbados with as much of your time as possible”, she says. Think of it as the Caribbean version of Italian dolce far niente or Danish hygge – except with a lot of rum.
For our liming, Rhea and I head to The Village Bar, aka Lemon Arbour. We’re here on a Saturday at 11:30 a.m. because that’s the best day to lime, says Rhea. “On Sundays you go to church and have your Sunday food. But Saturday, nobody’s cooking at home. They’re going to town to shop and to lime.”
Liming is egalitarian, she explains. Tourists, locals, seniors and children all lime, with younger adults showing up later in the afternoon after they’ve recovered from fetes the night before.
A fete (pronounced “fet”) is not a lime. It’s a Bajan party where the focus is dancing. A fete has just as much rum, but there are no tables involved and food is on the periphery. A lime can have music, but if a lime switches to dancing, it becomes a fete.
Liming generally happens at rum shops, which anyone can open by putting a few chairs outside their house. “It can be almost on the side of the road”, says Rhea. Add food and it can become spot for prime liming. “No granny in an apron out front means something ain’t right”, jokes Rhea.
There’s no table service, though, she adds. She’s at the counter and has taken the initiative of ordering our pudding and souse, the most famous liming dish and the one that’s made this liming destination famous. Classic Barbados souse is made with pork and it’s a nose-to-tail dish (though the ECO Lifestyle & Lodge occasionally does a lobster or red snapper version. “They use the pig trotters, the nose, the tongue, the ears”, says Rhea. It’s slow-cooked in a flavourful broth with local spices until the meat is falling off the bone. It’s then tossed – skin, bones and all – into a mixture of lime juice and salt along with steamed sweet potato, aka pudding. “The pudding used to be made with pig’s blood and sweet potato and piped into a pig’s intestines and steamed”, says Rhea. Alas, gone are the good old days!
At Lemon Arbour, while the macaroni pie (pretty much what I thought), fry fish and Creole breadfruit are made to order, the souse sells so fast that it comes pre-packaged. It takes a couple hours to “pickle” the meat in the lime juice, so once it’s sold, that’s all the souse for the day, which often happens around 2 p.m.
The same goes for the pickled conch (pronounced “conk”) and breadfruit. The rubbery-tasting mollusc gets its own lime juice bath and makes for steady chewing along with chunks of starchy yellow breadfruit and plenty of minced parsley.
For the best liming, you’ll also want somewhere breezy, preferably with a view. We’ve taken our food and drinks and headed to Lemon Arbour’s back patio, which overlooks a lush green gully extending as far as the eye can see – perfect for staring at while you’re doing nothing. (Is staring too much activity for a lime?)
Unlike the souse, the rum is in no danger of running out. Most groups buy small, medium or large bottles to share along with bottles of soda and fruit drinks and home-made mauby, a non-alcoholic sweet drink with an addictively bitter aftertaste made by infusing a local bark in cane syrup with cinnamon and nutmeg. Locals also order bottles of cognac, a sign that we’re at a fancy lime. We stick with traditional rum.
Can you lime at cook shops? I ask. I’ve only just found out what a cook shop is because the mother of Chef Avion Caine of Hugo’s owns and operates one (she sells a mean souse, he says). “Cook shops are more in town doing breakfast and lunches for people working”, says Rhea. They’re less about rum. And customers don’t hang out for hours.
You could lime at a beach, but generally that involves roasting whole breadfruit and locally caught flying fish in the embers of a fire. And if you’re cooking, you’re not liming.
Rhea and I are definitely liming. A couple of rums and some offal-y good pig parts later, we finally stand up to leave. “It’s almost 4 p.m.”, says Rhea, approvingly. We’ve been here more than four hours. A respectable lime. The day has passed. We’ve chatted. The weight of the world has been far from our shoulders.
The next Saturday, driving through winding roads draped with the bright red flowers of pride of Barbados trees, circumventing buses that for some reason honk “La Cucaracha”, on my way to Cariba Restaurant for a cocktail interview, I see sheep in my lane up ahead. Not several sheep; a whole flock, heading straight towards me. I slow down and move to the right to avoid them. They stay politely in my original lane, never venturing across the median. After I pass, I stare in wonder in my rear-view mirror. They seem to know exactly where they’re headed. They don’t seem to have a care in the world.
It’s Saturday, after all. They’re probably going to a lime.
Amie Watson
is a Montreal-based food and travel writer.
www.multiculturiosity.com
@MissWattson
