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.
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"Sergeant my wife is currently taking a course at the continental school of gourmet cooking. Apparently they’ve never heard of the principle that to eat well in this country, one has to have breakfast three times a day. And an English breakfast at that.”
Frenzy (Alfred Hitchcock, 1972) Foreign food as a nightmarish culinary imposition There's something innately disturbing about the short memory of popular culture, the impetuous hastiness with which celebrated things can be completely and utterly forgotten, a reminder that most people’s legacies don’t extend too far beyond their lifespans. So while it’s nice to imagine we have an adequate picture of what life was like 50 or 60 years ago, a sampling of hit movies and TV shows, icons and stars, fashions and trends, there’s really a huge amount of now-vanished information which leaves this image incomplete. Take for example Bob, Rose and Cora Brown, a by-all-accounts moderately famous husband, wife and mother team of food explorers, who wrote several impressive tomes on the joys of adventurous eating. All of these are now out of print, and the Browns can no longer even boast a Wikipedia entry to their name. Bob, the trio’s de facto leader (if only by virtue of having lived the longest and wrote the most) still has a few scant clippings accessible, including this 2010 NYTimes piece, which seems to completely misinterpret an obvious joke about an idea for an automated reading machine. This disappearance is a shame, since the Browns’ gourmand legacy, the concept of combing the globe for new flavors rather than clinging to the comfortable tastes of home, seems especially relevant today.
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The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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