We are so glad to be here. In late 2022 when these stories were first assigned, privately, discussions were being had about the future of the magazine. It was an abysmal time in media, one that we didn’t know was just the beginning of an ongoing phenomenon that investors and market watchers call a correction, a crass euphemism for lost jobs and mass layoffs.
Whatever the error the media made or bore, penance has been significant. There’s scarcely been a tier, size or category that has been unaffected.
One thing we knew for sure was that continuing to publish meant locking in with the same editorial team that has earned Whetstone all of its acclaim—Layla Schlack, Alex Bowman and Lyric Lewin—our copy, art and photo editors at large and in charge.
At the top of last year, right about the time we were wondering about the fate of our publication, a thennewly-launched initiative called HONE had us feeling optimistic despite the broader headwinds. Much like Whetstone in 2017, HONE was a response to what was absent (in this case, culinary management from a peer), a corrective amid the correction.
Diversity, human connection and understanding narrative as leverage. These have always been our guiding tenets for the magazine and the same is true for our expansion into culinary management. As much as making it in media has been an upstream swim, we are pleased that HONE has grown swimmingly and continues to do so with great promise.
It has meant a recalibration on our content, which I know some of you have been lamenting, but fear not! In case you missed the announcement, we are, once again, creating a new wrinkle in our business that reflects our aforementioned core beliefs.
We are taking this show on the road and connecting at the intersection of media, talent and travel. In this issue we are pleased to introduce you to ROAM, our new culinary travel vertical. In addition to bringing you more content on global foodways, you can now ROAM with the HONE team and bring the stories from Whetstone to life!
Origin Foraging, the name of our global food tours, is a commitment to take it back.
Both to the beginning of the story and, more critically, the parts where those who should be seen as protagonists are missing from the history entirely. Our work is about insertion and prioritizing understanding over voyeurism; learning, not discovering.
And our existence and survival has always been contingent on your support. It is a pleasure to still be making magazines, and it could not happen with you. Thank you. History has many mothers and is being remade everyday. We are here to bear witness.
Stephen Satterfield
42 24
12 Tobacco’s Story Unfolds | TEXT Israel Meléndez Ayala 18 In Bread, Sanctuary |
TEXT & PHOTOGRAPHY Felicity Spector 24 The Wild Cherries of Arcadia | TEXT & PHOTOGRAPHY Christopher D.Z. Mason 28 The Memory Threads Behind Taiwan’s Wheaten
Cuisine | TEXT & PHOTOGRAPHY Kang-Chun Cheng 38 Twin Fruits in Life & Lore |
PHOTOGRAPHY & TEXT Jessica Kehinde Ngo 42 A Tale of Tea | TEXT Naz Deravian & Hanif Sadr PHOTOGRAPHY Behrooz Joshani 50 Tarreh: An Iranian Herb and a Quest
Against Erasure | TEXT Homa Dashtaki 52 Tapuey: A Philippine Brew with Many Names |
TEXT & PHOTOGRAPHY Jessica Hernandez 62 Finger Food | TEXT Colleen Hamilton
PHOTOGRAPHY Tropico Photo 68 Plátanos & Politics | TEXT Vanessa García Polanco
ILLUSTRATION Lena Tokens 70 The Taste of Polish Mountains | TEXT & PHOTOGRAPHY
Karolina Wiercigroch 82 The Dishes, the Museum and the Empire | TEXT N.A. Mansour
IMAGES Courtesy of The Met Museum
Tapuey: A Philippine Brew with Many Names
PHOTOGRAPHY
Jessica Hernandez
The Taste of Polish Mountains
PHOTOGRAPHY
Karolina Wiercigroch
Editor's Letter
Every issue of Whetstone feels a little miraculous to me, and not just because it’s a print magazine. I’m awestruck, each time, by the brilliance and talent of all of our contributors, as well as my beloved colleagues and friends Lyric Lewin, Alex Bowman and Emily Vizzo. It is, to me, a marvel that Stephen Satterfield brought me in to work among these people.
If that reads emotional or dramatic, it’s because Volume 12 is personal. It’s personal in the sense that I wasn’t sure if it would happen, and that it will be the last issue for a while (more on that to come), but also because of the nature of the stories.
We don’t have themed issues, but usually a motif of sorts emerges in each volume. Most of Volume 12 was assigned in late 2022, with stories coming in early in 2023. If we had done the assigning later, know we would have focused more on Palestinian people and their land.
But instead, the inadvertent theme of this issue is the ways in which family, friends and even work connect us with larger narratives around food, farming, history, imperialism, racism, war, ecology, you name it.
This issue spans the globe, from Polish cheesemakers, to the Chinese workers who brought tea to Iran, to the complicated symbolism of plátanos in the Dominican Republic. It also looks at how food and crops travel, from wheat to sourdough.
Of course, movement around the globe has been a theme in everything Whetstone does, which is why the
company is branching off. With Origin Foraging tours and the ROAM travel vertical, we will continue telling stories of where people and food have started, and where they’re going.
It’s always been a tough time to be in media, especially independent media, but this is an especially tough time. Projects like ROAM, Origin Foraging and Whetstone’s talent agency, HONE, allow us to keep telling these brilliant, miraculous stories. And so do you, our readers, so thank you for your support and patience. I hope you enjoy Volume 12.
Layla Schlack
Contributors
Karolina Wiercigroch
FRONT COVER ARTIST
Karolina is a Cornwall-based food and travel photographer and writer, specializing in culinary storytelling, editorial photography and creating food-focused destination stories. Her images and stories have been published in a variety of magazines, including National Geographic Traveller UK, National Geographic Traveller Food, Food and Travel, Telegraph Travel, The Sunday Times, Delicious Australia and VOGUE. Member of The British Guild of Travel Writers.
Kang-Chun Cheng
KC is an independent journalist and photographer based in Nairobi, covering the environment, foreign aid and outdoor adventure for outlets like Atmos, The New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Climbing and Earth Island Journal.
Jessica Hernandez
BACK COVER ARTIST
Jessica Hernandez is a 2nd-generation Fil-Am multimedia storyteller focusing on gastronomic preservation and cultural advocacy. She is the co-creator and writer of meryenda, a digital publication exploring the complexities of Philippine culture and diasporic food ways. Her current areas of interests revolve around rice beverages, biocultural diversity and fermentation.
Homa Dashtaki
Homa Dashtaki was born in Iran and is a practicing Zoroastrian. In 2011, Homa started The White Moustache with her father. What started as a quiet bonding activity with her community has turned into an advocacy effort in small food production. She is based in Brooklyn, with a strong connection to Southern California. She is the author of Yogurt & Whey: Recipes of an Iranian Immigrant life.
Israel Meléndez Ayala
Israel Meléndez Ayala is a historian and writer from Puerto Rico. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian and more. He writes a weekly newsletter called Crítica. You can find him on Instagram at @israelayalapr.
Naz Deravian
Naz Deravian is the author of Bottom of the Pot: Persian Recipes and Stories She is a Los Angeles-based writer and regular contributor to The New York Times food section. She has also contributed to The Washington Post, The Atlantic and The Los Angeles Times, among other publications. She is a James Beard Award nominee, and Bottom of the Pot was the recipient of The IACP Julia Child First Book Award. Naz was featured in Padma Lakshmi’s Hulu show, Taste the Nation. She was born in Iran, grew up in Canada and now lives in Los Angeles.
Colleen Hamilton
Colleen Hamilton is a poet, novelist and columnist at Them. Her writing has appeared in Teen Vogue, The Cut, VICE, the Los Angeles Times and dozens more publications. She is devoted to the creation of whole, liberated communities.
Behrooz Joshani
Behrooz Joshani, creator of Hyrcany Tea Workshop, continues a century-old legacy of tea cultivation in Gilan, presently pioneering ecological agricultural practices and specialized tea production, rejuvenating the ancestral tea facility in Amlash.
Jessica Kehinde Ngo
Jessica Kehinde Ngo is a Nigerian-American writer whose work addresses food (mostly plantain), twinship, intercultural and interracial relationships, and motherhood. Her writing has appeared in Epicurious, Taste, The Counter, Cuisine Noir, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Harvard Review Online, the James Beard Foundation Blog and elsewhere. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband and sons and is an Associate Professor of English at Otis College of Art & Design, where she teaches courses in writing and food memoir. She was a 2022–2023 Legacy Network Advisee for the James Beard Foundation and a 2023 winner of an IACP Food Writing Award.
Felicity Spector
Felicity Spector has been a television journalist at Britain’s Channel 4 News for 35 years, and is currently writing a book about food and war in Ukraine.
N.A. Mansour
N.A. Mansour is a writer and historian.
Vanessa
Vanessa García Polanco is an agriculture policy advocacy professional and a Dominican immigrant. She incorporates her experiences and identities into her food studies research and advocacy for food justice. She has projects including the Dominican Food Studies syllabus and supports food sovereignty projects in the Dominican Republic. She is a member of the Dominican Writers Association. She divides her time between Providence, Rhode Island, Washington, D.C., and Moca, Dominican Republic.
Lena Tokens
Lena Tokens is an international artist with 7 years of experience in the illustration field. Her art has been featured in Communication Arts, Fantastic Illustration V & Story Power of Illustration. Lena has been commissioned by Pixar, Disney, Nickelodeon, Netflix Lat, Fortune Magazine, HuffPost, WIRED, Playboy, Johnnie Walker, Lando Norris F1 and many more. Her illustrations have been shown in collective exhibitions in London, Vienna, Dubai, Cheltenham, Barcelona, and Hamburg. She had a solo show at Brazil’s AquaRio, which houses the largest aquarium in Latin America.
Christopher D.Z. Mason is a writer and
from South
has written and produced 20 natural history documentaries and has published fiction and poetry in the New Contrast, Near Window and Botsotso literary journals. He also occasionally writes environmental journalism for the Daily Maverick. He lives in the Peloponnesian mountains of Greece with his wife, daughter and four dogs.
Forrest Aguar loves pairing shapes and lines to create captivating compositions and Michelle Norris loves seeking out compelling color combinations. Together, they make work that draws on the feeling of an ambiguous time and place where art and advertising collide. Travel and beauty are their greatest shared loves.
