On Island Time in Paradise: The Rum Chronicles

On Island Time: The Rum Chronicles

One drink, followed all the way back to where it started. Fifteen years into a life spent chasing horizons, John Helms finally turned his attention to the rum that had been in his hand at nearly every stop along the way — and to the meals that sat alongside it.

It starts on a distillery porch in Key West and runs through Mount Gay's 1703 origins in Barbados, where a molasses byproduct nobody wanted became kill-devil, and cou-cou, salt fish, and pudding and souse tell the same plantation story the rum does. It splits into Cuba's polished elegance and Jamaica's stubborn funk, jerk pit and ackee and saltfish alongside it. It sits with the hard truth of the triangular trade in Newport and Ghana, rides the Royal Navy's daily tot into the American Revolution, races industrialization from Puerto Rico to Martinique, and closes at a regatta in Antigua where sailors from six continents each hand over a bottle — and a dish — from home.

Told in the same unhurried voice that carried readers through two continents in The Long Way Home, this companion volume follows rum and the food that always sat next to it, all the way back to the sugarcane, the ports, and the people who first turned a waste product into something worth savoring.