The urban legends of razor blades, poison injections and demonic worms encased in the cores of candy apples may have never been confirmed as fact, but something dangerous does lie in this autumn confection: the apple itself. Almost offensively sweet in its classic American incarnation, with a hard shell that threatens immediate tooth loss with every bite, the candy apple has comparable cousins all over the world, from France and Brazil with their ‘apples of love’ (also a curious old-fashioned name for the tomato), to sugar-coated hawthorn berries in China. In all cases it’s the same collusion between fresh natural purity and man-made saccharine stickiness, and while candy certainly carries an unnatural association with permanence, the fragile fruit inside will not last forever. I found this out the hard way recently, when I neglected to put a gift apple in my mouth (no, I will not double back to erase that horrible pun), and left it in a cabinet to await a future sugar craving. An investigation of the object a few days later revealed a rotting apple sheathed within the bright red exterior, and the realization that while sugar preserves itself, it hastens the destruction of organic matter, apparently releasing a not-unpleasant apple pie smell in the process. A more intrepid food explorer might have cut the apple in half to investigate its insides, but I feared the inevitable mixing of rot mush with sticky candy coating, and so was content to rest the doomed fruit in my palm and photograph its last pre-trash moments. Happy Halloween!
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According to scattered news reports issued earlier this year, the Hydrox, the original incarnation of the black and white sandwich cookie, is slated to return in late 2014. This may be great news for fans of dessert diversity, but it's not going to change much otherwise; whatever niche the new/old Hydrox may find, whatever founding status it possesses and whatever other advantages it boasts, it's still doomed to play permanent second fiddle to the monolith that is the Oreo. American's reigning #1 cookie has long since ascended to a cultural plane of which few products can dream of reaching, integrated in the very fabric of national culture, and it's not going to be removed from that firmament any time soon. Yet there's always market-share crumbs to be snatched up, particularly abroad, where a product's impression may not be as favorably clear-cut. When taking on a juggernaut like the Oreo, it's probably smart to go the route that the Japanese snack company Bourbon has here with its Bitter Cocoa Biscuits, stealing the signature colors but making their product appear just a tad classier than the original. These biscuits aren't really bitter, and aren't especially fancy, suffering from the same superior cookie/inferior creme dynamic that always plagued Hydrox. Yet like that supposedly soon-to-return cult favorite, they are a bit better for dipping into milk, important since this is the only civilized way to consume a sandwich cookie, no matter what cutesy twist-and-lick nonsense gets promoted in Nabisco ads.
Everyone has a different definition of what constitutes ‘fancy,’ with especially broad variations occurring across national and economic lines, but in the realm of the sweet most would agree that the French have this elusive descriptor locked down. And while the global masters of pastry may not be solely responsible for the wonders of the meringue - the Swiss and Italians both also claim ownership and probably had something to do with the confection’s creation - the airy snack does fit squarely into the French dessert tradition, with its routine elevation of earthbound items to a divine plane via the wonders of furious frothing. This brings us to the Philippines, an island with more than its share of foreign influence, but which has never hosted any sustained French (or Swiss, or Italian) presence. How then do we end up with the Puto Seko, subtitled here as ‘fancy cookies,’ which taste like a dustier, denser cousin to the meringue?
Apologies for leading here with a picture not really related to the topic at hand, but this one all starts with Keith. I’ve been obsessed with Scotch Eggs ever since I witnessed the rotund weirdo (and unquestionable superior to his American counterpart Kevin) munching one during an early episode of the original British version of The Office. The Scotch Egg, as I discovered, is the irresistible combination of an entire breakfast packed into one concentrated ball, an egg jacketed with sausage meat, coated with breadcrumbs and deep fried. Not always appetizing when sold cold next to the sandwiches at a Tesco, but a respectable part of British cuisine nonetheless. They can also be classed up a bit to lighten the load on the arteries, as I learned after baking a batch of these last year, forsaking the oil and coddling the eggs in the skinned insides of some nice Cumberland sausage.
I hate wasted food. I hate it on a compulsive, imbalanced level, to the point where I will eat things I do not enjoy and preserve those that have no business being preserved. Hailing from a legacy of food-waste-hating stretching back to the poor villages of the Mezzogiorno, the tenements of the Lower East Side and at least one overcrowded shanty outside of Cork, I would say I’m justified, and with an especially reserved enmity for those who cavalierly toss away their pizza crusts. This curbside scenario, in which one or more unidentified pizza eaters has routinely stopped about two inches short of the crust, abandoning sizably edible portions of four pepperoni slices to the birds, is another level of savagery altogether.
