Croquetas + Croqueta Preparada: Croquettes are one of those foods which, despite their persistent presence in any number of cuisines, I tend to associate exclusively with the past, memories of both outmoded faux-French Continental cuisine and the ‘80s-excess-oriented buffet tables of my early youth. I remember finding a certain comfort in an item so closely resembling one of the few things I ate at the time: fish sticks. While the croquette usually has high-culture aspirations (despite, in my experience, being invariably filled with some goopy version of Chicken Cordon Bleu), the two things actually very similar in construction, with a whipped filling making up the soft center for a heavily breaded, log-shaped fritter. I stumbled upon a different iteration last year at an Indonesian restaurant, in a Dutch-derived form known as the Rissole, but didn’t think much of it.
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An oft-repeated open secret of Thai-American restaurateurs, one likely applicable to those adapting other foreign cuisines for spice-averse palettes, is that when cooking for Americans not familiar with the cuisine, the safest method is to prepare the food as they do for children, with spice levels pushed way down, and sugar content way up. This leads to legions of syrupy pad thais, bogged down with ketchup and peanut butter, the sharp, sparkling flavors of the cuisine buried in viscous goop. I spend an inordinate amount of my time figuring out how to avoid such goop, and yet sometimes it’s worth surrendering to the allure of something intended specifically for a child’s palate. Enter Happy Soda (a.k.a. Gembira), a roseate cartoon beverage overflowing with mysterious sweetness. I spotted this one at the now-monthly Indonesian Food Bazaar, held inside Elmhurst’s St. James Episcopal Church, where vendors gather to sell homemade batches of native meals and snacks. The onslaught of unfamiliar items (Indonesia being another of those countries whose dozens of regional cuisines I’m only beginning to understand) forced me to do several laps to take it all in before ordering, and on these the thing which kept standing out to me was not any specific food item but this glowing soda, clutched in the hand of many a dawdling child, the source of its color still a mystery. My initial suspicion after purchasing one, which was prepared fresh before my eyes, was strawberry; a little research reveals the answer is actually coco-pandan syrup, a mixture of two maritime Asian staples, blended with condensed milk over ice, filled out with a healthy pour of seltzer for the requisite fizz. A tad too sweet for me, but I’m glad to have added this particular shade of pink to my rainbow of consumed beverage colors.
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.
For every modern food craze, there’s some sort of historical antecedent. So while slurping down almond milk seems like a decidedly contemporary (and possibly environmentally deleterious trend, the practice actually has a long history, stretching back to the dark, dairy-deprived days of the Middle Ages and beyond. In a time before refrigeration and canning, when you needed to own a cow or live in close proximity to one to enjoy the benefits of lactose, plant milks served more than a niche purpose.
Bird’s Nest gets a lot of attention as one of those fundamentally bizarre foods, perfectly demonstrating the eccentricities of the Chinese palate. Produced from the massed saliva of tiny cave swifts, it’s prized for its supposed health proprieties_, textural qualities and the inherent difficulty of procuring these little prizes. The latter makes this one of the most expensive foods on earth (retailing at upwards of 2k per kg), although the old, dangerous method of scaling cliff faces to pluck nests from gaps in the rock has mostly disappeared, largely due to the accompanying devastation of swiftlet populations. The nests are now harvested in specially built birdhouse complexes dotted throughout Southeast Asia (see here for more info and a fabulous headline), but the high price remains part of the prestige attraction and has thus held. This leaves lots of room for artificial bird’s nest flavoring, which might not pass muster in the famous soup, but works as part of handy imitation beverage. Genuine bird’s nest drinks do exist, and may come with better packaging and real-deal spittle, but the imitation, purchased for $1.50 from a Chinese supermarket, will do in a pinch. This version employs “artificial bird’s nest flavoring,” in addition to floating flecks of white fungus, which I guess cover for the missing textural consistency of the actual nests. Produced in Thailand, which seems to have recently caught the bug in terms of bird’s nest production and consumption, the can also boasts a bevy of beautiful birds, darting through the air with the stern efficiency of military aircraft. The golden sun, cresting above the outline of a white cloud, is also a nice touch.
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.
