Another trip to Florida means, as is the case with a trip to anywhere further than the local corner store, another round of exhaustive investigation and cataloguing of everything stupid thing I stuffed into my bottomless maw. That said, let’s cut to the chase, in the first of a pair of posts dedicated to this voyage to America’s southernmost corners, this one dedicated to the pleasures of traditional old-Florida eating.
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As with many Caribbean islands, Barbados has its share of Indian-originating products, introduced by workers imported during the British colonial era, whose culture is now an inextricable part of the traditional island mélange. This cross-continental transference is also the force, in my opinion, behind the very-Bajan snack food known as Sugar Daddies, which seem to have an ostensible origin in Indian jalebi, not to mention the wider category of sweets and savories combining a fried dough base with nuts and seeds. It’s pretty hard to find a direct link confirming this transference, and I may have already jeopardized my current employment with a search for “Barbados Sugar Daddies” on company time. Still, there’s evidence, specifically Trinidadian Kurma, a recognized Indian import and cousin of Guyanese Mithia, which tellingly also go by the name “goolab jamun.” The question of how these crunchy fritters became nominally associated with a syrup-soaked milk ball presents yet another mystery, but whatever the case, these things are delicious, sort of a condensed churro with frosted sugar overtones. The brand is BiBi’s, which doesn’t offer much in the way of packaging design or online presence, but at least has an affable Facebook account.
A good, if not exactly terroir-oriented, way to gauge the tastes of a place is through its sodas. These will generally provide you with a shorthand barometer of the national sweet tooth, and also a concise sampling of some of the fruits, flavors and spices favored by locals. Looking at soda, in the case of formerly colonized countries, can also be an inroad toward surmising the influence of the colonizer(s) upon those tastes. The most extensive example of this may be Vimto, the king of the colonial sodas, a nominally British beverage that now enjoys far greater popularity in Asia, the Caribbean and especially the Middle East. A similar situation occurs with the lingering specter of Peardrax, a drink which, although now discontinued in its country of origin, continues to enjoy robust popularity in Trinidad & Tobago, where it’s taken on status as a sort of national soda, a status it shares with its autumnal apple partner Cydrax. All this with names that sound like under-the-sink cleaning agents. Caribbean sodas often grow out of a prior traditional of fermented alcoholic and non-alcoholic brews, skewing toward approximations of juices from fruits (or roots) which, if not always native, at least have some entrenched history in the area. Pear and apple ciders, on the other hand, innately seem like cold-weather concoctions, which would explain why the 'Drax favored at Christmas, and enjoys a likely-related popularity as a toasting drink on special occasions. Both draxes were originally products of the now-defunct Whiteway Orchards (a fact still noted on the label), based in the bucolic southwestern English town of Whimple (a pleasant pastoral picture of the former orchard can be found here). As for the taste, despite the long distance from Devonshire, Peardrax definitely remains true to its cidery roots, with a slightly sweet flavor that’s redolent of hard cider stripped of alcohol. I’m not entirely clear, however, why the drink description on the bottle bears French text.
On my 5th day in Colombia I found myself in a white and teal painted restaurant in Cartagena’s Old City, grateful to finally be out of the sun. The temperature was at this point topping out around a 116 heat index, twenty of those degrees coming solely from the miserable, momentum-crushing humidity. Having sweated out at least a few water bottles worth of moisture, I was soaked, scorched, and about to collapse from fatigue. This meant I was also less than enthused when the waitress brought out the complimentary Sopa de Pescado, its herb-flecked liquid steaming in a small bowl.
The cover art for The Rolling Stones’ Goat’s Head Soup features a beatific Mick Jagger swathed in some kind of pastel-tinged material, his head topped with a mysterious pinkish substance. Judging by the album title, I’m assuming this is intended to be some kind of cheesecloth, with Jagger’s head replacing the goat’s as part of a flavorful bouqet garni, ready to be plunged into the stew. As seen in the gatefold photo pictured above, the actual soup is prepared with far less delicacy. More commonly known as Mannish Water - a nod to its supposed aphrodisiac properties - the Jamaican goat’s head soup involves simmering various native vegetables and tubers, a slew of goat parts, scotch bonnet peppers and rum into a thin broth. A festival food usually reserved for bridegroom consumption on the eve of a wedding, it remains popular enough to merit a soup mix version from Grace, which would probably pair well with their version of Irish Moss, another hypothetical libido-fortifier. The company does not appear to provide any shortcuts for Cow Cod Soup, the bovine cousin to Mannish Water, which boasts a full roster of bull parts but appears to skip the head (too big for most pots, I imagine). As for the album, it was recorded in Kingston, with a full complement of Jamaican and Guyanese musicians, as the band continued their early ‘70s period of jet-setting dissipation and tax-refugee ennui, but contains no other direct references to Jamaican cuisine. For a more thorough discussion of the soup, and its potential magical qualities, see Pluto Shervington’s 1976 hit "Ram Goat Liver." In most cases, souse refers to a variant of head cheese, an aspic of skull padding and organ meats pickled with vinegar. Picadillo, throughout Spain and Latin America, points to a swirling of spiced ground meat seasoned with tomatoes and peppers, plus various aromatics and spices. In Panama, as I learned from a recent visit to Crown Heights’ Panamanian Independence Day festival, things are a little different. There, souse instead refers to the other extreme of nose-to-tail eating - pickled feet, usually of the porcine or bovine variety - a denomination which actually applies all over the Caribbean. Historically connected to that other souse, it demonstrates an inventive way to make use of spare parts, via a spicy, citrusy preparation that can now also be prepared with chicken feet or conch. Sharing the vinegary base of the European variety, the one here also comes smothered in quick-pickled cucumbers, ribbons of white onion and rounds of Scotch Bonnet pepper, the entire thing immersed a tincture tinged with lime. Further flavor is provided through the addition of culantro (aka Chadon Beni), cilantro’s brawnier cousin.
The result is both bracingly fresh and a bit unsettling - the sensation of nibbling cold gelatinous flesh off of a pig’s hoof making me glad I didn’t order the cow version - although it’s ultimately not much different than a plate of pork belly. As a committed lunatic, I spend an undue amount of time trawling Yelp pages and MenuPages listings, seeking out the strange and the unique amid the torrents of food selfies and vaguely described menu items. Last Thursday, while immersed in a messy spread of browser tabs on local Caribbean restaurants, I stumbled upon what seemed like an ordinary French bakery, clicking through to the listing mostly to keep up my frenzied momentum. Amid the croissants and omelets listed on Richol’s menu I noticed a strange item, simply labeled ‘agoulou,’ which neither I nor any internet content written in English seemed to recognize.
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The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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