Dominica

Citrus x paradisi

Dominica grows some of the Caribbean's finest grapefruit, especially pink-fleshed fruit from mountain slopes. Eaten with a spoon at breakfast or juiced until bitter-sweet, it is the island's citrus signature.

Musa acuminata

Fig still fills the valleys, a crop that built roads and broke hearts when markets shifted. Cooking and sweet varieties hang under blue bags, the fruit of everyday breakfast and the boil-up pot.

Passiflora edulis

Vines smother fences in the wet interior, dropping wrinkled shells that locals call the most popular fruit on the island. The juice is sharp, seedy, and sold everywhere a Kubuli is sold.

Cocos nucifera

Coastal palms and inland plantings give water, oil, and the milk that goes into cocoa tea and callaloo. Chopped open beside a river, a young nut is the walker's companion.

Mangifera indica

Season floods the roads with fallen fruit, from fibrous yard mangoes to grafted sweets. Children still stone them down with sticks; the rest become juice, chutney, and breakfast.

Annona muricata

A spiny green fruit blended into a creamy, tart juice that markets sell by the bottle. On the Nature Island it is medicine as much as dessert, the leaves steeped when the fruit is gone.

Artocarpus altilis

Roasted on an open fire until the skin chars and the inside turns to bread. It is a provision of the hills, as Dominican as river crayfish and far less fussy about weather.

Ananas comosus

Small, fragrant pineapples grow in the south and in kitchen gardens, sweeter than anything shipped in. Eaten in spears at the Roseau market, juice running to the elbow.

Theobroma cacao

Pods ripen in the shade of the rainforest farms, beans fermented and rolled into cocoa sticks. Those sticks become the morning cocoa tea that smells of nutmeg, bay, and wet earth.

Citrus x aurantiifolia

Dominican limes are small, oily-skinned, and essential to fish, rum, and the glass of water after a hike. Trees fruit in the valleys year-round, a green punctuation on every plate.