Composed of chocolate syrup, milk and seltzer, it’s a famous anomaly that the classic New York egg cream contains no actual eggs. Vietnamese egg soda (Soda Sữa Hột Gà), on the other hand, is packed with yolky goodness, balanced out with the heavy tang of sweetened condensed milk and the fizzy snap of seltzer, the kind of concoction that’s almost a meal in itself. As served at Com Tam Ninh Kieu, in the Bedford Park section of the Bronx, it pairs well with the sharp flavors of the restaurant’s namesake dish, which makes use of ‘broken rice’, the irregular toss-offs of the rice world, which have long since been rediscovered as an ideal flavor vehicle. Served with all the trimmings at Com Tam, the once-neglected rice is accompanied by two fried eggs, a slab of pork chop and a shrimp cake, a sort of Indochinese spin on a lumberjack breakfast. Breaking the cardinal rule of carbonated beverages, I took the remainder of my soda home, where it was reconstituted in this fantastic Silver Gulch pint glass, with a bit more seltzer added to cut down the egginess, nudging the texture out of full-bodied nog territory.
The term Rastafarian invokes a whole lot of cultural associations - primarily reggae, dreads and those baggy tri-colored hats - but ‘natural eating’ likely isn’t one of them. Yet the Ital (pronounced ‘eye-tal’, as in ‘eye-talian’) diet is as important to the traditional Rasta lifestyle as the famous ganja use or Babylon and Zion, its focus on fresh, basic ingredients exemplifying the movement’s back-to-the-land approach. Impressively forward thinking, the group’s original 1930s regimen prized purity over processed ingredients: substituting sea for table salt, fresh produce for canned, eliminating dried, pickled or otherwise preserved foods. This doubled as a rejection of the Western values early proponents saw as corroding traditional Jamaican culture, and jibes with the religion’s separatist bent, heavily inspired by Marcus Garvey’s Pan-African philosophy. Early Rastas sought to slough off the shackles of a colonial system by looking toward role models other than their reviled British overlords, landing most singularly on Ethiopian king Haile Selassie, who became viewed as a quasi-deity. This meant the rejection of imported convenience products and modern chemicals and a renewed focus on the fruits of their own island - fruit, vegetables and fish - while introducing health foods like tofu and soymilk, which in the early days of the movement were produced by Rastas themselves, befitting their interest in rustic self-sufficiency.
Underhill Avenue, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn: A vertically-stretched tableau of fancy foods decorates the exterior of this organic-food-themed deli, ghostly snack apparitions layered over the landscape of an old neighborhood.
Following a recent visit to the Bronx Zoo, I ventured into the wilds of Van Nest, a small, diverse neighborhood just outside the southeast gate. The western fringe of this area, dominated by the Cross Bronx Expressway and the city’s last remaining stretch of NYW&B tracks, seems to firmly prove Jane Jacobs’ theory of border vacuums, a depressed stretch of boundary wasteland marring the appearance of a place better known as the childhood home of Regis Philbin and Stokely Carmichel, and which boasts what may be the most ornate station in the subway system, or at least the one most resembling the property of a Spanish landowner.
Mass market mineral waters like Perrier and San Pellegrino act as a high-end counterpart to artificially carbonated seltzers and club sodas, their naturally occurring fizz and smattering of calcium connoting freshness and vitality. It’s therefore easy to forget that the drink’s original focus wasn’t elegant thirst quenching but health, with most of the major brands originating as bainological boutique products from 18th century spa towns. Case in point is Russian mineral water Yessentuki, which like its French cousin Vichy, focuses more on its healing powers than any refreshing qualities, pretty much necessary since it tastes like salt water. It basically is salt water, although this isn’t just any salinous stuff scooped straight from the ocean, it’s a magnesium rich mineral broth prized for its supposedly salutary properties. This brand claims that the spring from which it’s drawn has uniquely restorative abilities, growing hair on the head of a sickly bald child, thus explaining the name of the river and surrounding town, which means ‘living hair.’ The bottle was mistakenly purchased at a Georgian bakery in Sheepshead Bay - I thought it was this elusive tarragon soda - and no, I did not actually drink the entire thing.
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The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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