Tropico Photo
Christopher D.Z. Mason
filmmaker
Africa. He
García Polanco
Hanif Sadr
Hanif was born in France and raised in Tehran, Iran. Growing up he spent his summer days in northern Iran at his grandparents family farm learning about traditional farming, foraging and animal husbandry from the people working on the farm. He is the Co-founder and Executive chef of Komaaj Food group, a Northern Iranian restaurant group in The Bay Area.
Solidarity
As origin foragers we have made it our mission, to the best of our ability, to uncover history that has been covered. We amplify and stand in solidarity with those who have been silenced and erased.
Sometimes foraging leads to beauty and understanding and sometimes it leads to more questions.
Palestine, the land at the forefront of our hearts, is one that is holy to many and has, throughout the course of history, been home to many. These include peoples like the Canaanites, Judeans, Samaritans, Phoenicians, Philistines, Israelites and Palestinians.
This land has been handed from empire to empire and through insurmountable odds, the Palestinian people have continued to live and to love, though many have tried to extinguish them from doing so.
As we have covered Palestinian farmers, cooks and makers, we have been in awe as we have learned about the work they have done to reclaim and preserve their rich history and traditions.
At Whetstone, we’ve documented the making of knafeh in the West Bank, explored the distillation of Palestinian arak, examined the symbolism of hummus in Yafa (or Jaffa) and talked to an olive oil producer about life since October 7.
We know that there are more stories to tell and will be for generations to come. We know that food is being used as a weapon, and that we have an obligation to bear witness to that. And through this recounting, we look forward to the day when there will be freedom in this beautiful land with its sun-dappled vineyards.
Whetstone
Pistachios are sprinkled over top of fresh knafeh in the West Bank. September 2019. Photo: Lyric Lewin
Nader Muaddi checks on the grapes before the harvest for his arak production. West Bank, September 2019. Photo: Lyric Lewin
Tobacco’s Story Unfolds
Long an important crop in Puerto Rico, the leaf is also tied to important feminist history.
TEXT Israel Meléndez Ayala
My right arm is covered in a sleeve of tattoos dedicated to Puerto Rico. Included among the sugarcane, rum barrels and flamboyant flowers is a tobacco leaf, all done by an artist named José Serrano, who studied a master's degree in art and history and expresses his artistic skills by tattooing. In addition to treating my arm as his canvas, Serrano is a great friend.
The tobacco in particular is in honor of my greatgrandmother, Clara Molina, who made and smoked her own cigars at her home in Arecibo.
After rolling the leaves that she dried, destemmed herself—sometimes using her front teeth—and cut, Clara would smoke. Many Puerto Ricans have practiced this for centuries, and it has special significance in local feminist history.
Colonizers’ Currency
Tobacco is an agricultural product processed from the leaves of Nicotiana tabacum . It is consumed in several ways; the main one is to inhale through smoking. An article by Duke, D., Wohlgemuth, E., Adams, K.R., et al., in Volume 6 of the journal Nature Human Behavior says that archeological evidence shows that tobacco was commonly grown and used in religious ceremonies among the Indigenous peoples of the Americas approximately 12,000
years ago. In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean and met the local inhabitants. The Arawaks, known as Taínos, offered him dried tobacco leaves as a token. A few days later, a party from Columbus' ship docked off the coast of Cuba and witnessed local peoples there smoking tobacco through Y-shaped tubes that they inserted in their noses, inhaling smoke.
The conquerors, amazed by tobacco, brought it with them upon their return to Europe (along with many other goods).
An account by the chronicler Bartolomé de Las Casas in his book Historia de las Indias, Vol.1 provides details:
On this island of Española and in the neighboring ones they had another form of yerba such as their own lettuce, and this was dried in the sun and over a fire, and they made a roll out of dry tree leaves like a paper musket, and they put a little bit of that herb and lit the musket on one side, and on the other they sucked or drew the smoke into their chests, which caused a numbness in their flesh and throughout their bodies, so that they neither felt hungry nor tired, and these muskets called 'tobacco'...
Also, the chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo describes similar details, but adds in his General History of the Indies (1835) that consumption of tobacco became part of a ritual and describes its use as medicine, both to Figure 1
cause sleep and relieve fatigue. For centuries, there have been many supporters and detractors of this product. However, it wasn’t until the last half of the 20th century when epidemiological studies revealed the harmful effects of tobacco.
In the year 1500, the Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral reported that the Natives of present-day Brazil used tobacco to treat ulcerated abscesses, sores, inveterate polyps, among other ailments. In 1529, the Spanish missionary Bernardino de Sahagún recorded that healers from present-day Mexico used it to treat headaches, catarrh, colds and swollen lymph nodes in the neck.
Around the middle of the 16th century, Europe was interested in the medical properties of tobacco. Over a dozen books published mention tobacco as a cure for everything from pains in the joints to epilepsy to plague.
In 1560, Jean Nicot, a French ambassador, learned about the curative properties of tobacco when he was on assignment in Portugal and used the American herb to cure many symptoms like the migraine headaches of Catherine
de Medici The French became enthusiastic about tobacco, calling it the herbe à tous les maux, the plant against evil, pains and other bad things. By 1565, the plant was known as nicotine, the basis of its genus name today. By the beginning of the 18th century, tobacco could be found in any corner of the globe.
In 1881, the first machine capable of producing cigarettes in the world was patented in the United States and created by James Albert Bonsack. It could make 120,000 cigarettes a day, revolutionizing mass production and therefore increasing consumption of tobacco in the world.
Tobacco consumption made a considerable qualitative leap during the Industrial Revolution. During and after the two world wars, it spread with greater impetus as a way of raising soldiers’ combat morale and readiness for battle. Also during that period, cigarettes became popular among those women who were working outside their homes for the first time.
However, women did not enjoy parity in the workforce: They were paid less than men and did not have the same social and labor rights.
Puerto Rico’s Tobacco Story
In Puerto Rico, tobacco, coffee and cane sugar were the three main agricultural products of the economy throughout its history. The Spanish introduced tobacco from its colonies in the Caribbean to Europe and sold it around the world in different forms: dust (snuff) to be inhaled, chewing yarn, cigars and string to be smoked in pipes.
From the 1630s, tobacco was harvested for export to Spain and Holland, where it was processed during the Spanish regime. By 1775, Puerto Rico was producing over 2 million pounds of tobacco; it became such an important export product that eventually the island produced around 35 million tons of tobacco per year.
The U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico in 1898 altered all aspects of archipelago life, including agriculture. The United States capital quickly monopolized the cultivation of sugar and tobacco. In 1903, the Puerto Rican American Tobacco Company controlled 43 percent of exports, a disadvantage to local companies. The great interest of U.S. business in Puerto Rican tobacco made many local landowners shift their production away from other goods in order to take advantage of this interest.
Likewise, the cultivation of tobacco gradually spread rapidly and consistently. In 1917, it held the position of third-most important commercial product of Puerto Rico, after sugarcane and coffee. By 1918, tobacco had already managed to position itself above coffee, becoming the second-most important product. By 1919, there were 39,067 acres planted to tobacco, and more than 19,363,000 pounds were produced. Tobacco maintained its status until the mid-1940s.
Starting from this context, the cultivation of tobacco was not only of importance for trade, it was also a source of income for farmers and the rural population. More than 14
percent of the farms in different areas of the island were cultivating tobacco leaves by 1940, and 40 percent of all crops were tobacco leaf. At that time, there were 37,000 acres of cultivated tobacco and more than 16,000 farmers.
But in the mid-1940s, Operation Bootstrap offered tax incentives to U.S. businesspeople who would industrialize the island, and tobacco production declined rapidly.
Many farmers moved to the cities to work in factories or in tourism and other jobs because it was a stable income and an industry supported by the government.
By 1970, there were fewer than 4,000 farms and approximately 9,000 cuerdas (a traditional unit of land area nearly equivalent to 3,930 square meters, or 4,700 square yards, 0.97 acre) to plant tobacco until it dwindled to the level of only a few who grow on farms for personal use or make cigars or sell leaves for those few who produce craft cigars to sell.
An Opportunity for Women
Small farmers were disappearing, but new employment opportunities were created for Puerto Rican women, the fastest-growing, lowest-paid group of the wage labor force.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the International Conference of Socialist Women demanded women get the right to vote. While factory workers in the United States went on strike for better jobs, Luisa Capetillo—a Puerto Rican feminist, anarchist, journalist and labor union leader, who was born on October 28, 1879, in Arecibo, worked in the tobacco factories for women's rights, such as universal suffrage and equality.
Remembered as one of the first women to wear pants, Capetillo was far from a fashion icon. She was a pioneer in addressing the problems facing the working class, the conditions of women and the importance of labor organizing in Puerto Rico.
The great interest of U.S. business in Puerto Rican tobacco made many local landowners shift their
production away from other goods.
It was in the tobacco factory that Capetillo started working as a reader and had her first contact with labor unions.
She also spent time in the United States, working with the Latinx communities, especially the tobacco workers and labor leaders, and created and built alliances with syndicates as well in the Caribbean.
The tobacco factories in the Caribbean hired people to read to the workers, as many were illiterate. The interesting custom began in Cuba in 1864 and was eventually adopted
in Puerto Rico, according to Arturo Bird Carmona, author of Parejeros y desafiantes: La comunidad tabaquera de Puerta de Tierra de principio del siglo XX .
After the reading there was a discussion session that didn’t interrupt the making of cigars. Reading literary, historical and revolutionary classics turned some artisans into labor leaders. Although many did not know how to read or write, thanks to the readers who accompanied them in their daily routine, the tobacco masters and destemmers were getting to know the progressive ideas of the world.
Throughout the 20th century, workers of the industry staged several strikes in search of better working conditions. It was the cradle of the union movements, as mentioned by the historian Dr. Jorell A. Melendez-Badillo, author of The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico
Capetillo edited the newspaper La Mujer , which confronted women’s issues and circulated in Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean and the United States. She authored several books of essays and plays: Ensayos libertarios (Libertarian essays) in 1907, La humanidad en el futuro (Humanity in the future) in 1910, Mi opinión (My opinion) in 1911 and Influencias de las ideas modernas (Influence of modern ideas) in 1916.