I’ve been meaning for years to visit Pirosmani, long considered one of the jewels of South Brooklyn’s Caucasian belt, ensconced in an out-of-the way corner of Gravesend that’s accessible only by car (or bus). Circumstances recently aligned to grant me the use of a vehicle for the weekend, and so I set off with a group to check out a wide assortment of Georgian feast foods. Surrounding a pivotal stretch of the Silk Road, with a spice-speckled cuisine that gloriously combines Eastern-European and Asian styles, Georgia has been getting a lot of attention lately, even expanding into Lower Manhattan via a few new venues (Oda House, Old Tblisi Garden and Tone Café). Pirosmani, on the other hand, isn’t aiming for modern bistro cool, with a truncated banquet hall full of rustic folk-art murals (reproductions of work by the restaurant's artist namesake), tulle wall draperies, thick white tablecloths and seasonal ceiling decorations. On Friday nights it also offers live music from a singing keyboardist, who backed up his spirited performance with a series of Youtube nature videos. The wide spread of kebabs, khachapuri and roasted poultry were immensely satisfying, but others have already better summed up the broad outlines of the country’s cooking. What instead caught my attention were two unusual herbal preparations, one pickled, another in soft drink form.
I have a distinct memory of attending a church youth group event, sometime around 1996, a pot-luck affair to which everyone brought soda or snacks. My father, who possessed (and still does) a seemingly inexhaustible trove of carbonated beverages purchased at steep discount prices, all of them stored in an expansive basement closet overstocked with expired items, saw this as an opportunity. He sent me off with two bottles of Pennsylvania Dutch brand birch beer, scooped up at some previous sale, then deemed unfit for offering to company (the only time soda was served at our house). The stuff sat on the communal snack table, among the more fashionable Mountain Dews and Cherry Cokes, while other kids poked fun at its weird yellow label and the liquid’s sharp violet tinge. I shrunk away, denying my relationship with the Birch by omission (perhaps three times?) and gulped down the vile Mountain Dew instead.
Purple drinks, as we learned from Sunny D commercials of yore, are gross. Distilled into a toxic tone ordinarily reserved for poisonous berries, jellybeans and gourmet potatoes, a violet-hue in a beverage generally indicates some serious element of artificiality at play. Even fresh stuff like high-end grape juice doesn’t have much to offer the adult palette, and I say this as someone who spent a dozen years fiending for the stuff. I won’t say that any of this applies to chicha morada, since I’m not inclined to broad-brush an entire class of beverages based on experience with one Snapple-style version of it, but the drink’s mixture of corn-y wholesomeness and fruity sugar doesn’t exactly see to be my cup of maté. As for the Inca Foods version, after a few sips, the rich corn taste begins to dissipate, the sugar takes over, and we’re back in grape juice territory once again.
Chichas are a wide-ranging product of the South American corn belt, spanning from Nicaragua’s cold-brewed, banana-flavored chicha de maiz to Chilean apple and Bolivian amaranth varieties; the only real defining standard is maize as a primary ingredient. The morada style is most identified with Peru, where Andean corn culture has also produced the fermented chicha de jora and other styles produced from quinoa, molle seeds and chickpeas. Classic chicha morada is created by simmering purple corn (another exception to the ‘purple-is-poison’ rule, a regional staple which doubles as a dye source) in a broth of cinnamon, cloves and pineapple juice, which grants it a slightly acidic sweetness (lovely little illustrations of these items are pictured on the bottle, along with some imposter apples and pears). Inca’s take on morada does notably improve when mixed with seltzer, and I should note that I’ve had better luck with the company’s other products, specifically their jarred aji sauces, not to mention their fantastic website, which also features a few other as-yet-untried chicha varieties. Composed of chocolate syrup, milk and seltzer, it’s a famous anomaly that the classic New York egg cream contains no actual eggs. Vietnamese egg soda (Soda Sữa Hột Gà), on the other hand, is packed with yolky goodness, balanced out with the heavy tang of sweetened condensed milk and the fizzy snap of seltzer, the kind of concoction that’s almost a meal in itself. As served at Com Tam Ninh Kieu, in the Bedford Park section of the Bronx, it pairs well with the sharp flavors of the restaurant’s namesake dish, which makes use of ‘broken rice’, the irregular toss-offs of the rice world, which have long since been rediscovered as an ideal flavor vehicle. Served with all the trimmings at Com Tam, the once-neglected rice is accompanied by two fried eggs, a slab of pork chop and a shrimp cake, a sort of Indochinese spin on a lumberjack breakfast. Breaking the cardinal rule of carbonated beverages, I took the remainder of my soda home, where it was reconstituted in this fantastic Silver Gulch pint glass, with a bit more seltzer added to cut down the egginess, nudging the texture out of full-bodied nog territory.
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