Munchkin:
Belizean “Green Pea.”
I have been fortunate enough to have had a diversity of culinary experiences in my life not to get “stuck in mud” over the need for “familiar” vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower and spinach. Having a Chinese background, I grew up with bok choi, kai lan, pickled mustard greens, bitter gourd and a whole plethora of greens I cannot even name but would recognise them at Mile 23 Taiwanese supermarket outside Belize City.
In amongst this, I had to stomach over-boiled cabbage that smelt distinctly of smelly socks with mince and tatties (potatoes) for school dinners during my primary school years in Scotland. These experiences have combined to give me an “iron stomach” (I think this was largely due to the cabbage) and a sense of adventure to eat anything exotic. And so, when people ask me if I miss any of the vegetables I grew up with I can confidently say “NO!” ; I am not desperate enough for broccoli to wait the nine month growing period, but, on the contrary, would much rather stick chaya in the ground and start harvesting in four weeks time.
When I first came to Belize about ten years ago, I wanted to import exotic vegetable seeds to grow in my garden and so went through all the necessary paperwork and even paid USD100 for the phytosanitary certificate because it was so important to me. The post-master at PG post-office nearly fell off his chair and beamed with administrative pleasure when he perused over the first phytosanitary certificate he had ever seen in the course of his long career as post-master.
And now I am getting to the actual story; one of the seeds I brought was “Thai Green-Pea’ which is described as an exotic egg-plant which produces green-pea like vegetables and is considered a delicacy in Thailand. It is a well sought after vegetable amongst the Thai community, so much so that it is even imported to London vegetable markets exclusively for them.
Over time I grew this vegetable and I had bumper harvests. The “peas” are green in colour and grow to about one centimetre in size and the leaves are 20-25cm long with prickles; the white flowers have bright yellow stamens and occur in clusters. My plants grew up to 120cm, bushed out and took over the whole garden. We were eating the “green peas” every day (steamed/stir-fry/sauté/cooked in curries and stews). The peas are eaten more as a texture – somewhat like biting into a soft rubber ball and do not really have a distinct taste but rather absorb the flavour of whatever you cook with.
At about this time, I happened to be walking on shrub-land on my farm (“huamil”) when I spied a plant with little white flowers and green pea-like fruit growing to a height of 60cm and apart from the height, in all other respects looked exactly like the Thai Green Pea I was cultivating in my garden. After some reading up, I discovered that this “exotic plant” is native to the Belize and Caribbean areas. The Latin name is Solanum torvum and is known commonly as “wild eggplant.” I am not aware of anyone harvesting this as a vegetable in Belize but it is used in Jamaica as a vegetable combined with salt fist. In the Caribbean countries, it is used as a rootstock for grafting tomatoes and cultivated eggplants (this might be our answer to bacterial wilt to which our tomatoes suffer from down here). In Caribbean herbal medicine, the root is an ingredient in a tea to treat gonorrhoea and the buds are used in tea to counteract influenza.
Well, what a surprise to go to all this trouble to bring in an exotic seed from Thailand to then find it growing virtually on my door-step! I really learned my lesson here, there is truly an abundance of vegetables in this country if we only take the trouble to look! Nowadays, we mostly eat chaya, calaloo, loofah, giant granadilla and of course, our very own “Belizean Green Pea!”