I once spent a few months, in and around the summer of 2010, trying to source raw olives for a home-curing project. This quest mostly involved roaming hopelessly around Queens, checking on expired leads, and culminated when I encountered an entire slaughtered cow, broken down among two shopping carts, in the back of a small Middle-Eastern grocery in Astoria. Now, nearly a decade later, I finally stumbled upon the elusive jewels at Carnival Fresh Market, a compact wonderland of produce and selected dry goods in Kensington.
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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.
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.
Every so often I encounter an ostensibly edible object which makes no immediate sense, fits into no previous classificatory bracket, and provides few visual hints as to its identity. On truly rare occasions, eating said object only makes things worse. Enter Senjed, a small dried fruit which, despite its wrinkled external texture, gives way to a shockingly fluffy interior; the closest comparison I can make is to some kind of prank jellybean filled with old-fashioned couch stuffing. The package, whose label I made a point only to read after attempting to figure out what was going on first on my own, describes a “taste and texture somewhere between dates and candy floss.” This, to me, seems a bit charitable. The highly informative bag, obtained from the venerable Manhattan Spice Temple Kalustyan’s, also offers a few different names for the item (Lotus Fruit, Silver Berry, Russian Olive, Oleaster Fruit), which helps to confirm that it is indeed a fruit, not some oddball candy hiding out in inside of one’s skin.
As the days grow warmer and root vegetable season recedes into recent memory, I’d like to pay a small tribute to one of my favorite traditions of this time of year: the traditional root veg roast up. Here a diverse variety of husky earth dwellers congregate for the tuber equivalent of a spa treatment - scrubbed clean of dirt, trimmed of eyes, bruises and hairy wisps of budding stolons - before being chopped and subjected to a program of blistering heat. The resultant fragments come out transformed: carrots, which I loathe under most circumstances, emerge from the oven newly sweet, soft and wrinkly, their intensified color complementing the purple hue of beets, the white flesh of potatoes and fiery orange yams. I’ve been conducting large scale winter root roasts for a few years now, but few sessions have typified the simple pleasures of rhizome roasting better than the all-star class of 2015-2016, featuring a few unlikely suspects who, like many of their veggie brethren, invariably benefit from some serious time in the stove.
Beyond warily eyeing them during their bi-seasonal autumn/winter appearance at the borders of the supermarket fruit section, I’ve never really known what to do with the persimmon, a fruit that seems firmly (if not insistently) Asian in character. Finally, this year, emboldened by a recipe that provided a method for synthesizing these mysterious orange globes into bread form, I picked up half a dozen in Chinatown, where stores seem to be especially bountiful during the fall season. Here I disabused myself of a long-time misconception - that persimmons are mushy and/or pulpy. Maybe this has something to do with their offhand resemblance to a tomato, or a since-forgotten encounter with an overripe persimmon on a store shelf, but the ones I purchased were actually hard, with a fibrous inside that in some ways resembled a pear. Even after brown-bagging these guys for two weeks they stayed hard, and I was eventually forced to unceremoniously mulch out the semi-soft meat inside with a spoon.
