The only thing of interest that I learned in the comments of this entry is that SM comment leaver DesiDancer likes food.  Well so do I.  The Village Voice reports on a fruit that I am ashamed to admit I have never tried.  It is the “Queen of fruits,” the Mangosteen:

Last month, after a long discussion with his father, my friend gave up on his latest business idea: Importing mangosteens into America. The plan was to petition the government, build a greenhouse, and then get rich off of this rare South Asian fruit, which apparently tastes like ice cream and causes perfectly normal people to burst into tears. R.W. Apple wrote in The New York Times: “I can no more describe mangosteens than explain why I love my wife and children.“

Good God.  What hole have I been living in?  I must have this fruit, I simply must.

Recently, I went to Chinatown to find this dark, purple treat, but the few people who had heard of it told me to stop looking. Mangosteen–widely considered the “queen of all fruit”–carries too many flies to be permitted in the U.S. Because durian, the so-called “king,” was hanging from nearly every fruit stand on East Broadway, I bought one instead. It was $8 and about the size of my head–plus spikes. While mangosteens are said to chill the body, durians are 900-calories a piece and so creamy that last year when a man in Thailand ate four in a row, he passed out and died. The Thai Ministry of Public Health then issued a warning against excessive durian consumption.

Durian looks totally freakish to me.  It’s not surprising that it has been described as such:

We cracked open the skin with a steak knife. Inside there were five red seeds, surrounded by doughy goo. I thought it resembled a dead chicken, but my friends had other ideas: “porcelain fetus,” “alien baby,” “dinosaur egg,” “anonymous shit on sidewalk.” The pulp tasted burnt, warm and sweet, like onion custard, and got more syrupy the closer it was to the seeds. One friend loved it: “Durian is sublime,” she wrote me in an email later that night, “I want to inflict it on people.”

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The Grey Lady lets us know that desis have crossed a new frontier, with desi cooks infiltrating older ethnic food establishments in different parts of New York:

Exhibit A: the egg cream. For New Yorkers of a certain age, this was the nectar of a Jewish neighborhood, and Gem Spa was the drink’s sacred temple, certified as such by magazines and travel writers. Gem Spa is still there, still turning out egg creams at its narrow patch of a soda fountain in the East Village. But the person who owns the store and taught the staff to make this curious concoction of seltzer, milk and chocolate syrup is Ray Patel, a 62-year-old immigrant from Gujarat state in India.

He learned the recipe, including the secret stirring motions that create a frothy head resembling beaten egg whites, from the previous owner (Italian), who learned it from the old owner (Jewish).

“People try to learn new things in a land of opportunity,” is Mr. Patel’s elegant explanation for how an Indian came to make a drink that is considered exotic west of the Hudson River, let alone in Gujarat.

I’ll bet they wrote the same article 30 years ago when the guy behind the counter was Italian. Gujarat is now as exotic as Sicily used to be, so the story becomes interesting enough to retell. What they miss is how little has changed. The owner may be a bit darker, but he’s still named Ray.*

However, don’t look to Ray to spice up the old standards. Ray’s probably a purist,  but somewhere there is a young Jewish foodie who’s hybridizing the old Egg Creams with desi flavors. Cultural appropriation goes both ways. Continue reading →

Did you ever daydream about starring in a movie as an archeologist who ferrets out exotic treasures, the origins of which have been lost in the mists of antiquity? Well, get over it. Hollywood still has no idea how to cast brown people as anything other than terrorists, doctors, and occasionally taxi drivers or eaters of monkey brains. They’re not yet ready to make an Indian ANNA Jones movie, “M.Night” notwithstanding.

Instead, I offer you a far geekier and more glorious pursuit! The BBC and OED have teamed up to find the earliest verifiable usage of words from the unimaginatively titled “BBC Wordhunt appeal list” for the next version of the OED. If you can beat their earliest recorded usage (you need some form of dated evidence) your contribution might be featured as part of a new BBC2 TV series. How’s that for 15 minutes of fame?

Two of the fifty words on their list (4%!) are words of BritAsian origin:

balti
Wanted: printed evidence before 1984; information on the word’s origin

Are you one of Britain’s original curry kings or queens? If so, did you cook or serve Britain or the world’s first balti — or do you know who did? Knocking around at the back of the kitchen drawer do you have an old takeaway menu with a balti on it from before 1984?

