How to Cook a Tapir: A Memoir of Belize

by Joan Fry

In 1962 Joan Fry was a college sophomore recently married to a dashing anthropologist. Naively consenting to a year-long “working honeymoon” in British Honduras (now Belize), she soon found herself living in a remote Kekchi village deep in the rainforest. Because Fry had no cooking or housekeeping experience, the romance of living in a hut and learning to cook on a makeshift stove quickly faded. Guided by the village women and their children, this twenty-year-old American who had never made more than instant coffee came eventually to love the people and the food that at first had seemed so foreign. While her husband conducted his clinical study of the native population, Fry entered their world through friendships forged over an open fire. Coming of age in the jungle among the Kekchi and Mopan Maya, Fry learned to teach, to barter and negotiate, to hold her ground, and to share her space—and, perhaps most important, she learned to cook.


This is the funny, heartfelt, and provocative story of how Fry painstakingly baked and boiled her way up the food chain, from instant oatmeal and flour tortillas to bush-green soup, agouti (a big rodent), gibnut (a bigger rodent), and, finally, something even the locals wouldn’t a “mountain cow,” or tapir. Fry’s efforts to win over her neighbors and hair-pulling students offers a rare and insightful picture of the Kekchi Maya of Belize, even as this unique culture was disappearing before her eyes. 

Genres: Nonfiction, Travel, Anthropology, Memoir

294 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2009

Reviews

[Paul Bryant]

This is the funny, heartfelt, and provocative story of how Fry painstakingly baked and boiled her way up the food chain, from instant oatmeal and flour tortillas to bush-green soup, agouti (a big rodent), gibnut (a bigger rodent), and, finally, something even the locals wouldn’t tackle: a “mountain cow,” or tapir.




Don’t go near the kitchen, tapir
Don’t go near the stove
If Miss Joan Fry gives you the eye
Then no more will you rove

She means to learn some new cuisine
She’ll have your snout in her tureen
Deny Miss Fry your tender booty
Let her put up with an agouti



O why Miss Fry must the tapir die?
With his stippled brown fur and his laserbeam eye
In Belizian forests does he frolic and graze
And all you think about is to boil or to braise

I wish I had some videotape here
I’d put you on youtube for eating a tapir

[Liralen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wellll, I can file 'epic descriptions of cockroaches and plate-sized spiders' under 'things that override my wanderlust'.

Fry took a year off from university to follow her new husband to Belize (then British Honduras). He was only two years older than she, but those two years—coupled with the facts that it was 1962 and that they were following his dream (he was doing anthropology fieldwork) rather than hers—put them on unequal ground.

The book sticks pretty strictly to that year. Fry doesn't talk about, for example, meeting her husband or how she came to marry so young; if she initially thought this year 'in the bush' was folly or brilliance, we have no idea. But we do see that she is on the one hand determined to make the best of it (briefly agonising, for example, over the lack of outhouses, and then getting on with it...because what else could she do?) and on the other hand reliant on her husband as a source of support and knowledge.

As time progresses, though, and Fry begins to feel more comfortable in the village / with the villagers / teaching English, she begins to need that support from her husband less and less, and—if not to push back on his authority more—to see more clearly the imbalances in their relationship. And for all that it is her husband who is the anthropologist, Fry is keenly curious about the people around her and the similarities and differences between them and the people she knows back home. (Her husband is interested really only in the differences.)

I was not terribly interested in the recipes, although it was interesting to see them get more complex as Fry's confidence (and willingness to experiment, sometimes with rather inedible results) grew. Would have liked to see more of Fry (and her husband) in their 'ordinary' lives; I am not sure that I ever got a great sense of who he was, and she...well, she seemed resilient and adaptable, but without context from their American life I wasn't sure how limited this snapshot was.

They were both happy to go home, when the time came. Not without regrets, and not without sorrow at leaving friends, and parts of village life, behind...but happy to go home. I wonder if she would go back and do it again, knowing now what the experience was like in full?

[Harishankar G · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1962, the author decides to come on a ‘working honeymoon’ with her anthropologist husband  who wants to live among the Qekchi Maya and study their way of life; while she takes up the job of teaching English to the children. There starts the story of the 20 year old Teacher.

What follows is a fun and in depth description of life in the bush: daily bouts with tarantulas and cockroaches, and the burden of learning to cook and wash clothes. The lifestyle of the Maya influences the author strongly and makes her realize her own strength. From being reliant on her husband for most things in the beginning, she starts forming deep bonds with the people around her, learn to barter and stand on her own feet. There are a lot of photos the place and the people included in the book, which helped a lot. There were also recipes for Mayan dishes at the end of each chapter which, I’m sorry to say, I mostly skipped. Reading such books make me realize how different people are, but at the same time so similar.

