Did you know there are two types of coconuts? (Well, there may very well be MORE than that, but what I meant to say was that I’ve learned since coming to Guyana that all coconuts are not the same)
There is a soft coconut and a hard coconut, a water coconut and a dry coconut.
I remember, Dad once brought home a hard coconut from the grocery store for us when we were kids, you know the typical brown, hairy ones you always see in cartoons. He brought it just for fun, just for us to see. He got a hammer and broke it open, and the boys and I looked at the milk inside. Dad gave us a taste and I remember thinking it tasted nothing like milk. I didn’t like it. Dad broke off pieces of the meat, and let us try that, too. This, too, I did not like. Weird texture, not much flavour. I was sort of disenchanted by this coconut. It wasn’t as exotically delicious as I’d expected it to be.
When I came to Guyana, there were a plethora of coconut trees. Many family and friends back home will know my excitement in this. My first vision of a palm tree was in Las Vegas, and as we were walking down some Boulevard, I turned to Mom and said “What I want to know is, where are all the coconuts?” Mom laughed and explained that coconut is a palm tree, but not all palm trees have coconuts on them. Disappointing as that was, my excitement over palm trees began then.
The next summer, on Amanda, Tricia and mine’s graduation trip, when I re-visited the West for the second time, I was wiser, but certainly not jaded. I think I had fallen asleep as we drove into Santa Barbara, and when I woke up, we were driving on the coast, you could see the ocean and – “Oh my god! Palm trees!” Amanda and Tricia never let me forget that. Hey, I was excited, what can I say?
But it wasn’t until coming to Guyana that I got to see coconut palm trees. I looked up at their size, their leaves, and their massive clusters of these yellow to Kelly green coloured globes and admired them. When I was with my host family, they, of course, had coconut trees in their yard, and served me my first. With a cutlass, they cut off the top part of the coconut, then carefully chopped off pieces of the side until the inner sphere was punctured. Mouth up to the hole, tilting the entire coconut, shell and husk alike, up to your mouth. This was coconut WATER, a clear liquid that comes from water coconuts. It has a slightly sweet, slightly acidic taste to it; refreshing.
They say coconut water is good for your health, too. Good to boost immune systems, good to give you an electrolyte boost, and generally very low in sugar, to name a few. Though be careful, it will stain/bleach your clothes. Check out this great article about it when trying to state specifically HOW: The Health Benefits of Water Coconuts.
I’ve had water coconuts opened and El Dorado poured right in; a natural delight. Once all the water is drank, you take the cutlass and cut the coconut in half to get to the coconut jelly. You cut off a shaving of the husk and use it to scoop out the insides. It’s soft, slightly milky white and gelatinous. When I first tried it, I didn’t like it. It was cool to the touch and gooey – ew. But it’s grown on me.
Now, the other coconuts, the hard ones. They’re just like I discovered them to be in Cast Away – you have to shuck the husks off to actually get the round brown shell. A sharp cutlass is a nicer way to open a coconut in comparison to a hammer, too, though whatever gets the job done. I enjoy the milk now, and the meat as well. It is hard to peel out the pieces of meat, but worth it. I’ve come to enjoy snacking on fresh pieces of coconut, but I’ve also come to see the different ways it is used around here.
Once grated, you can do a lot with it. Junita bakes buns (scone-type pastries), Cleonicia and Jose baked me a coconut cake for my birthday. Junita grates it like carrot shreds, dyes it red then rolls it in sweet dough to make salara, a Caribbean pastry. Once you grate the coconut, you pass water through the meat, straining into a cloth and getting all that milk out to add to curries or cook up rice. And while visiting my host family, I watched Meena make coconut oil, a popular cooking, hair and body oil. She grated it, strained out all the milk, let it set over night, then boiled it over a fire until all the fibers and not oil parts got burned into tiny ball-like morsels that she strained out. Coconut oil was what was left. It smells AMAZING.
The coconut. It is something that has earned its usefulness in my eyes while down here.
"I’ve got a lovely bunch of coconuts, deedlie dee, there they are all standing in a row, bum bum bum, big ones, small ones, some as big as your head. Give ‘em a twist, a flick of the rest, that’s what the merchant said…."
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