In Ensayos libertarios Capetillo wrote about themes that were key to her political views and guiding principles in her personal life: free love, universal brotherhood and the importance of workers unions. Capetillo also believed in the education of women; to her, educating women was necessary to free them from dependency on men and to become autonomous. In Mi Opinión
Oh you woman! who is capable and willing to spread the seed of justice; do not hesitate, do not fret, do not run away, go forward! And for the benefit of the future generations place the first stone for the building of social equality in a serene but firm way, with all the right that belongs to you, without looking down, since you are no longer the ancient material or intellectual slave.
During the labor strikes of 1905 in her hometown, Capetillo began her career as a labor organizer, wrote propaganda and organized the workers in the strike. In 1910, she became a reporter and member for the Puerto Rican "FLT" (American Federation of Labor) and traveled throughout Puerto Rico educating and organizing women.
In 1908, during the FLT convention, Capetillo asked the union to approve a policy for women's suffrage. She
insisted that all women should have the same right to vote as men and thus is considered one of Puerto Rico's first suffragists.
In Puerto Rico, another suffrage leader, Milagros Benet de Mewton, upheld voting rights for literate women as a path to suffrage for all women. In 1920, she was president of La Liga Femínea Puertorriqueña, lobbying in the U.S. Congress for women’s suffrage, where she formed connections with suffrage leaders such as Carrie Chapman Catt, president of National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), and Capetillo. Together, they were able to strengthen the alliance around the diaspora as Puerto Rican women’s groups in New York City.
Capetillo collaborated on a 1921 essay collection with figures such as Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin. In it, she argued, "Tyranny, like freedom, has no country, nor do the exploiters or workers."
She continued to organize workers until her death from tuberculosis on October 10, 1922. But her legacy bore fruit. Universal suffrage in Puerto Rico was secured in 1935
Of the many strikes Capetillo organized and participated in, the strike of 1915 was one of the largest in Puerto Rico’s history. Thousands of industrial workers protested for months. It not only resulted in a national salary increase for laborers but also created a lasting legacy within the history of economic development and political organizing, too.
The cultivation of tobacco and demand for the archipelago’s tobacco, as well as labor strikes, continued.
Currently, although there are so few people working in tobacco locally, there are still women in the industry, such as Liz Janice and “La Dama del Tabaco,” who sell her cigars in Old San Juan’s Plaza Colon.
Feminist activist leaders, groups and NGOs continue growing and fighting for women’s rights, such Taller Salud Todas, Colectiva Feminista en Contrucciòn and others, meeting and providing services in universities, houses, and marginalized neighborhoods—a grassroots approach similar to Capetillo’s work in the tobacco factories. In the 21st century, Capetillo remains an icon and inspiration.
Image Credits Figure 1: St. Nicotine of the Peace Pipe (1909), by Edward Vincent Heward featured these illustrations of different tobacco species. Credit: Public Domain sourced via Smithsonianmag.com Figure 2: Painting of a Sugar Hacienda in Puerto Rico. Titled: Hacienda La Fortuna, 1885. Painting by Francisco Manuel Oller. Brooklyn Museum Figure 3: A newspaper clipping of Luisa Capetillo. Circa 1919. United States Public Domain
Figure 3
In Bread, Sanctuary
For Ukrainians fleeing war, taking a sourdough starter means bringing a piece of home.
TEXT & PHOTOGRAPHY Felicity Spector
It was early April 2022 when Katrya Kalyuzhna managed to escape from Russian occupation, weeks after the invading forces marched into her hometown in the Kherson region of southern Ukraine. There was no official evacuation corridor, she said, but this was the best chance they'd got, so she and her husband threw everything they could grab into their van, including their two cats, and began the terrifying drive into Ukrainiancontrolled territory.
"It was 12 hours of horror, rage, danger and fatigue," she says, "going through so many Russian checkpoints, their questioning and other disgusting things. Driving through a 'gray area' [the line separating Ukrainian and Russian controlled territory], we heard the sound of artillery shelling. It was endless."
Finally they reached liberated Mykolaiv—and "we breathed the air of freedom."
In the relative safety of western Ukraine, Kalyuzhna slowly began to recover from the trauma of that journey and the weeks spent witnessing the violent seizure of her hometown. About a week after arriving in Lviv— and despite reliving those Russian checkpoints and the sound of air raid sirens in her nightly dreams—she finally managed to bake a simple loaf of Ukrainian sourdough, reviving the four-year-old starter that was among the few precious possessions she'd been able to bring. She called it her “bread in exile,” and said that baking it had turned out to be incredibly healing. She even posted the brief recipe on her Instagram, a recipe people are still making today.
But once again, baking and bread as a symbol of Ukrainian resistance and fortitude have proved something of a sanctuary.
Four months after she fled her home, I met up with Kalyuzhna in Lviv, at a microbakery run by her friend Vasylyna in an apartment on the outskirts of the city. We spent some happy hours baking several things with a no-knead bread dough that the girls had adapted from a Tartine recipe, including a particularly delicious beetroot pizza.
But once again, baking and bread as a symbol of Ukrainian resistance and fortitude have proved something of a sanctuary. Bread, especially the iconic Ukrainian loaf known as palyanytsya, is incredibly meaningful in a nation that feeds much of the world with its wheat. Driving through the countryside in the height of midsummer, we passed hundreds of miles of farmland, fields of corn and wheat and sunflowers, the landscape mirroring the blue and yellow flag of Ukraine.
When children who work checkpoints with borrowed combat fatigues and wooden rifles flag down cars, they
It was another difficult week for Kalyuzhna—she had finally managed to get her mother out of Kakhovka, after a journey even more traumatic and dangerous than her own escape back in April. The Russians would only let a handful of vehicles pass through their checkpoints at a time, forcing people to wait in their cars in searing hot temperatures for days on end. Several people died in the attempt to leave.
ask the drivers to say the word “palyanytsya,” as it's widely assumed that Russians find it impossible to pronounce. Countless bakeries have been hit by rocket fire, like the Bakehouse, which we visited in Kyiv. Despite losing tens of thousands of pounds worth of supplies in their destroyed warehouse, and having to work under shelling and curfew when the city was first under attack, they've been baking and distributing hundreds of volunteer loaves a day for the army, free of charge.
There is a terrible and dark history behind Ukraine's relationship with bread. During the Soviet-made famine known as Holodomor in the 1930s, millions of Ukrainians lost their lives after the USSR confiscated grain and food, and trapped people in their homes to die of hunger.
"Nowadays, Russia is repeating history, killing, raping, stealing crops and destroying wheat fields," Kalyuzhna says, while people in occupied areas are starving again.
"Fortunately Ukrainian and foreign volunteers are still baking bread all day and night, and despite danger of bomb shells and without any fees, managed to deliver it to those who were in need."
Kalyuzhna, who had her own microbakery back in Kakhovka, is one of those baking heroes, nurturing her precious starter, watching it grow, shaping it into loaves. Every one of them a piece of free Ukraine, a sign that the Russians will never truly be able to steal away her land.
One of her dearest friends is the chef and cookbook writer Olia Hercules, who is also from temporarily occupied Kakhovka but now lives in England. Since the full-scale war started, she has tirelessly campaigned to raise vast amounts of money, practical support and awareness. Kalyuzhna wanted me to take some of her starter back to the U.K. so that Herculescould bake with it too. She carefully dried it out by adding flour and wrapping it in a plastic tub, the better to survive the long, 22-hour journey by various trains into Poland and then a flight back to London.
Once I got home, Kalyuzhna and I exchanged a series of WhatsApp messages, as she guided me through reviving it. I filled several Kilner jars with it, one for me, one for Hercules and one just in case the others didn't make it. But that Kherson starter was made of hardy stuff, positively thriving in the muggy heatwave of mid-August London.
used some of it to try Kalyuzhna’s simple sourdough recipe, with a video she posted on the Patreon channel she set up to help provide her with some income while she lives as what she calls an "inside refugee." I followed the instructions, stretching and folding the dough into some
kind of shape—I can't say my first attempt was anywhere near perfect, but I felt was doing some justice to the incredible spirit of the people I met across Ukraine, and their beloved palyanytsya. The second loaf was a distinct improvement, a golden-crusted affair with a touch of rye, flecked with poppy and caraway seeds. And it can only get better from here.
The second jar of starter I took to Hercules, along with some wild olive flower honey, which I had bought in Kyiv—a living, breathing part of her hometown, a symbol of Ukraine's courage in the face of the Russian occupiers, of their unflagging determination to win. That's a lot to put on a loaf of bread, but it is truly embedded in the Ukrainian DNA.
That goes for Kalyuzhna too, who has urged her social media followers to keep baking her recipe "to honour all Ukrainians alive and dead, those who are resisting! In bread we trust." The sourdough that can survive an horrific occupation, a journey from hell, which can cross continents, and still manages to thrive—bread that truly is resilient.
The Wild Cherries of Arcadia
These Greek fruit trees are a link to the past that's both bitter and sweet.
TEXT & PHOTOGRAPHY
Christopher D. Z. Mason
In the Greek province of Arcadia, life is still largely rural. Sun-cracked mountains cradle fertile valleys, where fruit orchards line the roads and goats graze in musky, bleating crowds. On the slopes of these undulating mountains are verdant woodlands of pine, oak and chestnut. Hidden among them, conspicuous only in spring, are wild cherry trees.
Prunus avium , the species known once as bird cherry but now mainly as wild or sweet cherry, is the ancestor of the sweet cherry cultivars grown around the world today. Native to parts of Europe and Asia, it has naturalized in temperate climates from the U.S. and Canada to New Zealand.
And in the forests of Arcadia, deep in the heart of Greece’s Peloponnese region, the wild cherries grow as they would have in the times of antiquity.
I, however, only stumbled across them recently. We had just moved here, and spent most of the spring walking through the forest that stretched out behind our village. I’m from South Africa, so deciduous forests were new to me, and discovering wild cherries was a great surprise, even if the initial eating was a bit of a disappointment.
The cherries found that first year were small, thin-fleshed affairs, hardly comparable to the fat, juicy specimens I was seeing at the supermarket. I figured that’s just what wild cherries looked like: tough, beady little things.
