Callaloo

Coral looked at the two soup packets again and thought about how she could frame her lecture on gender stereotypes in the Caribbean. The packet of Maggi Cock Soup had been languishing in the kitchen cupboard for months when she glimpsed it one day through eyes newly sharpened by insights from her Gender and Society course. What was it Coral's lecturer kept repeating? Something about feminism offering a new "lens" through which to study society.

With the lenses donated by feminism now firmly affixed to her eyes, she stared at the cock soup packet, seeing all sorts of things she hadn't noticed before. This was exciting. Her area was really Media Studies, but Dr. Stewart, who normally taught the Gender and Society course, was traveling and Coral, with a brand new doctorate, had been asked to fill in for her. A number of thoughts started running through her mind. What was cock soup anyway? Was it made exclusively with the meat of roosters? Did rooster meat taste distinctly different from chicken meat? She drove down to Liguanea to see if there were other kinds of commercial chicken soups available and returned with a handful of packets of different brands of cock and chicken noodle soup.

The Maggi cock soup packet had a virile cartoon rooster on it, with a massive comb and a rakish glint in its eye, looking every inch an avian rude boy. The chicken noodle packet, on the other hand, showed a photograph of what looked like a plump roast chicken lying passively on its back on a bed of noodles, legs in the air, stewing in its own juices. Without a doubt, thought Coral, it portrayed the predicament of the female of the species: legs trussed together, skin nicely browned, with alluringly plump thighs and breasts. There's plenty of material for my paper here, thought Coral to herself, especially after phoning Nestle and being told that cock soup was an innovation created especially for the Jamaican market. It was the same chicken meat that went into both soups but cock soup had more pepper in it and on the whole was a far spicier concoction than mere chicken soup.

Still it was strange that none of her Jamaican cookbooks had a recipe for cock soup. One of them had a note next to its recipe for chicken soup that said, "Nowadays, many Jamaicans use a packaged chicken soup called cock soup as a base for various soups. To me, it tastes artificial and seems to replace all the natural goodness of real chicken. Jamaica has delicious chickens that make great homemade soup . . . " Yet Zora Neale Hurston had certainly encountered cock soup in the 1930s when she attended a curry goat feast in St. Mary—a "feast so masculine that chicken soup would not be allowed. It must be soup from roosters."

Coral wondered who had concocted the idea of cock soup. Maybe that person had been thinking of Mannish water, the fiery soup made of goat meat (containing every part of [End Page 48] the goat, minus skin and horn, and reputed to have aphrodisiac qualities); it didn't really matter, it just went to show that even in the marketing and packaging of products, gender was an important consideration.

The phone rang. "Cock-a-doodle-doo!" crowed a lusty male voice. It was Jordan, whom Coral had known since she was five and who was one of her closest friends. "Hi Jordan, go and harass some other hapless female," she said. "Good evening, ma'am, Bernard Shaw calling from CNN in Atlanta. We understand you're conducting path-breaking research into reproductive fertility in the greater Antilles. Could you give us some pointers on the appropriate mating behavior for young Jamaican males? I mean what, in your considerable experience as a gender scientist, is a good opening gambit for a man? Huh? Can you tell us Ms. Genderoni?"

"Oh, buzz off, you genderless gadfly . . ."

"Shall I compare thee to a fresh vegetable? Or a midsummer mango? Oh come on, Coral, can't you see how ridiculous you're being? In Jamaica it's women who rule the...