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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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." 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.
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The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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