What I didn’t understand at the time was that it had been a bad spring. It was only later, when a local farmer named Mixali told me of a late winter frost that had all but destroyed his walnut and cherry crops, that I understood the precarity of spring’s harvests. I asked him if this had been the case with the wild cherries too, and he said it was very possible, as both wild and cultivated cherries flower at the same time, and those delicate flowers wither and die in the frost, before ever becoming fruit.
But it was another, much older neighbor who helped me better understand the history of cherries in Arcadia. His name is Thanasi, and even in his eighties, he’s still an active farmer, producing several tons of chestnuts each year. When I asked him about the different kinds of cherries that I’d been seeing in the gardens and orchards of the area, he told me that the proliferation of different cultivars was a fairly recent thing. Apparently, it was only 70 or 80 years ago that local farmers started planting commercial sweet cherry varieties in any great numbers. Before that, according to him, people would regularly harvest wild cherries to make their jams and preserves.
This anecdote stuck with me, because it gave me a sense of wild cherry trees as an enduring native species, providing that burst of sweetness for the people of Arcadia well before the now widespread popularity of commercial sweet cherries.
But it was not until last spring that I came to understand what a real wild cherry harvest could look like. Winter had waned without late frosts, and warm, sunny mornings gave way to afternoon showers as the days stretched out with a visceral sensation of growth. By June, wild cherry trees throughout the province hung heavy with glossy jewels. I went out daily in search of the subtle rush that comes from finding and eating wild cherries deep in the forest. In Greece, foraging on public land is legal, as long as it’s
for personal consumption. Still, I found myself entirely alone, stalking the woods in search of the most prolific cherry trees, which were often also the most elusive, hidden away in ravines or on the edges of remote patches of undergrowth.
It’s surprisingly difficult to describe the flavor profile of this archetypal fruit. As I walked, I would sample each tree like wine, expecting subtle differences and always finding that the slow ripening creep from sour to sweet held ticker tapes of taste. And there seemed to be little compromise between quantity and quality, with the most productive trees bearing staggering amounts of delicious fruit.
Seeing the sudden bursts of crimson and pink among the branches gave me a strange sensation, something that felt oddly like wealth, only different, more abundance than excess. It was plenty in the primal sense; the fleeting extravagance of all you can eat, and I wasn’t the only one who was digging in. Fox, badger and wild boar all gorge on cherries in early June, benefiting from the much-needed sustenance after winter, but before the other summer fruits have ripened.
"Sudden bursts of crimson and pink among the branches gave me a strange sensation, something that felt oddly like wealth, only different."
Besides me and the animals, however, there was little other interest in the wild harvest from my fellow villagers.
Eleni was born in the village. She’s almost 70, still robust and industrious in the old ways, and my wife and I (privately) consider her the undisputed queen of wild asparagus foraging. When I told her about all the wild cherries I’d been finding, she looked at me with a mild and kindly interest.
“They make a nice jam, but they’re a bit small,” she says. “I used to collect them as a kid.”
My neighbor Thanasi was even less impressed, waving away my claim that the wild cherries were delicious, and leading me to his garden to sample a bunch of his sweet red cherries.
In retrospect, it’s understandable that the village locals didn’t share my enthusiasm: Most of them grew up here and have been eating wild cherries since they were children. The tangy joy I took in harvesting the banquet of free fruit was certainly piqued with the flavor of novelty, which apparently wears off after about half a century.
Cherries have long been part of the Greek cultural milieu. The first written reference I could find to cherries in Greece was from Theophrastus, an ancient scholar who wrote a book about the natural history of trees and plants in around 300 B.C.E. But the relationship we have with the tasty drupes goes back further still. Cherry seeds found at Bronze Age archeological sites across Europe suggest that pre-modern people were eating cherries back when caves were family homes.
And that’s what is so special to me about the wild cherry tree: its power to connect us to the past. Even the etymology of the word cherry has Greek roots. It comes from the Latin cerasum which is derived from the ancient Greek kerasous once a city in what is now Giresun, Turkey. Looking at the word cherry in other languages, one sees a clear linguistic lineage. In Spanish it’s cereza, in Turkish it’s kiraz and in Farsi گیلاس (gilas). All of these words appear related to the ancient Greek word κερασός , for cherry tree.
It is in the name of places that I find clues to the history of cherries in Arcadia. There are at least three villages in a 50-mile radius of ours that have “cherry” in their names. The village next to us is called Kerasia, which we translate as “Cherryville.” It’s aptly named, as the village is flanked by well-ordered cherry orchards which give way to a dense forest full of wild cherry trees.
While huge harvests that year created a glut of sweet cherries—sold for €3 a kilogram at roadside farm stalls—I prefer the original Prunus avium , the humble wild cherry, for its ability to link us back to the times of the ancient Arcadians who would roamed these forests and valleys more than 2,000 years ago.
*** My imaginings take a darker turn as they come up to the early 1940s and the Great Famine of Greece, when occupation by the Axis Powers during the Second World War left the country ravaged and starving. Less than a kilometer from our house stands a large marble plaque with names on it, installed as a monument to the victims of the Nazi execution that took place in December 1943.
Recently, Thanasi told me of that time, when his and other families escaped the attacks by fleeing into the forest, where they lived in hiding with little more than what they had carried out of their houses. He told me that they had survived on what they could find in the forest, like the wild, leafy greens called horta and the sweet chestnuts that grow in the hills. He was born in 1942 and would have been an infant in his mother’s arms then, and the story he told me is his own, like a memory made of a moment lived through as a child but not remembered, except through other stories.
Seventeen men died here 80 years ago, and still it seems so many from a village which now holds only 30 or so residents, most already in their autumn years. There is one person still alive who was an adult back then.
It’s impossible for me to fully understand the experiences of the people who lived through those desperate, embattled years. It was a very different Peloponnese back then, but as I walk through the quiet forest, I feel the memory of their presence like something dissolved into the ether of the place. It’s a hard-to-explain sensation, and perhaps just something I’m attuned to, being a newcomer looking at the landscape with a sense of wondering what came before.
At the end of spring, pondered what seemed to me to be the essence of the wild cherries of Arcadia. Here, where old wounds lie lightly covered by time’s dust, and life dances between scarcity and abundance in oscillating seasonal rhythms, the wild cherry tree, with its annual resurrection from barren bark to fragrant flower and sweet fruit, feels to me like a symbol of hope and renewal; a fleeting reminder of the beauty and fragility of life.
Getting to know the wild cherries of Arcadia has helped me locate myself in my new home; the place from whence the blood of my ancestors came. Observing the annual cycle of this species has granted me intimate access into the deciduous forests of the Northern hemisphere, and developing relationships with the few special trees—and enjoying their bounty—has provided me with a sense of natural order and a deep-set anchor, as I put down new roots of my own.
The Memory Threads Behind Taiwan’s Wheaten Cuisine
Nostalgia for other homes and U.S. intervention played their roles.
TEXT & PHOTOGRAPHY
Kang-Chun Cheng
The mere thought of some places conjures up certain food memories for me. Taiwan is one such country. Walking down a side street in the less gentrified part of the capital city, Taipei, one will stumble upon tiny momand-pop food stalls that have been in business for decades.
There’s the beef shank soup with hand-pulled noodles and scallion pancakes shattering into flaky shards at gentle tugs—dishes that illustrate delicious collisions born of Taiwan’s diaspora history.
But the tiny island nation is also famous for pioneering culinary trends for the Western world. The last time visited, in 2019, brown-sugar boba milk tea with gold foil and cheesy matcha cream puffs were in high demand.
But my favorite foods are those with winding, intimate histories—dishes that have nourished and brought comfort to my forebears against the backdrop of a tenuous postwar era and tumultuous politics.
What isn’t commonly known is how American aid to Taiwan just after World War II played a vital role in establishing the wheat flour industry and even reshaping the Taiwanese palate. Waves of immigrants from regions of mainland China, where the crop thrived in temperate and cold weather, further reinforced a growing appetite for floury foods.
Today, the prominence of wheat in the quotidian life of Taiwanese people is unmistakable, from the crispy you tiao (savory fried dough sticks) served with soy milk for breakfast, to the xiao long bao (soup dumplings) that one never seems to tire of for dinner.
In the late 1940s, waves of refugees loyal to the Nationalist Party leader Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan, away from the Communist regime’s brutal takeover of mainland China. With the ending of both the Second Sino-Japanese War and WWII, it took several decades for the nation to find its bearings in terms of both economics and cultural identity.
My grandparents’ generation, for instance, had to make peace with not only leaving their homeland behind, but a period of isolation from China that lasted until the late 1980s. For decades, they had very little contact with their siblings and other relatives who stayed on the mainland.
Many refugees settling in democratic Taiwan continued cooking the regional foods of their respective hometowns, finding ways to adapt to different ingredients under resource-strapped environments. My Nai Nai (grandmother) longed for a physically unreachable homeland. Half a lifetime into residing in Taiwan, when the family’s finances had long stabilized and all of her kids had the chance to emigrate to America, she still ate the plain millet porridge (小米粥 ) that reminded her of her hometown in Shenyang, Manchuria.
Xiao long bao are a popular dish made with wheat.
“Not because it tasted particularly good,” my uncle reminds me. “But because she missed home.”
This generation’s nostalgia wove itself into Taiwan’s music, literature and cuisine.
My paternal grandparents met in Manchuria in northern China, brought together by the Second Sino-Japanese war. Nai Nai worked as an army nurse, and my Ye Ye (grandfather) was a captain in the Nationalist Army.
They decided to flee mainland China as the Nationalist Army was forced to retreat. Going south, they had a dragged-out stint in Macau while they waited for a spot in a Hong Kong refugee camp. Entering Hong Kong, their next stop, was difficult for Nai Nai—she spoke no Cantonese and didn’t look like a southerner. As my Ye Ye worked to obtain her ferry passage, she managed to survive on the streets with their infant son. For some months, she relied on the kindness of a masonry shop owner, who had very little to spare himself, yet allowed them to sleep next to their shop.
During this time, Ye Ye tried his hand at selling takeaway lunch boxes. As good a cook as he was, his lack of financial acuity meant that the business shuttered before it took off.