The winter issue of Curry Magazine (1984) contains the first printed evidence the OED has for ‘balti’. But where the term comes from (India, Pakistan — perhaps Baltistan) remains something of a mystery at present. They say it first appeared in the Birmingham area in the early 80s. But is there any printed evidence for the term earlier, and can the origin be confirmed?

See the OED entry for balti

tikka masala
Wanted: printed evidence before 1975

Restaurant menus and reviews start to show chicken tikka masala from 1975, according to the latest research from the OED. Despite the dish’s claim to be a great British national dish, the first recorded evidence comes from America. Something wrong here? Or not?

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For years those silly Mentos commercials ruled the television airways as the most annoying and obnoxious commercials ever. They’d plant themselves in your head while some ad exec somewhere smiled diabolically. Recently that honor was emphatically stolen by Fanta softdrink and its stupid television commercials where a bunch of Fem-bot looking women ask you (or shout at you) “Don’t-cha Wanta Fanta, Don’t-cha Wanta Fanta…” until you break down and submit to their will, hoping that it hurts so good. Well SiliconIndia.com has this headline today: U.S. FDA rejects Indian consignment.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) has rejected consignments of MNCs Coca-Cola India, Hindustan Lever, Procter & Gamble and Britannia from India on the grounds that they are ‘unsafe’ or not conforming to U.S. laws.

According to information sourced from the USFDA, a shipment of Fanta sent by Coca-Cola India from Mumbai to the U.S. was rejected on May 19 on the grounds that it contained ‘unsafe color’. The regulator said the ‘article appears to be, or to bear or contain a color additive which is unsafe’. Coca-Cola and Pepsi have been under fire in India for allegedly allowing higher pesticide content than permitted internationally.

Hmmm. I wonder if that unsafe color was yellow#5. Seems like the Fantanas evil plot has been thwarted and I shall never taste Lol…errr, I mean “Pineapple” on my lips. There were other items rejected by the USFDA as well. This one REALLY caught my eye:

A shipment of “decongestant vaporizing ointment” sent by the Indian subsidiary of U.S. FMCG major Procter & Gamble was also rejected by the USFDA on May 25 on multiple grounds including the grounds that “the article appears to be a new drug without an approved new drug application” and “the article appears to be a non-prescription drug and fails to bear the established name of each inactive ingredient…”

Come on. By a show of hands now, how many of you got rubbed down with some sort of ointment from India when you were a kid, that was supposed to cure the area in question whether you had a cough or a broken leg? The USFDA doesn’t know what it is talking about.

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As snarky desis, we use mirchi constantly, in both our writing and our food. However, there is a human face to all this heat:

In temperatures of over 45 degrees, 80 year-old Rajima sits under an asbestos roof preparing chillies for export to Britain. For eight hours at a stretch her aching fingers pluck the stalks from the red chilli pods, releasing a pungent dust that fills her nose and throat making her cough and sneeze. For this, she earns 30 rupees, the equivalent of 40 pence, or less than a third of the cost of a small jar of chilli powder in a British supermarket. Rajima and her 50 co-workers are the hidden face of India’s spice trade. [BBC]

Think about the effects to Rajima’s health from all of this exposure to pepper. Pepper farmers and processors go through alot and earn very little:

Watching his produce weighed at Warangal market, one farmer complains that the 800 rupees he’s getting for each 40 kilo sack is too little to cover the growing costs. “I took huge loans for agricultural investment – mostly pesticides,” he says. “Now there will be no alternative for me but to commit suicide”. [BBC]

Furthermore, demand for pepper is down, due to a recent food scare concerning a food coloring carcinogenic additive. Bad weather has spoiled much of the Indian pepper crop, causing desi farmers to lose business to those in other countries. It’s a rough life for farmers from Andhra Pradesh.

According to state records, 4,500 farmers have killed themselves in the past seven years, driven to despair by poor harvests and financial worries, and that figure would be far higher if other family members were included. The epidemic of suicide started with cotton farmers but it is now spread to spice growers. Ironically, most die by swallowing the pesticides that have helped get them into debt.[BBC]

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The Los Angeles Times introduces chaat to the mainstream, and offers up some recipes. Give them a try, and then lament the fact that it’s still nowhere near as good as momma used to make:
• Bhel puri
• Pav bhaji
• Lamb frankie
• Tamarind and date chutney
• Green chutney

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