Cat Island & Conch With Egg Sauce & Caviar

I live on a remote island in the Bahamas called Cat Island. Not to be mistaken for Cat Key, an upscale expat development close to Bimini.

Cat Island is a big island with few people. 60 miles long and very narrow with 1200 inhabitants. Paradise on earth, as far as I am concerned. Turquoise water, swaying palms, pink sand beaches and summer all year long.

But even paradise has its serpents. We live a long way from a decent supermarket, and although the grocery stores on the island – specially Orange Creek and Candy’s – do their very best to keep a varied and full inventory, they are sorely lacking in items for a foodie like me.

There are ways to solve this problem. All of them require time and planning.

You can grow your own vegetables. Eggplants and cucumbers can be grown all year long. Tomatoes and cabbage have their seasons. Pumpkins (actually butternut squash) is also plentiful most of the year. But the summer heat is too much for almost anything else.

Herbs are doing fine, as long as you replenish the pots every now and then. Basil, thyme and rosemary are used to tropical heat. Parsley and cilantro wilt in the summer. Chives and tarragon can be kept in the shade, and the indigenous fever grass (lemon grass) and Spanish thyme grow wild in the bush.

With the Caribbean Sea to the west, and the Atlantic to the east, you would think we have an abundance of seafood to work with. And it is both right and not so. The few fishermen we have on the island are overwhelmed by the demand for fresh fish. But the customers are difficult and do not want to pay what they consider are prices they can’t afford. So the fishermen pack their catch in coolers, ice them down and send them with the plane to Nassau. The old customers on Cat Island hark back to when the price of fish was depending the winds, not the ever-rising price of gasoline.

However, there is almost always someone who just arrived from a night of fishing with a cooler full of Red Snapper, Conch or spiny lobsters and, in season, nice, fat groupers. If you are lucky, someone caught an octopus by mistake, and you will get it for next to nothing.

I will therefore start with the most Bahamian of all foods; conch.

Everyone who has ever visited the Bahamas has probably had conch in one form or another. You have conch salad, conch fritters, scorched conch, deep fried (cracked) conch and conch chowder. This versatile mollusk can be used raw or cooked, beaten or minced, whole or sliced. This particular recipe calls for very, very thin slices. It is adapted from Nobu’s recipe for abalone, but I think it is just as good with conch.

This is an appetizer that you will get so much acclaim for that you will do it over and over again.

conch middens

a conch after it is pulled out of it’s shell

local Bahamian prepping conch. Typically chopped up ingredients incude onion, tomato, green peppers, and goat peppers (scotch bonnets).

Tropical conch salad is made with a variety of fruits like pineapple, strawberry’s and kiwi.

raw conch sliced and ready for the salad