“He always wanted to give out more food than the customer had paid for,” my father tells me, “so that didn’t last for very long.”
After finally arriving in Hong Kong, my grandparents had two more children amid the turmoil of Diao Jingling refugee camp. The budding family finally reached Taiwan in 1953 after nearly four years of statelessness, settling in a tiny house just north of Taipei in what would later be designated as Yangmingshan National Park.
In Nai Nai’s hometown of Shenyang, the cold climate is particularly conducive to growing wheat. There in the north, you can find some of the best noodles, dumplings and breads in China—sturdy foods essential to surviving long, harsh winters. Although delicious and filling, this hearty northern cuisine is rather utilitarian.
In sharp contrast, my Ye Ye came from Cantonese Guangzhou, where the food is light, sharp, crisp, known to lean on the sweet side: shao rou (braised meats), char siu, steamed fish.
As the breadwinner of the family, Nai Nai didn’t cook much, spending nearly all her time working at the local hospital. But for Lunar New Year and other holidays, Nai Nai drew from the food of her youth, stealing the show by rolling out hundreds of doughy wrappers and pinching out traditional pork and cabbage dumplings that everyone still remembers.
“I liked to eat cold dumplings in particular,” my father told me recently. “After everyone was done eating, I’d run into the kitchen and pick from the leftover pile, one by one.”
During that era, it was very much in America’s interest to garner allegiances across the Western-Pacific front to combat Communism. One-third of the economic assistance designated to build up Taiwan’s economic prowess focused on agriculture and food technology, to boost capacity on the ground. The idea was to minimize price inflation while providing Taiwan with the means to feed its postwar population, amplified by the wave of refugees from mainland China.
A proliferation of subsidized or donated wheat from American farmers established staples like wheat noodles and bread, transforming eating habits across Taiwan. Previously, rice was far more common—most dumplings and buns were rice starch-based. There was the further economic benefit of exporting rice, of which Taiwan started growing more, at higher international market prices.
The Sino-American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction is a governmental agency that was established in mainland China in 1948 and moved to Taiwan
with the Communist takeover. It laid strong groundwork for Taiwan’s agricultural prosperity, which made up nearly two-thirds of net domestic capital formation and eventually became one of Taiwan’s top industries. The commission advocated for the nutritional value of wheat, even providing pamphlets to teach women how to make scallion pancakes and mantou (steamed buns) at home. In tandem with the Executive Committee on the Promotion of Flour and Wheat Food in 1962, it took every opportunity to inculcate a societal taste for wheat-based foods and Western pastries.
For instance, in the aftermath of the 1959 typhoon floods—one of the nation’s deadliest natural disasters in the 20th century, in which more than 1,000 people died or disappeared and many more were left homeless—disaster victims were offered wheat flour in their relief packages.
The Food Bureau of the Taiwan Provincial Administration also promoted this dietary transformation through exhibitions on noodle production, featuring both homestyle and restaurant dishes, and encouraging home economics students to study abroad in the U.S. starting in the 1960s. The goal was to study Western-style baking and bring both techniques and nutritional knowledge back to Taiwan.
These campaigns were successful. Something love about Taipei is how the streets are lined with bakeries, all brimming with treats like bolo (pineapple, for the look of crunchy topping, not the fruit!) and taro-paste buns—so fresh that condensation from the warm loaves gathers in the plastic bags.
“The best time to go is early in the morning or around 3 in the afternoon,” my mother tells me. “That’s when the fresh batches come out.”
When she was growing up, these kinds of bolo buns were her favorite after-school snack.
In the 1970s, the flour industry gained another foothold as biscuit and instant noodle factories were established in Taiwan to find a use for excess flour production. The brand Ve Wong Noodles described its noodles as tailored for children and extremely nutritious, containing various vitamins and proteins.
Today, the options for flavor and brands of instant noodles are seemingly endless, ranging from the classic Tong Yi Mian dating back to the 1970s, to A-Sha, which also started in 1977 but specializes in air-dried rather than fried instant noodles. The brand has collaborated with Momofuku and
Hello Kitty and prides itself in offering instant noodles with the springy texture of fresh ones.
It didn’t take long for wheat foods to become deeply entrenched in Taiwan’s culinary landscape. The accessibility of it all welcomes you to nurture both fading history and memories of those you love.
When in Taipei, I make sure to go to Shun Yuan restaurant— one of my Nai Nai’s favorites. We’d order everything she liked: the 窩絲 (yi wo si , lacy flatbread), pan-fried dumplings, scallion pancakes, never forgetting the plain millet porridge.
Ye Ye was a stay-at-home father, a rarity in the mid-20th century. He cooked nearly all the meals in the family, the Guangdong food of his hometown. And he was a great, inventive cook. The first time my mother visited her future in-law’s home, he made steak frites.
“Just like the fries from a good restaurant,” my mother recalls.
My uncle says that he was like a magician: “Even regular food tastes great.” Sometimes, when I think about it hard, I feel this wave of ineluctable sadness wash over me: I’ve never met my Ye Ye who passed away before my older brother was born—before he could see the life he granted his descendants. I was too young to have any significant interactions with Nai Nai before she fell sick and spent the last five years of her life in a hospitalized coma. I am so distanced from my roots.
I’m the youngest of my cousins, the only one who’s female on this side of the family.
“Your Ye Ye loved girls,” my father tells me. “He would have adored you.”
He was moody, I’m told. He felt misunderstood and had a hard time assimilating with Taiwan’s nascent society. Ye Ye attributed his difficulties in finding a stable job to the martial law that governed Taiwan during those years. Escaping the Communist regime left an indelible psychological mark on Ye Ye manifesting in hallucinations at the end of his life.
In East Asian culture those days, there was no such thing as therapy or trauma support. My Taiwan-based uncle told me how before he passed away, Ye Ye had suddenly felt better and asked him to go out and buy some duck wings ( 鴨脖 ) , neck and tongue from Shilin Night Market—a change from the usual meals.
"Whenever I’m home, one of the first things my mother cooks is beef noodle soup with handmade noodles that she kneads, then cuts into strips with a knife and pulls."
I find myself thinking about how we could have bonded— what we might have in common. This past summer, during a visit with my parents in New Hampshire, I convinced my dad to make char siu for the first time that I can remember. I’d heard him reminisce many times about how Ye Ye cooked the best Cantonese food, which we rarely make ourselves.
We found a family recipe by a grandmother on YouTube, cut down the amount of sugar and red food coloring, and let the pork marinate in the fridge for four days. After roasting the pork filets in the oven for hours, we ate it one August evening for dinner, with rice, bok choy and Korean anchovies. thought it was very good, tender and flavorful, but my dad insisted that Ye Ye’s was dozens of times better. I wanted to make steamed buns filled with that char siu, but we ran out of time that week. It’s on my list of things to try out in the future.
I wonder whether Ye Ye would have liked me as a person, or approved of how Westernized I am. Yet perhaps this is what they wanted for their descendants—a life ripe with choices, emotional freedom and the physical capacity to explore places out of curiosity, not necessity.
Two generations away, my life could not be more different from my grandparents’ realities, which were rife with political persecution and the impassable weight of familial obligations. Yet maybe it’s the longing for a seemingly unattainable state of the world that binds us together.
Whenever I’m home, one of the first things my mother cooks is beef noodle soup with handmade noodles that she kneads, then cuts into strips with a knife and pulls. The rich umami broth is flavored with a hint of five spice and sweetened with carrots; the glistening chewy noodles float to the top. It’s a taste and experience that is both comforting and grounding.
In Taiwan, five-star hotels and fancy restaurants have long been serving this dish for high prices, but locals know that it’s the dive shops and informal stalls that do it best. Probably because it’s made with pride and care.
It’s 2019 on a gloomy Wednesday night in Taipei, my third time in Taiwan. It’s the first time I’m alone here, my mother having just returned to America. Each visit here has felt distinctly different, as I feel a different sort of connection with my relatives and the place itself. I find myself wondering more about what it was like to grow up here for my parents, imagine what the place looked like back in those days.
The December weather is mild. Evening joggers pace the park as teenagers shoot hoops under fluorescent lights. Those working long hours or evading the after-work traffic rush are finally on their way home. But there’s a more lively crowd heading out, eager to hit the night markets.
I join them, strolling past stalls of stinky tofu, grilled sweet corn, fresh soy milk, sugarcane juice and oyster omelets.
I’m here to meet my uncle at his favorite stall at Nanihang Night Market. He orders some cold dishes, sliced lotus root and braised tofu. We sit on the low plastic stools watching the cooks throw around piles of dough with envious dexterity, stirring the massive pots of umami stew, yelling out orders. The huge, steaming bowls of beef noodle soup arrive. We pile extra suan cai (pickled sour cabbage), taking after my Nai Nai’s northern taste, washing it down with 台灣啤酒 (Taiwan Beer). My uncle talks about Nai Nai all the time, how before she got sick, she loved getting drawn into the hustle and bustle of city life.
Taiwan is a transitory place for me. Locals can tell at glance from my style and mannerisms that I’m a foreigner despite my barely accented Mandarin. But I don’t mind. Every time I’m here, I get to unpack a bit more of my family’s murky history. Sometimes, that’s allowing myself a walk through the velvety darkness, finding comfort in retracing yesterday’s steps for another bowl of slurpable beef noodle soup.
Twin Fruits in Life & Lore
The phenomenon of twins, in both humans and fruits, has been a point of joy and superstition across cultures.
TEXT Jessica Kehinde Ngo
I was exploring the plantain trees at the New York Botanical Garden on a fall afternoon, when my friend, an anthropologist and fellow plantain enthusiast, voiced a surprising observation.
“Look! They’re all twins!”
Her outstretched hand pointed at a branch from which hung bunches and bunches of twin green plantains (two plantains joined together on one stem). I’d heard myths about such a rarity before but never witnessed it in real life. Overcome with excitement, snapped a few photos to memorialize the miracle.
As an identical twin, I have always been fascinated by twinships of all kinds. If two cookies become joined together during the baking process, smile. If a mom holds two children wearing matching clothes in her arms, I give a friendly wink. If I learn a public figure is a twin, I go down rabbit holes to research the pair’s life journeys.
