A potentially exciting product, purchased over a year ago from the cavernous J Mart inside Flushing’s New Word Mall, then cruelly consigned to the forgotten snacks limbo of my kitchen cabinet. By the time I’d opened the box the spun sugar bundles inside had desiccated into a foul-tasting saccharine powder. This leaves me capable of only waxing theoretically on this Chinese treat, threaded into shaggy frosted wheat style bundles that resemble psychedelic haystacks. I imagine it’s a portable rendition of Dragon’s Beard candy, a sweet which predates cotton candy (and whose Wikipedia entry notes its short shelf life) but can’t say whether the ‘must’ refers to the flavor (grape?) or some aspect of its preparation. The packaging strikes an odd balance between food-focused directness on the right half, old-fashioned street-market populism on the left, with a circular expansion on the royal purple theme. As the old saying goes: ashes to ashes, Dragon Must to dust.
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Less a neighborhood than a fossilized, fantastical curiosity, Little Italy clings to its exaggerated Paisan image as a charm against the turmoil at its borders, embodied by ever-increasing Chinatown sprawl and encroaching Nolita/SoHo development. In constant danger of erasure, its immigrant population base long since fled to the suburbs, the area’s lingering Italian-American heritage has inflated to accommodate this vacuum, plying tourists with a cartoonish approximation of vintage New York City, via a showy spread of ‘old-fashioned’ red sauce and clam joints. All this straining for authenticity climaxes with a burst of cannoli cream and scalding fry oil during San Gennaro, the two week festival ostensibly dedicated to the patron saint of Naples, who each September 19th gets marched down Mulberry and pinned with dollar bills, a fitting ritual for a festival that seems designed to promote its accompanying neighborhood by turning its proud history into a lumbering commodity.
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The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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