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.
On my 5th day in Colombia I found myself in a white and teal painted restaurant in Cartagena’s Old City, grateful to finally be out of the sun. The temperature was at this point topping out around a 116 heat index, twenty of those degrees coming solely from the miserable, momentum-crushing humidity. Having sweated out at least a few water bottles worth of moisture, I was soaked, scorched, and about to collapse from fatigue. This meant I was also less than enthused when the waitress brought out the complimentary Sopa de Pescado, its herb-flecked liquid steaming in a small bowl.
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." Following a recent visit to the Bronx Zoo, I ventured into the wilds of Van Nest, a small, diverse neighborhood just outside the southeast gate. The western fringe of this area, dominated by the Cross Bronx Expressway and the city’s last remaining stretch of NYW&B tracks, seems to firmly prove Jane Jacobs’ theory of border vacuums, a depressed stretch of boundary wasteland marring the appearance of a place better known as the childhood home of Regis Philbin and Stokely Carmichel, and which boasts what may be the most ornate station in the subway system, or at least the one most resembling the property of a Spanish landowner.
Stocked with spam, hot dogs, beans and noodles, tossed into brothy combat with tofu, kimchi and gochujang, Budae Jigae is a colonialist incursion in soup form. Haphazardly developed during the Korean War, the stew grew out of desperation, as food shortages forced many to rely on excess (or smuggled) canned food acquired from American army bases. Budae Jigae (‘army stew’) served as a higher-class alternative to Kkulkkulijuk (‘pig's gruel’), a dire hot pot combination of food scraps and water sold for cheap by street vendors. 60 years later, Budae is still around, and while there’s nothing unusual about dishes shaped by necessity, few are so overtly politicized, capturing the harsh reality of wartime via the hastily combined cuisines of victim and aggressor.
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The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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