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.
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Invented in 1912, Bonomo’s Turkish Taffy bar is billed as the ‘first interactive candy.’ A bit of a stretch, perhaps, considering the extent of the ‘interactivity’ here is bashing the extremely chewy candy against a surface hard enough to shatter it into a million pieces. If you miss this step, as I did after purchasing the bar from the Lower East Side’s always amazing Economy Candy, you may find yourself hopelessly gnawing at a series of too-large chunks, which remain totally resistant to stretching/bending. They can be cracked with teeth, but one attempt at this put such stress on my molars that I was afraid trying again would cost me a few fillings.
Despite the name, Turkish Taffy wasn’t always directly interactive, since it was originally stored behind Woolworth’s store counters in giant sheets. The helpful attendant would help you size out the piece you wanted, then would shatter it with a ball peen hammer, packaging up the resultant shards. The candy also isn’t Turkish, invented in the United States by the son of a Sephardic immigrant from the country. Albert Bonomo emigrated to the United States in the late 1800s and took up a trade as a candy maker in Coney Island, a business into which his son Victor followed him, developing this candy in the 1940s after a string of moderate successes ripping off more popular brands. Known as a ‘soft' or 'short nougat,’ similar to Italian torrone, it results from a mold-set mixture of egg whites and corn syrup. Victor Bonomo died in 1999 at the age of 100, but his company lives on, solely dedicated to the production of taffy bars and smaller ‘taffy nibbles.’ Also purchased on this same trip: a Zagnut, the odd coconut-covered peanut brittle bar whose 1960s TV ad campaign was even more memorable than the ones for Turkish Taffy. The origins of marzipan are hazy, involving the amorphous circuitry of medieval Middle Eastern trade routes and Hanseatic League-affiliated ports, but the candy’s history has at least some connection to medieval Italy. It was here that it may have gotten its modern name - derived from the term ‘March Bread’ (Marza Pane) - although this is only one of several competing claims. Whatever the case, marzipan's unique moldability has always allowed it to change with the times, and it reaches new heights of expressions at Brooklyn’s Fortunato Brothers café. Here, two proud Italian traditions merge, with the almond-based confection taking on the shape of a plate of spaghetti, a Margherita pizza, and perhaps most puzzlingly, an unadorned turkey sandwich.
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. Liquors often have roots in religious communities, which sounds peculiar until you consider the medicinal history of booze, the traditional mercantile focus of these mini-societies, and the fact that alcohol prohibition within the church is a pretty recent development. Monks are responsible for myriad varieties of beer, as well as Benedictine and Chartreuse among other liqueurs. Nuns, as far as I can tell, are responsible only for rompope, the thick yellow beverage known as Mexican eggnog, which reputedly originated in a Pueblan convent during the 17th century. This story probably has some truth to it, although the drink has roots which stretch back to the Old World, specifically Spanish ‘egg punches’, Dutch advocaat and English posset.
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The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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