Chicken Foot - A Caribbean Delight and Elsewhere it Seems

We’d been on the bus from Port Antonio to Oracabessa in Jamaica to visit the James Bond Beach (remember that scene in Dr. No when Ursula Andress emerges from the sea)? That place. We visited.

Just up the road from Oracabessa is GoldenEye, the former home of Ian Fleming, Bond's creator. And nearby too is Firefly, the former home of Noel Coward.

By now, lunch seemed like a good idea, and as we left the beach we met a couple of guys having their Jamaican midday sustenance in a tree.

We passed on the offer of grass for lunch and then we climbed the hill from the beach to the little town in search of something less...smoky...shall we say.

We saw our lunch menu. Our choice was by a process of elimination. We eliminated everything and found somewhere else.

In our first world lives we have lost touch with the real food that people eat. My father was raised in a farming family and chitlins, pig’s trotters and brawn were everyday fare in West Wales.

I’ve eaten them too, but the pig's trotters were a treat by a client in Marco Pierre White's Oak Room in Le Méridien Piccadilly Hotel in London (now closed). That was certainly at the top end of cuisine and I'm glad I wasn't paying.

Chicken foot was not on the menu there, I’m sure.

But in the Caribbean chicken feet are a delight.

A month before our stay in Jamaica I shot the picture below in 2017 in central Havana, unstaged, a pure coincidence of legs, believe me. I took a sequence of shots of somebody’s lost chicken-foot lunch and when I checked them later this one frame stood out. It definitely had the legs on the others.

Yes, chicken legs are a delight, in all the Caribbean islands I’ve sailed to, from Cuba to Grenada. A chicken’s foot in a bowl of soup is a delicacy.

Then one day I spoke to someone who’d been to a lunch where the treat had been served up. She said that she’d been disgusted when it was put on the table in front of her.

‘I can understand that’ I said, ‘but it’s what they eat here’.

‘The soup was fine, it was just that they hadn’t trimmed the nails on the chicken claw’.

True story.

Not that they eat the claw, of course. It’s just boiled and then decoration for the dish. I hope…

There are plenty of other delicacies too, most of which you can’t get in your first world supermarket refrigerator, but many of which have gone into that tin of chicken soup you just enjoyed.

I've since learned that chicken feet are widely eaten - in Asia and here where I am right now, Indonesia.

I guess I've had a sheltered life, but chicken feet just do not appeal to me.

Check the menu in the top picture again. In case you’re wondering, Banga Mary is a fish, by the way.

That I can do.

Chicken is cheap and nutricious. While we were in Jamaica, based on my boat in Port Antonio waiting for a new gearbox, we enjoyed several street food meals, most notably the fried chicken from Piggys. It was accompanied by festivals.

The Jamaican festival features a wide variety of spices and seasonings, depending on the cook. The dough is a mix of corn meal and all-purpose flour deep-fried in oil. And loaded with calories.

I don't think James Bond dined there, but he might have banga'd Mary.

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Canonical: This story was first published in Medium on Sept 27 2021 and has been extended.