Around the globe, twins have long been a source of mystery and wonder. I come from a culture that highly reveres twins, considering them bearers of joy and good fortune. The residents of Yorubaland in western Nigeria, where my late father was born and raised, have one of the highest rates of twin births in the world. Researchers now believe a diet heavy in local beans and yams to be responsible. Twins are
so common among the Yoruba that they have developed countless rituals and beliefs surrounding twinship. There are naming practices for twins (Taiwo for the first-born and Kehinde for the second-born), mothers of twins (Iya ibeji), and the first child born after twins (Ìdòwú). There are statues to be carved (ibeji) if one or both twins die. Local city Igbo-Ora is nicknamed “The Twin Capital of the World.” And so much more.
Though twins in Yorubaland and beyond now tend to be seen as a blessing, in the past they were frequently met with concern and fear, as unexplained phenomena often are.
“Twins may only account for around 3 [percent] of natural births, but they’ve had a huge impact on human culture,” writes Jonathan Openshaw, London-based writer, editor and consultant, in a 2017 Google Arts and Culture story “Artists, writers, philosophers and scientists have obsessed over the true nature of these dual-beings, meaning that twins have left their mark on everything from ancient myth to modern genetics.”
As a food writer, I’m particularly interested by instances of twinning in the food we eat, and one of the most visible places where this occurs is in twin—sometimes referred to as connected, conjoined or double—fruits. In their 2017 paper on stone fruits, Dr. Farooq Khan and Sajad A. Baat
Photograph courtesy of the author.
of the University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology of Kashmir in India describe fruit twinning as a disorder.
“Double or twin fruit is also a physiological problem of many stone fruits,” they write. “Whether a fruit will be double or not is determined the summer previous to fruiting when the flower buds are going through their initial development. During this period, the young developing buds are sensitive to stresses, particularly heat and water that may affect the tree's growth and result in increased formation of doubled fruit.”
And in her 2018 article for the Indianapolis Star , garden columnist Jo Ellen Myers Sharp adds that fruit twinning is “usually caused by the fertilization of two of the flower’s ovaries instead of the usual one. It can happen to squash and other plants, too. It’s not terribly uncommon. Some horticulturists say it’s about the same frequency as human twin births.”
Such scientific research helps explain the likely causes of fruit twinning. But without giving equal weight to the folklore surrounding these miracles of nature, we’re only opening ourselves up to half the story. And with twin fruits, just like with human twins, there’s plenty worth noting when it comes to myth and lore.
A confessed plantain fanatic (I like to refer to myself as made of plantain), my introduction to the phenomenon of twin fruits began with the Musa family—plantains and bananas. I was working on a story about the need to give the plantain its time to shine in the global spotlight, when I encountered a plethora of online discussion forums in which people were sharing about a common plantain myth in Nigeria: If a young woman eats twin plantains, she will give birth to twins.
Though there is no science to back this theory up, I was curious to see if such a myth was present beyond Yorubaland, outside of the home of one of the world’s highest human twin populations and my own roots.
As it turns out, this cautionary tale is present in many cultures across the globe.
In a 2017 article on the Indian news and popular culture website Arré food writer and chef Damian D’ Souza writes that “[t]he mythology of India is a rich and storied one, with tales about gods, goddesses, and sages, but the mythology of food is even more celebrated.”
My favourite is the one that my mum and grandmum claim most emphatically: That twins are the result of eating twin bananas—the small, yellow elaichi bananas that are sometimes conjoined, courtesy a fused peel. These bananas are simply banned in the house. Because these little mutant bananas are believed to be a bad omen and consuming them means the coming of twins.
Similar stories appear frequently in discussion forums across the web from commenters in locations such as Bangladesh, the Philippines and Cameroon. Though much of the dialogue surrounding twin bananas and plantains centers on avoidance and not wanting to end up pregnant with twins, there are also stories from those who think positively on such a prospect.
“Most of the time buy bananas, there is always a twin banana. I like it. [A]nd it feels good because I pray to get twins someday,” writes a commenter on a personal blog about the topic
When I began talking to fruit sellers, asking them if they had any twin fruits in their current inventory, I was surprised by an answer from a woman selling fruits at a farmers market: She insisted that such a phenomenon only happens with cherries. She wasn’t entirely off track, as it does appear that some of the most common instances of fruit twinning occur with cherries.
Megan Crivelli, who runs a business called The Produce Nerd, which aims to educate consumers about postharvest (what happens to produce after it’s harvested) why twin cherries are sorted out during the packing process. She said it was linked to buyer preference.
“For example, if you go and buy cherries at Costco, it is likely you will never find a double cherry, and if you do, it'll be a very low percentage because Costco's cherry specifications
require that no double cherries are included in the pack,” she says. “This is the same with other large retailers as well. You also have to keep in mind that double cherries result from some form of environmental stress, and without that stress, they are not as common as the normal, individual cherries.”
Beliefs and myths surrounding twins—usually referred to as double—cherries tend to trace back to one source: Shakespeare. In Act 3, Scene 2 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream , Helena says of her relationship with her friend Hermia, “So we grew together,/ Like to a double cherry: seeming parted,/ But yet an union in partition,/ Two lovely berries molded on one stem.”
Writer Alan Young addresses the cultural legacy of the scene in a 2022 post on his spiritual self-help blog, The Subconscious Servant.
“Today, the double cherry is often seen as a symbol of friendship,” he writes. “You will often find best friends heading to local tattoo shops to have double cherries tattooed onto their bodies to represent their friendship.”
Like with twin bananas, online conversations about double cherries also link their consumption to birthing twins. A post on the University of Southern California’s Digital Folklore Archives, for example, notes, “The informant’s uncle saw her aunt eating a double cherry and said, ‘Did you know that if you eat a double cherry while you’re pregnant, you’re going to have twins?’ My informant doesn’t really believe that this is true because she does not believe in superstitions, although it is a superstition that everyone in her family likes to joke about, because it also happened to come true. Her aunt ended up giving birth to twin girls six months later. This is why the informant likes to retell the tale, because it makes the superstition much more mysterious and believable when it actually comes true.”
An exploration of twin fruits would be incomplete without mentioning the coco de mer, often called the double coconut, a fruit best known for having the largest plant seed in the world. Though twinning is a rare occurrence in other fruits, all coco de mers are twins, making them truly extraordinary. The fruit is native to the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean. Larry Hodgson, garden writer and author of more than 65 gardening books, wrote about the double coconut’s history and how it got its name on his blog Laidback Gardener in 2018.
“Since there were usually two giant seeds inside the fruit and each seed has two distinct lobes, it became known as the double coconut,” he wrote.
In a 2020 article for London’s Kew Royal Botanic Gardens research leader Dr. Sidonie Bellot writes that “[l]egend has it that the double coconut possesses medicinal properties. Although these ‘healing powers’ remain unproven, the palm remains of high interest as an aesthetic wonder, with single nuts currently sold for £500-£2,000.”
She states that due to over-harvesting, the fruit, whose trees only grow on the islands Praslin and Curieuse, now faces extinction. “To protect them from going extinct, seeds in the wild and in botanical gardens worldwide that have [managed] to grow them, are carefully guarded, sometimes even placed in cages, to prevent poaching,” she adds.
In addition to myths that the giant twin fruit can help provide immunity from poisons and serve as an aphrodisiac, its rarity has also been known to grant it royal status. In a 2013 paper for Asian Agri-History , writer Ardeshir "Adi" B. Damania of the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of California, Davis, writes, “Due to its mythical properties in folklore as an aphrodisiac, the nuts whenever they were washed ashore in Sri Lanka were taken by the finders immediately to the king, so that he may partake of the jelly like substance within the nut and the finders suitably rewarded.”
Damania later writes that “The seeds of the double coconut have been highly prized over the centuries; their rarity caused great interest and high prices in royal courts, and the tough outer seed coat has been used to make bowls and other instruments.”
Ultimately, though science often classifies twin fruits as disorders, issues and problems—much like early accounts of human twins—myth and legend allow us to round out the story of these unique fruits and reflect on their inherent power. As postharvest specialist Megan Crivelli shared in my conversation with her, “I think some, but definitely not all, people are afraid to eat things that are different, which is why most produce items look just like the rest of the produce items in their section…However, with the rise of the ‘ugly’ fruit movement and things like that, that perception could change in the coming years.”
For me, twin fruits are godsends. On the rare occasions I am able to hold them in my hands or spot them growing on trees far above my head, I can’t help but smile, as they call to mind the Ibeji statues carved by my ancestors to memorialize the miracle of twins. They remind me, too, that reasons to be joyful come in all shapes, sizes and species.
Photo Credit: Jessamine Starr
A Tale of Tea
One diplomat and four Chinese agricultural experts made the drink a staple in Iran.
TEXT Naz Deravian & Hanif Sadr PHOTOGRAPHY Behrooz Joshani
In 1929, Iranian diplomat and politician Kashefal-Saltaneh was on the last leg of his trip back from China, armed with tea seeds and newfound knowledge about modern tea production and machinery. He was determined to fulfill his lifelong ambition to successfully cultivate tea in the north of Iran. Tragically, he never made it back to the expectant farms of Lahijan and Tonekabon.
Kashef-al-Saltaneh (née Mohammad Mirza Qajar Qovanlu), known as the father of Iranian tea, died when the car he was traveling in veered off a treacherous narrow mountain road between the Iranian port city of Bushehr and Shiraz. But the vehicle behind him, transporting four Chinese tea specialists he had recruited, safely made the trip. With their guidance, Kashef-al Saltaneh’s dream was eventually realized, and Iran’s tea industry would become among the most successful globally.
Details are sparse about the lives of Teng Hai Chou, Rip Wen Ching, Chen Fong Chi and Yip Mow Cheen. Most sources briefly mention them as a footnote in relation to Kashef-al-Saltaneh and the beginnings of Iran’s burgeoning tea industry. Gholamreza Moezi, director of Iran’s Tea Organization from 1968 until 1979, knew and worked alongside the men, in particular Hai Chou. He has written about them in his comprehensive book about the history of tea in Iran, Chai Dar Gozare Zaman (2008). Several photos of the men are displayed at Iran’s National Tea Museum in Lahijan, and a 2012 interview with Hai Chou’s
Photograph courtesy of the author.
son, Mohammad Reza Katouzi, featured on the Persian language blog Bam-e Sabz, also serves as a reminder of the overlooked contributions of these Chinese Iranians to Iran’s tea industry.
