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.
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