Excerpted from the late Eduardo Galeano’s Faces and Masks, part of the ‘80s-era Memory of Fire trilogy, here's a 12-hour rundown of antique Peruvian snacks, circa 1769. A running catalog of the toll of corporatist colonialism on the so-called “New World,” the book is particularly focused on charting historical upheavals via the metronomic march of the calendar, which adds a sense of strange menace to this seemingly innocent list of foods, many of them influenced by flavors and ingredients forcibly introduced from Spain. A few of these dishes are self-explanatory, although some others are not. “Curds seller,” to start, likely refers to vendors of Quesillo, a moniker that means something slightly different in every Latin American nation, in Peru signifying a fresh curd cheese still sold on the streets of Lima to this day. The “green velvet” Chirimoyas are the pale-colored, shingle-textured fruit also known as the “custard apple,” although this appellation applies to many of its cousins in the Annona/Soursop family (not including, strangely, the actual Soursop, aka Guanábana), which also includes the “Sugar Apple,” and the American Paw-Paw. Cherimoya means “cold seeds,” in the Quechua language, a reference to the high altitudes at which they are grown. More musings on custard apples, meanwhile, can be found in the second of my Colombia trip report posts.
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When fusion is discussed in culinary terms, it’s usually of the broader, cross-cultural sort, either occurring organically (Indo-Chinese, Chinese-Caribbean, Indo-Caribbean) or mandated by the exigencies of the market (any place you can get both Sushi and Pad Thai). But there are also smaller instances of synthesis, ones occurring incessantly within national cultures themselves, sometimes at the behest of foreign influence, sometimes owing to other factors. Take Delimanjoo, which is run out of a small booth in Manhattan’s Koreatown, sharing space with a steamed bun dispensary and doling out a small set roster of seemingly traditional pastries. These have individual appellations, yet here get classed together under the name of the shop, itself a portmanteau (Delicious, or Delice, the company’s name, and Manjoo/doo, for dumpling). Delimanjoo is a global chain that most famously sells these cute little corns stuffed with custard, a treat I’m convinced they did not invent, although I can find no immediate visual evidence of their existence anywhere else. Word of mouth, meanwhile, seems to indicate they’re spotted frequently within the Seoul subway system.
Visiting a foreign city always involves some measure of culinary comparison, weighing the things it has in common with home versus the differences, which may be as subtle as slight variations in coffee preparation or as extensive as rib soup for breakfast. A massive cosmopolitan center, the largest city in Colombia and the third largest in South America (behind São Paulo and Lima), Bogotá shares a lot of surface commonalities with New York. Yet the primary difference is that, for all intents and
purposes, New York is done growing. It’s already received its waves of immigrants, both domestic and foreign, and while it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, its position and shape are now relatively fixed. Bogotá, on the other hand, has a much more open-ended set of prospects. Still in the midst of successive waves of a population boom, it’s gained nearly two million new residents in the years following the 2005 census, more than quadrupling in size since the mid ’70s. To accommodate all these people, it continues to expand outward, absorbing formerly outlying communities, the city’s character changing with each new acquisition. It’s also, as I learned trying to traverse the popular Santa Fe neighborhood, packed to the gills with young people, many of them still teenagers, which seems to ensure a continuation of the population spike. A city of this scale promises a full battery of international options, fine dining experiences and stylish nightspots, all of which Bogotá has in spades. I wasn’t really interested in any of this. What I was after was a rough picture of Colombia’s capital city as a prism for its national cuisine, refractions and reinterpretations of dishes from Nariño to Boyacá. Most of this gets supplied by the migrants flooding into the city, adding to the local Santafereño style fare with new flavors. It was a bit difficult demarcating one sub-cuisine from another, but I found that many places, especially in the city’s more working-class neighborhoods, tended to focus on the open-air cooking of the Llanos, a vast grassland in the Northeastern part of the country, which produces a sort of rustic grill culture that’s popular all over. I also spotted numerous references to the nearby Tolima, Cauca, Valle del Cauca and Santander departments. One thing all of these styles share is a fondness for meat, beef in particular reigning supreme over the rest. Certain Indian dishes get all the attention. Naan gets ordered with every meal. Tandoori and tikka masala hog the spotlight, with the downside that many fascinating foods don't seem to get any attention at all. In the last decade or so, a thaw has been occurring, with the growing interest in these congenial ambassador dishes granting chefs license to try new things. A few weeks back I had an exciting presentation of sliced duck breast in tamarind sauce (Magret de Canard Pulivaar) a relic of the longtime French occupation of Pudicherry, at Sunnyside’s Saffron Gardens. Branching out beyond the usual Indo-American fare, the meal also included curry spiked with the pan-Indian, Persian-derived mincemeat keema, Xacuti de Galinha (a Goan favorite, the name reflecting the region’s Portuguese history) and yengai, an eggplant, sesame and peanut dish hailing from Karnataka. My own childhood neighborhood, formerly a wasteland of diners, over-the-hill Italian joints and fast food franchises, has blossomed into a wonderland of new Indian options, many of them offering specialties from the southern states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, opening up a new world of parottas, moilees and kingfish fries. Another example is the above-mentioned Patra (aka Patrode), a complex Malvani/Gujarati preparation that employs the gram flour used in so many fritters as putty between a pinwheel bundle of taro leaves. Found at the fantastic Rahjbog, a sweet shop which also offers dosas, dhoklas, pav sandwiches and chai, a veritable roster of lesser-known items that will probably see their visibility increased in the coming years, as America's understanding of Indian cuisine becomes deeper and more nuanced.