[Carolyn J Niethammer]

This book sat on my to-be-read shelf for two years, but once I began reading I devoured it in two days. Having lived overseas three times - though never in such primitive or challenging conditions - I understood the author's initial culture shock, her growing fondness for her students, and her ultimate reluctance to leave. She was very young, very unprepared, but with courage and intelligence she plunged ahead. Full of great detail that takes you right into the empty hut she had to turn into a home. She takes you along as her neighbors become friends and she becomes aware of her own competence.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm known for asking people who just arrive back from vacation; 'How was the food ?', so I appreciated the detail on what the indigenous people of Belize ate in this memoir of the author's year of teaching children in an indigenous village, while her husband studied the people for his Anthropology dissertation. Joan Fry adds in recipes at the end of each chapter, usually they act as punctuation to what happened in each chapter. While the information about the food is interesting, that's not really what the book is about.

Her marriage to her PhD candidate husband is really the subject here, its either the main subject when he's with her, or in the background when he's not. The only problem I had with the book is that there was no foreground on her relationship before they arrived in Belize. How they met, why they decided to get married, and what the relationship was like before they married would have provided some perspective for what was to come while they were in Belize. So once they arrived and the tension between then starts, there's not much sympathy for the relationship, they're just a couple of people who get irritated with each other for some reason, maybe it's because of the stress of being without daily first world comforts, maybe it was like that back in the US, maybe they got along fine in the US, it's not clear. Though besides her relationship with her husband, she does spend a lot of time describing the people of the village, which provides a lot of relief from reading about how they are becoming increasingly annoyed with each other. It takes place in the early 60's, but she wrote the book many years later. Towards the end of the book she explains why she wrote the book and why it was written so many years later, which is a poignant look at how it can sometimes take years to fully understand the events in one's life.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Joan Fry was newly married at 20 when she accompanied her husband to the Belize rain forest where he would conduct field research for a year in 1962, the same year I spent in Florence, Italy. The story follows her development from pretty college girl from Verona, NJ, into independent-minded adult, proud of her ability to teach Maya children the rudiments of English in hopes of connecting them, like herself, to a wider world. As she learned to balance a full bucket of water on her head and to cook for own family and her new friends on an open hearth in her thatched-roof hut, Joan Fry also differentiated herself from her imperious, know-it-all nascent archeologist husband. As she becomes stronger (reading the Second Sex is a dead give-away of her soul's progress), he becomes weaker physically and spiritually, and Joan finds that she cannot submit to his judgments or those of his academic community.

For me it has been much easier to understand the ethnic Mayas, their culture and native habitat from reading Fry's narrative than from comparatively dry works of nonfiction. Luckily I won't have to cook or even eat tapir on my upcoming trip to Belize, but Joan's recipes, which comprehend both Belizean and American technology so to speak, are enticing.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked this up at a discount book store and read it entirely on my way to Belize. Maybe it was the timing, but this book was the perfect read I had hoped for. I was left with awe and reverence for the culture and nature of the region.

[Michele Benson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Belize. This was such a fun read. The author marries an anthropologist and goes to live in a remote village in Belize for her honeymoon! At the end of each chapter she includes a recipe for some jungle dish. Written in 1962, It made me wonder if this village is still in existence. This is a quick read and very entertaining. I did have to order it from the Ohio project because it was not available from the Cincinnati library.

[Scott Garcia]

love it

[Catherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fry, a newly married twenty-year-old, spent a year in Belize in a small Mayan village with her anthropologist husband in the early 1960s. The book is insightful not only on the Mayan society but also on the experience of leaving the familiarity of home and how one chooses to adapt (or not) in a completely new environment.

The recipes were an aside that didn't really add all that much to the story, but they do provide readers with another glimpse into the culture.

This is a nice memoir probably more worthy of 3-1/2 stars.

[Roadhouse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oddly interesting.

In regards to the title, at the time, Belize was, and still should be, a part of the British Empire. It was refereed to as British Honduras.

Also a Tapir is a pig like animal with a trunk.

A correct title for this book would be:

How to Cook a pig like animal with a trunk: A Memoir of British Honduras

[Kerith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this during a trip to Belize last month. Good timing made for an excellent and engaging read, and probably earned it an extra star. As much about U.S. gender politics in the early 1960s as it is about Belize (then British Honduras).

[Michele · Rating 4 out of 5]

An easy read and very interesting.

[Laurie Stevens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful book - so much more than a unique cookbook. Transports you to the rain forest and the Maya who live there, seen from the eyes of a twenty year old "Teacher" in the 1960's.

[Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Unique and Engaging Memoir

Joan Fry’s How To Cook A Tapir held my interest from the start with stories of her and her husband Aaron’s adventures in Belize, the village they lived in, the families they lived with and the children she taught along with delicious recipes of the Kekchi Mayans.

This is a very special book that allowed me to enter another culture intimately and without intrusion. What an adventure for a woman about to turn 21 years of age! The book brought me into the Kekchi Mayans’ everyday world by observing Joan and Aaron’s adjustments, dramas and learnings within that world.

Joan Fry uses humor so well and through their humor I got to know the people in the village in a charming way. Joan can laugh at herself as well, engaging and bringing the reader in. Her style, prose and storytelling are of the highest order and her talent shows through.

Joan’s experiences and the aspects of Kekchi Mayan culture that she introduced me to will stay with me for a long while. I am already trying the recipes in the book.

I highly recommend How To Cook A Tapir. It is a memoir that informs, entertains and leaves you with much admiration for its author.