Just past North Truro sits Provincetown, the terminus of the Cape, a seaside burg that doubles as a sleepy fishing village and a thriving gay hotspot, the latter apparently a residual effect of its historic status as final point on summer stock theatre tours. The fishermen who once made up the majority of the town’s population are still here (albeit in diminished numbers) a presence evidenced by the wealth of Portuguese flags hanging on nearby houses and the prevalence of bolos levedos in local supermarkets. Yet all the old specialty restaurants have closed, leaving only a smattering of dishes at select spots, Vinho de Alho pork chops mixing with old-fashioned Yankee fare like Salisbury steak at a place like The Mayflower. The last bastion of this culture is the town’s Portuguese Bakery, which has operated without fail since the earliest days of the 20th century.
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Along the dunes in North Truro, MA, the end of August means rosehips, a fruit far less appreciated than the flower which precedes it. This makes sense, since despite resembling lustrous, bite-sized tomatoes, rosehips are fundamentally inedible, at least without a little massaging. After the flowers have bloomed and been fertilized, they contract back into dense packets of thick red skin enveloping tiny, stubbornly-set seeds, the rose’s essential redness concentrated down into an impenetrable little nub. These same late-summer weeks also produce a rarer, easier-to-enjoy fruit, with stands of rosehips interspersed with bunches of beach plums (the beautifully named prunus maritima), a relative of the cherry whose ubiquity along New England’s coasts has faded with modern beachfront development. The two plants often occupy the same territory, and having had the good fortune to spend a week of summer 2015 on a stretch of beach dominated by both of these plants, I ended up collecting a healthy amount of fruit from both.
An oft-repeated open secret of Thai-American restaurateurs, one likely applicable to those adapting other foreign cuisines for spice-averse palettes, is that when cooking for Americans not familiar with the cuisine, the safest method is to prepare the food as they do for children, with spice levels pushed way down, and sugar content way up. This leads to legions of syrupy pad thais, bogged down with ketchup and peanut butter, the sharp, sparkling flavors of the cuisine buried in viscous goop. I spend an inordinate amount of my time figuring out how to avoid such goop, and yet sometimes it’s worth surrendering to the allure of something intended specifically for a child’s palate. Enter Happy Soda (a.k.a. Gembira), a roseate cartoon beverage overflowing with mysterious sweetness. I spotted this one at the now-monthly Indonesian Food Bazaar, held inside Elmhurst’s St. James Episcopal Church, where vendors gather to sell homemade batches of native meals and snacks. The onslaught of unfamiliar items (Indonesia being another of those countries whose dozens of regional cuisines I’m only beginning to understand) forced me to do several laps to take it all in before ordering, and on these the thing which kept standing out to me was not any specific food item but this glowing soda, clutched in the hand of many a dawdling child, the source of its color still a mystery. My initial suspicion after purchasing one, which was prepared fresh before my eyes, was strawberry; a little research reveals the answer is actually coco-pandan syrup, a mixture of two maritime Asian staples, blended with condensed milk over ice, filled out with a healthy pour of seltzer for the requisite fizz. A tad too sweet for me, but I’m glad to have added this particular shade of pink to my rainbow of consumed beverage colors.
Spotted at the Jackson Heights location of Patel Brothers: a uniquely American pepper product (with an assist from Middle Eastern cuisine), known primarily for its status as a pizzeria staple, enters the Indian market. "Pizza Chill," meanwhile, whether a fortuitous spelling error or a mere consequence of an improperly snipped label, has permanently entered my personal food lexicon.
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The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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