Buss Up Shut

Buss Up Shut by Lea Ann Robson



Bread Nut after boiling & draining, or the start of Buss Up Shut?

As I’ve mentioned, St. Croix is a wonderful ‘mash up’ of cultures, flags, traditions, & people.  Today was a great example.  I had dinner with my two favorite ‘Southern Suitors’, my dear friends Miles & Philip.  Among the local restaurants we tend to have our favorites & form our ruts, but tonight we branched out a bit & tried a lovely bistro called Salud.  There we had a wonderful array of tapas that I feel sure would rate well with any food critic, anywhere.  But my culinary adventures weren’t over for tonight.

When I got home I remembered a kindness my friend Joan gave me as a holiday treat this morning.  She vends (colorful wraps, bags, & pretty much everything else!) next to me by the sea when the ships are in & has become a great friend.  She is from Trinidad, has a voice you’ll never forget once you hear it, & a fiendish sense of humor.  She also has a work ethic & positive outlook that is rare.  She packs a substantial amount of wisdom in her not so substantial frame, put her kids through school & is a veritable dynamo.  She loves to garden, & makes all manner of local fruit preserves, jams & chutneys that are a big hit with patrons of our annual Agricultural Festival.  We chat a lot while vending & the topic is frequently gardening or cooking. 

So Monday when the Jewel of the Seas was in port, we were gabbing about what is growing & what we’re doing with it & she mentioned she had a bread nut tree laden with nuts.  Bread nut trees have longer ‘fingers’ on their giant hand-shaped leaves than the more common Breadfruit, & breadnuts have a mild flavor & texture that I loved when I tried them a few years ago, kind of like a cross between a chestnut and a fingerling potato.  I mentioned I liked them, & this morning she had me stop at her veggie stand in front of Ag Fair grounds to pick up the bag of nuts she had cleaned for me.  She told me they still need to be boiled, & I thanked her & rushed off to my other job. 

It wasn’t until after dinner out this evening that I remembered I needed to boil the nuts…& I had no idea about the specifics so I typed the question into my phone & as always, up came multiple answers.  I found one website, simplytrinicooking.com that had several pertinent entries.  The most interesting posts were from ‘Felix,’ who seemed trustworthy if colorful in his advice.  So I boiled the nuts (as he said) for 25 minutes in a deep pot of water, added salt (no idea how much—Felix doesn’t work from specifics) & boiled them 25 minutes more.  They are resting in their water as I write, & we’ll see if I made Felix proud or filled him with shame. 

Some of the breadnut curry recipes on that website were very interesting, but their names are more so than the actual recipe.  One recipe is called Buss Up Shut, & if I have success with the nuts, I may get brave & try that…mostly for the opportunity to say that name to people!