Snack Semiotics

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Not a still, but too good to ignore (or leave unanimated). Jackie Chan's bumbling private eye finds his lust competing with his hunger, Tex Avery style, in Wong Jing's City Hunter (1993)

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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.

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Every so often I encounter an ostensibly edible object which makes no immediate sense, fits into no previous classificatory bracket, and provides few visual hints as to its identity. On truly rare occasions, eating said object only makes things worse. Enter Senjed, a small dried fruit which, despite its wrinkled external texture, gives way to a shockingly fluffy interior; the closest comparison I can make is to some kind of prank jellybean filled with old-fashioned couch stuffing. The package, whose label I made a point only to read after attempting to figure out what was going on first on my own, describes a “taste and texture somewhere between dates and candy floss.” This, to me, seems a bit charitable. The highly informative bag, obtained from the venerable Manhattan Spice Temple Kalustyan’s, also offers a few different names for the item (Lotus Fruit, Silver Berry, Russian Olive, Oleaster Fruit), which helps to confirm that it is indeed a fruit, not some oddball candy hiding out in inside of one’s skin.

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Not just meat, but tushenka, a stewed, canned delicacy, that like many packaged goods, originated as a military ration. I was mostly drawn in by the red and green color scheme, which is strangely un-Christmas-y in this context, instead landing somewhere between soothing and post-apocalyptic.

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It’s been over a month now since Pokémon Go finally revealed the hidden network of acquirable pocket monsters lurking around the nooks and crannies of our cities, towns, parks and coastlines. In that vein, it’s worth remembering that the search for snacks is a bit similar in spirit, especially when the result leads to a miniature bag of Irish crisps emblazoned with a snaggletoothed, cherry-red gremlin. Sourced from the somewhat inexplicable UK section of a local Key Food, these chips are indeed monstrous, blasted with a bracing pickled flavor that makes plain old salt and vinegar seem mild by comparison. This falls in line with the apparent British propensity for strongly flavored snacks, a taste which has spawned everything from Prawn Cocktail to Ham & Mustard and Marmite flavors.

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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 theMiddle 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.

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On the Taco Tuesdays of my youth, the menu was always the same: fat flour tortillas, stuffed with black olives, mild cheddar, lettuce, tomato and ground beef, sometimes seasoned with spiced tomato sauce to add a weird Italian-American flourish. As an adult, I’ve mostly abandoned this style in favor of less Americanized preparations, partially a consequence of living with a vegetarian with a highly specific cheese allergy (hint: it’s not lactose).  It’s hard, however, not to look back fondly on the old yellow cheese standby, especially as a member of a generation in which the casual gringo taco was perhaps at its prime, dished out at community socials and high school proms (yes, I attended a prom with a “Make Your Own Taco” station).

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This one was an impulse buy, purchased mostly thanks to its magnificent box, which I snapped up while trawling the aisles of a local Vietnamese supermarket. Based on the name I wasn’t expecting much, and was therefore delighted to discover the Vietnamese equivalent to halvah, a treasure trove of sweet, dusty dessert cubes, with a nice mung bean funk replacing the usually nutty twang. The exceedingly handsome package opens to reveal a tray of twelve separately packed containers (I notice that packaging within packaging seems to be a trend in Asian snacking, although I guess it is in American as well). As the box notes, this confection is a specialty of Hai Duong province, located in North Vietnam’s Red River Delta, where it’s apparently served in two distinct forms.

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I’ve always had a special fondness for Vegetable Thins, a snack that’s long occupied the second string of Nabisco’s cracker team, paired with perennial misfits like Chicken In A Biskit, Better Cheddars, Sociables, and the VT's polar opposite, the now-defunct Bacon Thins. Even in my early years, when I refused to touch a single earth-hatched tuber or legume, the taste of freeze-dried vegetable scraps preserved inside vinegary, MSG-laden crackers was alluring. even more so for the way the snack appeared in approximated vegetable shapes, all of them tasting exactly the same. Things have changed now in Nabisco Land, and while I do enjoy the fact that the above Wiki cites separate varieties clocking in at 40% and 44% less fat, respectively, it's likely that the VT will never be the same.  

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I recently spent a little over two weeks in India. During this  time I consumed untold quantities of rice and coconut milk, figured out how to passably eat curry with my hands (the right one, specifically), and learned the appropriate method of finishing off a banana leaf feast (the leaf should be folded toward you, not away, which is a sign of disrespect). Yet while the exact proportions of the ingredients consumed were not quantified, just about everything else was, as I obsessively documented everything I ate (and some things I didn’t) in order to create a rough food index for the parts of this country that I managed to visit. “Parts” is another key word, since India seems to only grow in complexity the more closely you examine it. Even minute sub-areas within one state vary wildly in terms of history and cuisine. This index is obviously wildly incomplete and rudimentary, an outsider’s perspective that hopefully contains a few insights nonetheless.

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I’ve at this point come to accept the fact that, despite numerous attempts to get on their wavelength, the pleasures of certain snacks will always remain elusive to my palate. One particular weak spot seems to lie in the cold-served, offal-based bar foods of Southeast Asia. I’ve already twice failed to comprehend the complexities of soondae, the Korean sausage stuffed with pig’s blood and cellophane noodles. This may have had something to do with the circumstances of consumption; I nibbled on it once amid a spread of far-more-palatable dishes at a group dinner, then again by my lonesome with a beer at home, my vegetarian companion sneering with disgust at idea of supermarket-purchased intestines invading our kitchen. Hoping for a better atmosphere, I brought this package of Nem Chua, purchased on impulse from the counter at Tan Tin Hung to a rental house upstate, hoping the convivial atmosphere therein would inspire at least some drunken inquisitiveness.

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As the days grow warmer and root vegetable season recedes into recent memory, I’d like to pay a small tribute to one of my favorite traditions of this time of year: the traditional root veg roast up. Here a diverse variety of husky earth dwellers congregate for the tuber equivalent of a spa treatment - scrubbed clean of dirt, trimmed of eyes, bruises and hairy wisps of budding stolons - before being chopped and subjected to a program of blistering heat.

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The Chess Players - Satyajit Ray (1976) 

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MARZIPAN

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. 

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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 theRyukyu 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. 

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Mannish Water

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.

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