I do not eat much frozen yogurt, and while I do cohabitate with someone who consumes a fairly reasonable quantity of the stuff, I don’t foresee Fro Yo Landscapes becoming a recurring feature. As a whole, these dispensers of suspiciously low-calorie treats seem to lack the right mixture of flashy personal branding, outsized ambition, and blatant disregard for spatial coherence that marks this city’s best deli tableaux. Consider, then, this to be a seasonal treat. This particular YoGo truck is regularly parked in front of the Brooklyn Museum, and while its pink-hued exterior might paint it as friendlier than the average Mr. Softee, that innocuousness hides a heart as cold as any other frozen-goods purveyor. See also, for more illumination on the dangers of ice cream purchasing, this seven-year-old post from a since-abandoned blog project.
That said, this particular truck has done nothing wrong, aside from a few inspired design flaws. First off, a half-hearted attempt has been made to give the flavors an NYC theme, which range from the reasonable (The SoHo, Brooklyn Bridge) to the puzzling (perhaps unwise to create a flavor association with the fume-choked tube of the Midtown Tunnel), and the irritatingly ingratiating (‘Freedom Tower,’ which is not the official name of One World Trade Center and needs to vamoose before it sticks). None of this really matters, however, since like the specter of eternal winter that awaits dwellers of both Earth and Westeros, a giant, sprinkle-spattered cone looms, already having swallowed the entire leftward section of the truck. There are hundreds of pizzerias in New York City, serving round and rectangular pies, ranging from the most delicate Neapolitan construction to the humblest dollar slice, with all manners of variety and toppings in between. There is, as far as I can tell, only one place serving langos, the Hungarian answer to the portable, sliceable, cheese-bedecked pie, and it’s not even a brick-and-mortar establishment. It’s a truck, manned by a friendly fellow who handles the entire preparation himself, which trawls the Union Square area and a few other select locations in Manhattan. This is a shame, because as Eastern European cousins to accessibly exotic snack foods go, the langos is pretty fantastic, a snappy cold weather retort to the relaxed rhythms of peninsular eating. The primary difference between it and a pizza is the use of fried dough as a base, rather than an airier baked crust, which immediately removes any possible applications as a health food. Freshly fried as I waited, the dough didn’t have any lingering grease residue, and despite its Magyar origin point was reminiscent of Navajo fry bread, another hearty but surprisingly light item not readily available in the city. The biggest difference from the standard pizza comes via the swapping out of sauce for sour cream, which is topped with grated gouda, although Old-World variations apparently often involve quark, liptauer, or good old Swiss Emmentaler. I had my langos fortified with a sprinkling of smoked ham cubes, although in retrospect I probably misordered; in the interest of exploration I should have opted for Hungarian salami. The result was delicious nonetheless, a sharp counterpoint to the silky smoothness of pizza, and the pleasant mixture of gently fried bread and two healthy helpings of dairy grants it a wholesome, satisfying quality which, if not quite at the level of a great slice, explains how the snack has managed to spread out all over Southern Europe.
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The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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