I’ve also since learned that persimmons are not exclusively Asian, despite the majority of production occurring there, with the Japanese ‘kaki’ variant being the source of the main crop produced for global consumption. These are generally split into two categories, the rounder fuyu (which I purchased) and the heart-shaped, more-bitter hachiya, which requires a bit more massaging (and/or ripening) to get to an edible state. These widely available versions, as is often the case, are only the tip of the iceberg. There’s also the legendary date plum, one of the first fruits cultivated by humans and a favorite of the ancient Greeks, the Texas/Mexican persimmon, the charred-looking chocolate persimmon, and the velvety Filipino mabolo. Last but not least is the American persimmon, which grows wild across the Eastern United States, originally cultivated by Native American tribes. These are evidently quite bitter, and eating them before they’re ripe can lead to a coagulated mass of acids and food known as a bezoar, a nasty condition (do not Google image search this, especially if you’re planning on eating in the next twelve hours) that wreaks the most havoc in animals; humans can usually break them down through the nifty trick of drinking cola. With an appearance that sits somewhere between root and poop, the bezoar can also be polished into jewelry; Queen Elizabeth I had one in her crown jewels, cast in gold and apparently given as a gift from noted Renaissance Man John Dee. This gift likely had something to do with the bezoar’s reputation as a means of protecting against poisoning. All this from a fruit that seemed pretty much worthless at first glance. Colombia, with its outlandish bounty of ridiculously fresh, not-quite-ready-for the Northern Hemisphere crops, is a paradise for the fruit lover. In fact, it’s a paradise for anyone interested in plunging into a miniature universe of colorful, edible, beautiful little objects, which grant further brightness to an already vibrant landscape. The country produces a wide variety of different fruits across its several micro-climes, the majority of which find their way to Bogotá, the country’s capital and its near-geographic center. Much of this harvest is on display at Plaza de Mercado de Paloquemao, a truly spectacular temple of produce, where hundreds of vendors congregate inside an airplane hangar-sized space. The focus is mainly botanical, although Paloquemao is actually an all-purpose market, offering fish and meat and various home goods. It's also surrounded by nested conglomerations of other satellite markets, which all seem to boast boundless quantities of goods at rock-bottom prices.
A jujube is both a candy - the American equivalent to German gummies and Turkish lokum - and a fruit, a red date which has a large variety of medicinal and culinary uses, mostly in Southeast Asian cultures. Part of the buckthorn family, it’s also closely related to Ziziphus mauritiana, the tree which produces the slightly stockier fruit known as the Bere (or the Ber, the Chinee Apple, Indian plum or Masau). Most popularly, it’s referred to as an ‘Indian Jujube,’ although the decidedly Indian Patel Brothers grocery at which I purchased this apple-like fruit also used ‘bere’ on its display. It’s hard enough to separate one cultivar from another when dealing with familiar fruits; this becomes downright impossible when you range out into foreign exotics, so I’ll leave it up to someone else to taxonomically classify all these different variants. The one I ate looked something like this, although with the green skin cast of a Granny Smith apple, with flesh that was similar but a bit softer in texture.
I can say, from a little research, that none of these are related to the Indian Plum, also known as the osoberry, which in furtherance of all this confusion hails not from India but the Pacific coast of the North American continent. Pushing the botanical chaos even further, the ‘Indian Jujube’ does sometimes appear in plum guise, specifically in the wrinkled, preserved form of Xi Muoi, Vietnamese sour plums, which show up as both a Warhead-style sucker (taking the sucker-er through extreme stages of sweet, sour and salty, similar to those strange Chinese olives), and the basis for a refreshing tonic drink. I bought the plums pictured above in Denver over a year ago, and still haven’t figured out an adequate culinary use for them, beyond plunking one or two into a pitcher of lemonade or passing them off as candy to unsuspecting guests. The Indian Jujube, again appearing in its miniature, not-as-appley form, continues on the road toward utter mystification by appearing as one of the principal ingredients in this Chinese drink, a veritable party of exotic botanicals that falls within the inscrutable dessert category of ‘sweet soups.” In 1968 China received the gift of a case of mangoes from visiting Pakistani foreign minister Mian Arshad Hussain. Normally, this wouldn’t have been a big deal. Gift-giving is endemic to Chinese guest culture, and while the fruit was unfamiliar to many Beijing residents, it’s also native to the southern part of the country, which is the world’s second-largest producer of mangoes. Yet, as described in this article by Ben Marks, Mao’s decision to send off the mangoes as a gift to his rabid student supporters sparked a nationwide sensation. Emblazoned on plates, pencil boxes and countless other mementos, the famous fruits usurped the peach as the national symbol for vitality and life, wax-cast replicas circulating as symbolic tokens. Now, two years after first opening in Zurich, this exhibit has rolled around to New York, where it’s being exhibited at the China Institute on 65th street, allowing visitors to feast their eyes on another historical instance of mango madness. Below, for complementary listening material, you'll find Claude Channes' "Mao Mao," as featured in Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise. |
The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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