Pepper shrimp, or "swimps," are cooked with fiery Scotch bonnet chiles, then sold by the bagful in the Jamaican village of Middle Quarters. I rose early in the morning and nibbled a light breakfast. At a general store, I equipped myself with a roll of paper towels to deal with spills and dribbles and two liters of spring water, my weapon against the fierce heat that can lurk in even the most innocuous-seeming Jamaican dish.
I headed toward Middle Quarters, a village in the heart of St. Elizabeth that sits beside the Great Morass, a vast mangrove-choked estuary that is home to exotic birds and endangered crocodiles. But I couldn't resist stopping at a fruit and vegetable stand, where a young man was roasting several dozen ears of corn directly on the coals of a wood fire. He handed me an ear balanced on a corn husk napkin. It was substantial and chewy, with the flavor of a roasted corn tortilla.
Twenty or so minutes later, I stood beneath a vast archway of bamboo that framed a lone woman sitting beside a plastic picnic cooler and a pile of unripe (green) coconuts. She was young, slight, and soft-spoken, but she knew how to handle a machete. Holding a coconut outstretched in one hand, she neatly decapitated it with three quick whacks and handed me the nut and a drinking straw. The cold, sweetish coconut water slipped down smoothly. But the best part was yet to come. She reclaimed the drained nut, chopped it in half, and hacked a rounded chip off the side. I used my biodegradable spoon to scoop out the gelatinous meat.
I didn't need a sign to know I'd arrived in Middle Quarters. At every narrow bend, knots of women hoisted plastic bags full of Day-Glo-orange crustaceans and lunged halfway out onto the pavement, shrieking, "Swimps! Swimps!"
On the theory that age begets culinary prowess, I stopped for an old woman hovering over a soot-blackened pot that sent up tendrils of fragrant steam. For about two dollars, I procured a bag of a dozen large freshwater shrimp. She showed me how to twist the tails off and pinch them to break them in half, liberating a morsel of flesh. They were like Louisiana crayfish, juicy and hot, yes, but not painfully so, their edginess rounded by a fulsome saltiness, along with hints that I couldn't identify. "Just island spices," she said coyly. "Stuff I find in the forest."