According to the interview with Katouzi, his father was originally from the Canton region and living in Shanghai in 1928 when he was recruited by Kashef-al-Saltaneh.
Hai Chou had studied agriculture in England, and his expertise in tea cultivation was regarded as an asset to the development of Iran’s tea industry. The offer, according to Katouzie, included all expenses paid to make the trip from China to Iran. Katouzie recalls that his father originally turned down the request but ultimately agreed to go with Kashef-al-Saltaneh and the three other Chinese experts.
Little did Hai Chou know that he would never get the chance to work with Kashef-al-Saltaneh; that he would never return to China; and that his name would be forever tied to Iran’s tea industry and tea culture.
Hearts are shared and broken, momentous or mundane life decisions are pondered, and solitary moments of respite are enjoyed over a cup of tea.
***
Iranians are consummate tea drinkers, so much so that a cup of tea is considered an extension of an Iranian arm.
The day begins with a hot, fragrant black tea, followed by multiple cups throughout the day. Black tea is typically served in glass tea cups to better determine its strength and admire its hue. It’s the first thing you’re offered as a guest, and drunk as a digestif following a meal. Hearts are shared and broken, momentous or mundane life decisions are pondered, and solitary moments of respite are enjoyed over a cup of tea.
But tea was not always the beloved drink of choice it is today. Iranians were originally coffee drinkers. And it wasn’t until the 1800s that imported tea gained popularity. ***
Tea leaves were first discovered in China about 5,000 years ago. While it’s uncertain exactly when tea made its way to Iran, it is believed that Iranians were first introduced to it with the Mongol invasions in the 13th century. But it wasn’t until the middle of the 19th century, during the Qajar dynasty rule, that Iranians traded coffee-drinking for tea.
It’s not clear why the shift from coffee to tea happened, but it is believed that a case of diplomatic gift-giving in 1850 contributed to the rise in popularity of tea in Iran. It is said that Amir Kabir, chief minister of Qajar king Naser al-Din Shah, was given a Russian samovar and a tea set as a gift while in France. Amir Kabir, impressed by the samovar’s design and craftsmanship, and with an acute interest in boosting Iran’s economy and advancing its domestic industries, awarded the production of Iran's first samovars to a craftsman in Isfahan.
While there were a couple of attempts at cultivating tea in Iran before 1929, those efforts quickly proved unsuccessful, and by the late 1800s demand for Britishcontrolled tea from India grew. In 1898, Kashef-al-Saltaneh
was serving as consul-general in India under the new Qajar king, Mozaffar-al-Din Shah. Aware of Mozaffar-al-Din Shah’s interest in growing tea in Iran, and driven by his own passion to establish a domestic tea industry, he set out to learn all that he could about the agricultural and technical processes of tea cultivation in India.
In his book, Moezi refers to Kashef-al-Saltaneh as a bright and forward thinker with the best interests of his nation in mind—unlike the Qajar monarchs, who essentially sold off the country's assets to foreign interests, namely Britain and Russia. Under Qajar rule, Iran’s local economy was significantly depressed. Like Amir Kabir before him, Kashefal-Saltaneh surmised that a homegrown tea industry would greatly benefit the country and its failing economy. Iraniangrown tea could also become a viable export and bring in considerable revenue—most certainly to the ire and resistance of the British.
Since Britain held the monopoly on Indian tea, it did not openly share agricultural and manufacturing practices. According to Moezi, Kashef-al-Saltaneh, who held a political science degree from the Sorbonne University in Paris and was fluent in French, was permitted to observe and work at the tea farms and factories in Kangra district by passing himself off as a French businessman. A touch of cloak-anddagger in the name of tea education.
In 1901, Kashef-al-Saltaneh returned to Iran with several thousand seedlings of Assam tea, as well as numerous potted tea plants and many other goods such as turmeric and cardamom. There is a widely shared story that he smuggled tea seeds out of India hidden in his walking stick. While this makes for an exciting story worthy of an espionage thriller, it’s unfounded and Moezi dismisses it as “utter nonsense” and “made up stories.”
According to Moezi, Kashef-al-Saltaneh imported the goods with the full knowledge of the British by traveling from the foothills of the Himalayas to Bombay, and then by ship to the port of Bushehr, by mule to Tehran and eventually to Gilan and Mazandaran Provinces.
“An incredible feat driven by passion, determination and service to one’s country,” Moezi said.
Impressed by his unwavering efforts to establish tea farming in Iran, Mozaffar-al-Din Shah bestowed the honorific Kashef-al-Saltaneh chaikar upon Mohammad Mirza. Chaikar means tea planter.
The subtropical climate of Gilan and Mazandaran, in the Caspian region of Iran, is optimal for tea cultivation in Iran. The town of Lahijan, in Gilan Province, sits at the foothills
of the Alborz mountains and is a short distance from the Caspian Sea.
“Because of its vicinity to the Caspian sea, the Alborz foothills have better soil to grow tea,” Moezi said.
And it is there that Iran’s first tea farms came to fruition under Kashef-al Saltaneh. But without the proper tools, and only local workers who were primarily rice farmers and didn’t know about tea agriculture, his efforts failed. Kashef-al Saltaneh set aside his ambitions for a few years, when once again, reignited by passion and determination, he set off on an expedition to South and East Asia, where he recruited Hai Chou and the three other Chinese men.
The Chinese tea experts were initially hired to work in Iran for one year, Moezzi writes in Chai Dar Gozare Zaman In 1933, however, Iran’s national assembly approved their permanent stay with specified wages and job titles. Cheng Fong Chi was in charge of educating local farmers how to work with appropriate tools and to process the leaves after harvesting. He taught them how to weave bamboo baskets to be used for the drying process and how to dry tea leaves at their own farmhouses. Rip Weng Chin and Yip Mow Cheen were hired as instructors at the agriculture university.
Hai Chou’s position was primarily as an expert tea tester. According to Moezi, every two weeks he would test the tea quality from 80 to 100 factories; Moezi held the codes to which factories were being tested so that Hai Chou would be impartial. He was discerning in his criticism and never settled for anything less than exemplary. Although Hai Chou was not proficient in Persian, he was able to communicate with workers and colleagues with a mix of English, broken Persian and the assistance of translators.
“Somehow he made it work,” Moezi said.
Katouzie confirms his father’s dedication to the job but recounts a different version of him ultimately staying in Iran. In the Bam-e Sabz interview, he claims that initially his father had tried to return to China to pursue other business ventures. However, by the order of Reza Shah Pahlavi (the new reigning monarch after the demise of the Qajar dynasty), he was prohibited: his passport was confiscated and he was not permitted to leave Iran. Katouzie also claims that the main reason Hai Chou decided to remain in Iran, and never returned to China, was because he did not approve of the rise of Mao Zedong.
Once settled in Gilan Province, the men eventually became Iranian citizens, adopted official Persian names, got married
and started families. Hai Chou converted to Islam (without the support and acceptance of his family back in China, according to his son) and adopted the name Katouzie.
Moezi has fond memories of attending Hai Chou’s retirement party from Iran’s Tea Organization and has never forgotten his colleague’s sharp sense of humor.
“Hai Chou wanted everyone to agree with him on his opinion on tea,” he said. “He would say to us ‘Confucious says’ and then he would speak in Chinese. We would say, ‘Mr. Hai Chou, we don’t understand. What did Confucious say?’ And he would respond, ‘Whoever has more knowledge than you, you should accept it.’”
The beloved Iranian tea that is praised today for its fragrance, color, depth and soulful taste, is born of a marriage of Assam tea leaves from India and tea leaves from China. Every leaf carries in its DNA the history of Kashef-al-Saltaneh’s unwavering efforts to cultivate tea in Iran’s rich and worthy soil and the dedicated individuals whose expertise ensured the growth and success of Iran’s tea industry: Rip Wen Ching, Chen Fong Chi, Yip Mow Cheen and Teng Hai Chou.
Tarreh: An Iranian Herb and a Quest Against Erasure
In diaspora, a oncecommon ingredient becomes an elusive means of connection.
TEXT Homa Dashtaki
There is a simple herb from Iran called “tarreh” that has no English equivalent. It is an herb that captures my heartbreak of being part of a dwindling Iranian-Zoroastrian ethnic group. It is an herb that finds itself in the midst of my complicated urgency of beauty, impermanence, nostalgia and grief.
Tarreh is subtly spicy with a delicate flat blade. Quite common in Iran, it’s nearly impossible to find Stateside, but I am unrelentingly stubborn in keeping it in my kitchen. I only find tarreh in stores in cities where the Iranian diaspora is strong: D.C. and Los Angeles mainly. Living in New York City, I have gone through some hilarious feats to find it, even to convince stores to carry it. Not frozen, not dehydrated, but fresh, perishable tarreh.
My attempts to describe tarreh are difficult. I am perplexed to describe something so obvious. Every attempt to do so aligns it with something that it is not. The texture of tarreh is not as coarse as a leek, but also not as delicate as green
onion leaves. The taste is not as garlicky as chives. It is more subtle. It is worthy of the poetry Iranians resort to out of habit, to describe much of life that seems to evade explanation. Tarreh tastes like the optimistic headiness of the first regrowth of a mowed blade in springtime. In the Iranian kitchen, tarreh is mainly used in stews, but also enjoyed raw—as is the custom to intentionally yet elegantly shove handfuls of raw herbs into our mouths between or even with bites of food during most meals.
To my dismay, fellow Iranians have suggested substitutions for tarreh. I guess can understand why; that it is a kindness to a foreign audience to make it accessible. As an Iranian cook and author, the desire to make our food (and ourselves) familiar and known to a Western audience sometimes means that make even this herb accessible and not troublesome or fussy to come by. In a hospitable attempt to encourage cooks to make already intimidating Iranian dishes that contain this herb, such as ghormeh sabzi, writers will use the phrase “leek” or offer substitutions such as “green onion.”
I envy that this doesn’t give them a paralyzing existential crisis.
