After years of obsessively scouring restaurants, markets, and the internet at large, I imagine myself pretty well apprised of the general ins and outs of most global cuisines, at least well enough to possess a passing familiarity with some of their products. Every so often, however, I’m totally thrown for a loop, a reminder of how much there still is (and always will be) left to learn. Even in a city where seemingly all the finest fruits of world cuisine are readily available with a little searching, much of Africa, particularly the inner quadrants, remains a huge mystery to the culturally voracious shopper. Enter Adja Khady (I did), an importing and distributing operation catering to a fundamentally Senegalese clientele, but which also offers products from Nigeria, Mali, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, and many others. The resulting melange of West African languages printed on colorful bags and boxes made for a bit of initial confusion, but after a little snooping around (and some exhaustive follow-up research) I was able to suss out the proper uses for these ingredients, and even employ some of them myself. Also notable was the appearance of many French items, with a specifically Lebanese and Vietnamese bent, thanks to shared history of foreign administration and resultant cross-immigration of workers and soldiers between these places.
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Unearthed at Russ & Daughters during a 40-minute Sunday morning wait for bagel sandwiches: an old-fashioned beverage that was new to me. For the last five years I’ve been intending to recreate this 2010-era New York Times recipe, itself a recreation of a turn-of-the-century cooling beverage. Each year I’m put off by the cost of fresh berries and end up lazily gobbling up any batches I manage to get my hands on. Then, serendipitously, on the first truly cold day of an encroaching winter, I found a ready-made version. Shrub, as it turns out, is just another term for drinking vinegar, with which its sharp bitter notes piercing velvety sweetened vegetable juice proves the perfect complement for the taste of smoked fish. The beet and lemon mixture seems to cement the beverage’s Old World bonafides, apparently isolating its derivation as either the LES itself or one of the Eastern European origin points which once funneled so many new immigrants into this crowded area. This seemingly clear-cut explanation is of course confused by the fact that Russ and Daughters sits squarely at the nexus of genuine old-fashioned conservationism and tongue-in-cheek modernization. The sandwich I ordered, for example, was called the ‘Super Heebster’ and featured wasabi flying fish roe atop baked salmon and whitefish salad.
New York City’s Japan Society is currently hosting a two-month series on Okinawa, the country’s southernmost prefecture, home to a culture that skews far from the rigid intensity of the rest of the archipelago. Held on Tuesday the 3rd, the ‘Explore Okinawa’ event seemed like the most general of these, a broad primer on the island’s culture, history and cuisine. Okinawa is actually the largest island in the Ryukyu chain, which existed as an independent kingdom / Chinese affiliate state until being brought under Japanese control in the 17th century, persisting as largely autonomous entity for centuries afterward. Absorbing influences from all over the Western Pacific, the island culture has produced distinctive exports like bingata, a painstaking, multi-step textile form, and karate, Japan’s best-known martial art.
If only all cans were this beautiful, evoking the fresh driven snows of the Alps via pure white packaging and the fresh-faced grins of two young soda sippers. The colors here actually point back to the flag of Austria, where Almdudler was born in 1957. The name (according to Wikipedia at least) roughly translates to “yodeling in the Alpine pasture," and the taste is pretty much as close to that image as you can get in soda form.
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.
Less a neighborhood than a fossilized, fantastical curiosity, Little Italy clings to its exaggerated Paisan image as a charm against the turmoil at its borders, embodied by ever-increasing Chinatown sprawl and encroaching Nolita/SoHo development. In constant danger of erasure, its immigrant population base long since fled to the suburbs, the area’s lingering Italian-American heritage has inflated to accommodate this vacuum, plying tourists with a cartoonish approximation of vintage New York City, via a showy spread of ‘old-fashioned’ red sauce and clam joints. All this straining for authenticity climaxes with a burst of cannoli cream and scalding fry oil during San Gennaro, the two week festival ostensibly dedicated to the patron saint of Naples, who each September 19th gets marched down Mulberry and pinned with dollar bills, a fitting ritual for a festival that seems designed to promote its accompanying neighborhood by turning its proud history into a lumbering commodity.
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The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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