Guava jelly and jam helped by chickens
By Alice Bain - The Abaconian - August 15, 2002

Esther Sawyer makes the most famous guava jam on Abaco, and on some occasions she also sells the best-tasting eggs. She and her husband Silbert operate their cottage industry at Esther"s Kitchen behind Abaco Wholesale and right now are busy with the heart of the guava season. Miss Esther indicates a vat full of guava pulp, ready to be boiled down for jam. "I don"t use any preservatives.

There"s only guava and sugar in that. The Sawyers grow their own guavas, large, pale green fruit with delicate pink insides of a variety called "strawberry guavas" which have much more meat and less of a seed bulk than the traditional yellow guavas that people grow in their gardens. All the guavas are peeled by hand, but Mr. Silbert has invented a mechanical pulper to remove the pulp from the seeds. Two of these machines whir away at the front of the kitchen. The Sawyers extract the fresh pulp and freeze the bulk of it in ten pound bags so that they can make jam to order all during the year. "We boiled the last of our pulp this year in May," says Miss Esther. "We usually have had guavas before this, too, but the rains were late."

"We got perhaps a hundred pounds of guavas today," she continued, "but we did much better than that before Hurricane Floyd. Used to be, we"d get maybe 500 pounds in a day during the season! Next season we"re hoping we"ll have enough guavas to sell some of them fresh. We had to plant new young trees since Floyd, as the older ones that survived the storm never really came back." The Sawyers also lost their nursery business in that hurricane.

Miss Esther keeps a flock of chickens, fluffy Bantams, Auricanas and Rhode Island Reds mostly. She supplements the chicken feed with ripe golden coconuts, split open and left in the run for the chickens to peck out themselves. Esther"s chickens have lots of room, and their run encompasses a good chunk of the guava grove. "Chickens are good in a guava patch," she says. "The chickens fertilize the guava trees, and they eat the bugs that come to the guavas. And the bugs are good food for the chickens!" The flock is presently recovering from an intrusion by local dogs that broke through the fence. "They mangled or killed probably a hundred of the hens," says Miss Esther. She has a good number of chicks being raised to replace the lost hens though, indicating a cage full of Rhode Island Red chicks who come to peck her fingers for food. An Auricana hen sitting in a nesting box in the same house startles and runs off, leaving a pale turquoise egg in the bottom. Auricanas are pretty chickens with patches of feathers in iridescent black, mottled reddish brown and white covering their bodies. They lay the delicate blue and green eggs that the Sawyers sometimes sell at Bahama Family Market, and the Rhode Island Reds lay the brown and beige ones. "The hens don"t lay so well in the summer though," she continued, "It"s too hot for them."

In interbreeding her chicken stock Miss Esther has developed a line of "sports" she calls "frizzles." Walking up to another henhouse, she points out a young chicken that looks like it has had a bad encounter with a hair-dryer. "See that one with its feathers turned wrong side out?" she asked. "I used to get maybe one frizzle out of a batch of chickens, but I put one away and raised up the chicks and now I have six of them. They"re difficult though, some of them you can"t tell the rooster from the hen!"

Miss Esther"s grandmother raised chickens on Allan"s Cay in the early 1900s, growing her own corn for feed and supplementing the birds" diet with coconut just like Esther does. "They used to trade them to boats going by," said Esther. Yet another henhouse contains half-grown Bantams and black-and-white striped Dominick chickens. A few of the Bantams are white. "We got one white Bantam five years ago," Miss Esther related, "and we never had another one till this year. It took that long for them to breed white again."

She opened the door to the henhouse, and the chicks run out between her legs and begin to peck around under the guava trees. "You have to give the chickens room," she asserted. "It"s better for the chickens and it makes their eggs better for you." Esther"s chickens also eat bird peppers and natural grass seed, and their eggs are definitely the tastiest available on Abaco.