Far be it from me to criticize another country’s snacking habits, but I can’t seem to get on board with the apparent Korean preference for sickly sweet, HFCS-addled, between-meals comestibles. The worst part is that most of these snacks demonstrate an exquisite deftness for balancing salt and spice, which then gets subsequently washed away by the cloying tide of sugar. The same holds true on this otherwise alluring snack from Japanese/Korean mega-conglomerate Lotte. Too bad, since this is a stellar bit of packaging that swaddles a pretty reasonable governing concept; I, like many others, spent much of my teenage years partying with large bags of aggressively seasoned snacks. Back then we had Bugles, which seem like the dominant inspiration for Teenager’s Party Time, right down to the general “compressed corn dust” taste found beneath the aforementioned overwhelming sweetness. Online sources tell me these are barbecue flavored, although I can’t detect any real kinship with the prevalent American version of this style. Dominated by a syrupy finish, these mostly remind me of Golden Grahams. Let's not forget, however, two other recently purchased Korean snacks; the one just below, with its daring, fantastically designed co-opting of American branded content, also seems more than a little similar in presentation.
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China is a big place, one whose seemingly infinite variety of regional sub-cuisines is further complicated by hastening modernization and circuitous internal emigration. I’m still nowhere near finished working through the ever-expanding options offered at Chinese restaurants in New York, and the growing infusion of Northern and Western immigrants into the city’s composite cuisine only makes attempting to do so more of a fool’s errand. There’s also the additional difficulty that, even if something appears to be unavailable in Flushing or Sunset Park, it may just be under-reported (no one can check every menu, especially when some aren’t even entirely in English) or operating under a different name, which I suspect may be the case with the exotic delicacy sometimes known as Golden Sand. I was put on to this stuff by Carolyn Phillips’ fantastic Madame Huang’s Kitchen; in short, it’s a rich combination of salted egg yolks, garlic and onion, which get wok fried, then joined in the pan by any variety of edible matter, usually vegetables or seafood.
I’ve spent some timely lately digging through the 1930 NYC Dining Guide, an invaluable document for illuminating a time period whose dining mores are now pretty hard to envision, far removed as they are from our current views of what constitutes gourmandizing. An especially archaic section is the one detailing drink recipes, which hearkens back to the rosy days of the cocktail party era, when home bars were routinely well stocked enough to support the construction of everyone’s pet cocktails. Beyond this, the very concept of a dining guide with a drinks section (labeled “What to do Until the Taxi Comes”), serves as an important reminder of Prohibition-era restrictions. While media depicting this time period is rightly obsessed with detailing the cavalier party atmosphere of speakeasies, I imagine there was also a large segment of the populace that felt marginally or less than comfortable with flouting the law, and didn’t routinely frequent these subterranean dens of iniquity. Intended perhaps for this homebody set, the primary purpose of these concoctions is clearly to get readers loaded enough to be able to enjoy a dinner without further need of alcoholic sustenance, aside from a few clandestine nips from a hip flask perhaps.
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The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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