Sometimes I ask myself, W hy can’t I be easy, just let it be easy—fuck it, use a leek or a green onion. It won’t matter . But tarreh’s subtlety carries the richness of the world in each blade; its delicacy is unparalleled, lending itself to be eaten in ways that leeks and onions could not.
Of course, I am a meager army of one with a fierce love for tarreh and its subtleties, when there are more worthwhile causes. I take it quite personally that I am holding onto something that is impossible to hold onto. I know that the gravity I bring to this little herb is a metaphor. Its significance is borne of the fact that cook with the broken heart of someone in exile who is part of a dying culture;
and I eat with the beating heart of an Indigenous Iranian Zoroastrian whose language and food and customs and rituals all do not make sense outside of our ancestral lands. Fighting for this little herb is fighting against erasure.
don’t want either me or tarreh to become a quiet little footnote in some recipe because we were unfamiliar or inconvenient.
***
was born on the eve of the 1979 Iranian revolution, and tasted both religious unrest and the Iran/Iraq war within the first eight years of my life before immigrating to the U.S. in the ’80s. We migrated to Orange County, California, where there were many other Zoroastrians from our Iranian towns and villages who shared the same religious holidays and seasonal festivals. We share the same foods and the same sing-song dialect of dari, the same music, the same generational history of persecution and stories of survival. We didn’t have to explain or translate ourselves in the safety of this community.
Zoroastrianism is thought to be one of the world’s first monotheistic religions, starting more than 3,000 years ago. Once 40 million strong, Zoroastrianism was the dominant religion of the Persian empire. The tenets of the religion are simple: Good Thoughts lead to Good Words which lead to Good Deeds. The religion celebrates a duality in choosing Good over Evil every day.
Throughout history, through invasions, persecutions and politics both ancient and modern, our numbers have dwindled down to 120,000 or so globally. A majority of Zoroastrians now identify as the Parsis of India, and approximately 20,000 to 40,000 are fellow ethnically Iranian Zoroastrians. While the global community is a thriving active group, I find the generational trauma experienced by our faction of the Iranian community lends to our disappearance in the larger community—sometimes intentionally hiding—just to survive in this day and age.
Outside of the heaviness of our history and reality, my experience of our community has been sublime. Our religion is connected to the rhythm of the earth and the dance between the seasons. The six ghamabars celebrate various harvests. We mark the four seasons with celebrations of Mehreghan, Sadeh, Yalda and Noruz helping the human spirit mark time and build resolve and context for our existence within nature. These holidays are still celebrated in Iran, India and the West as part of the year—our shared roots are in these ancient celestial holidays.
Our family is from a small village in central Iran that is constantly covered in the desert sands. I have participated in the initial gushes of water coming to the irrigation channels of the village orchards as if I were watching blood pumping through my own veins. I have learned and sung the songs of our history, our persecutions, our food and our humor with so much delight. I have felt the language dissolve from my tongue as I have fewer and fewer people to speak it with.
My parents, sister and I go back often to maintain our family’s land and the village our bones still call home. Our efforts feel like futile yet deeply comforting ways to stay connected—within our own lifetimes at least. And while this truth is quite heavy, I have learned, like many displaced peoples, that food and storytelling are conduits for connection and wellbeing.
And so I cling to tarreh.
Left with no option, I have started growing it myself, here in the foreign earth of the displaced Native Americans. I know it will not taste the same. It is not caressed by the winds of its arid climate or touched by the sun of its particular latitude. It is not nurtured by the native soil that so long for, feel so ripped away from. But like the craving to hear your name pronounced effortlessly by a tongue that is used to saying its syllables for generations, crave to have tarreh at my table.
“Our native soil draws all of us, by I know not what sweetness, and never allows us to forget.”
I am heartbroken at the fissures in my existence and I have made the best of it in my glorious new home. have found love in the heart of a man I would otherwise have never met and put roots in a place where I otherwise would have never seen. I healed my roots in a foreign land. And I have brought my tarreh here as well. Neither one of us truly belongs here, but we filter through this soil and find a taste of belonging.
Tapuey: A Philippine Brew with Many Names
A native rice wine pulses in the archipelago.
TEXT & PHOTOGRAPHY Jessica Hernandez
Having grown up in Los Angeles, will admit I am more attuned to the nuances of Japanese saké and Korean makgeolli than those of Philippine rice wine. The Philippines’ extensive linguistic diversity and equally expansive culinary expressions make it a challenge to isolate a distinguishable profile among the country’s native rice wines. find the messy confusion to be part of its allure.
To begin, the archipelagic state is composed of three major islands: Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao. In Ifugao of central Luzon, bayah is a rice wine brewed using toasted malagkit, or glutinous rice, and a starter culture called binokbok or ipo.
In Baguio and the Ilocos region, rice wine is made in a similar method sans roasting the rice and is called tapuey, tapuy or tapey.
There are also the traditional rice wines of the Visayas and Mindanao. In Capiz on Panay Island of the Visayas, the Suludnon or Panay-Bukidnon Indigenous people make pangasi with nonglutinous rice with the addition of sugarcane juice.
That is not to be confused with pangasi or pangase in Zamboanga del Norte of Mindanao, where the Subanen more commonly use cassava instead of rice and will typically also add ginger and chili pepper in addition to a complex starter culture made from various botanicals called tapay.
A curious student of beverages, I reached out to Ken Alonso of Proudly Promdi, whom I connected with in Manila shortly after reading about his efforts to magnify traditionally home-brewed Philippine beverages.
“This is tapuey from Adams in Ilocos Norte,” he says as he hands me a modernized incarnation—gone is the ubiquitous reused plastic soda container, replaced instead by a dark-colored glass bottle.
The drink is a translucent amber. While the aroma breathes traces of umami, I take the first sip and am delightfully reminded of tamarind candy: sweet, tangy and reminiscent of visiting relatives from the Philippines who would often bring bags as gifts to remedy my childhood snack cravings. The flavors deepen and ground my palate with a rich, almost savory finish. It is delicious on the tongue and warming in the belly. I do not entirely understand what I am drinking, but I know I want more.
My initiation into tapuey brings me to Adams to meet the maker. This charming, secluded highland town perches on the provincial fringe of Ilocos Norte, caressed by lush jungles, sweeping fog and broad rivers snaking the foot of the mountains. To the north lies the apex of Luzon, whose rocky coasts hug the South China Sea. It is one of the few places in the Philippines where you can find yourself shivering in the shade.
Petite with a gentle demeanor, Ernanie Pedronan (or more lovingly called Manang Ernanie) is a refreshing welcome to the predominantly male brewing sphere.
Tapuey-making in its most basic form is quite straightforward: glutinous rice is cooked and sprinkled with a discshaped starter called bubod, which houses an ecosystem of bacteria, molds and yeasts that simultaneously turns starch into sugar and converts sugar into alcohol. The mixture is left to naturally ferment, traditionally in earthen jars, until the right chorus of microbial activity sings on the tongue. The final step involves filtering the rice mash from the liquid before bottling.
It is a live brew with no added sugars, preservatives or alcohol. While the entire process involves a few steps, it is laborious, requiring constant lifting, carrying and stirring. Despite this, Manang Ernanie tells us, “Gagawin ko ito hanggang hindi ko na kaya.” I will keep doing this until I can’t anymore.
More than tapuey itself, I have always been curious about the starter culture, which is shrouded in a bit of mystery partly due to its elusive makers. Bubod is unique to the Philippines, just as koji is to Japan and nuruk is to Korea. It is a wild yeast agent made of local rice and herbs, able to impart flavors and sense of place in ways industrial yeast cannot. When I ask people here where it’s from, a common answer is, “Binibili lang namin sa bundok.” We just buy from the mountains.
Vendors at sari-sari stores and those who brew rice wine don’t necessarily make the starter, and finding a bubod maker proved to be a challenge. That is, until I reached Batad, a remote village cradled in the mountainous province of Ifugao.
For the people in the Cordilleras, rice is entwined in cultural practices and traditions. In traditional Ifugao culture, rituals are performed at several stages throughout the rice cycle. Deities are invoked for fruitful harvests and to guard the fields from evil spirits. According to the Ibaloi, rice was given as a gift from the gods. Before rice, humble root crops such as taro, sweet potatoes and yam nourished the Ibaloi. Rice wine is regarded as an important offering, a reminder of the times when rice was limited and reserved for special occasions. Rice wine is deeply embedded in many aspects of life among the Indigenous peoples of the Cordilleras, offered in ceremonies, rituals, weddings and celebrations.
In the everyday life of Filipinos, rice is integral to a meal but it has since become embedded in quotidian routine. In Ifugao, the sanctity of rice remains palpable. It was August when I arrived at the tail end of rice-harvest season in the region.
Bushels of palay, or unhusked rice, blanket the roads. Banaue remains lush with plump golden fields, but Batad’s rice terraces are now mainly barren pools waiting for the next planting season. I came here to tread the curvatures of this colossal amphitheater, to burrow in the depth of the
region’s heirloom rice varieties, to inhale the mountain’s crisp air and to be warmed by bayah.
Knowing my interest in bayah, Ifugao resident and our local guide Irene Binalet introduces us to Batad’s oldest maker: Inyoppeh. He shuffles steadily, back hunched, but hulls palay with a blunted wooden pole in a large stone mortar at a pace only a lifelong apprentice of rice could sustain.
Inyoppeh’s fingers are powdered white, layered in rice dust after pounding the grains just moments earlier. Typically,
bayah is prepared for celebrations, but Binalet, sensing my eagerness to learn, kindly requests Inyoppeh to prepare a new batch for this occasion. He agrees, but before we begin to make bayah, Inyoppeh invites us into his home. He, too, is eager to have an audience.
The four of us huddle inside his home and watch as he pulls a large black basket from among the clusters of palay. He lays it in front of us and reveals what’s inside: three white discs nestled atop a bed of rice straws. In this humble bahay kubo, we had stumbled upon a craftsman of ipo, the starter culture. I am stunned.
The Ifugao constructed rice terraces embracing the Cordilleras mountain range long before the birth of botanical nomenclature.
Bidens pilosa is an herbaceous plant found in temperate and tropical regions. The scientific name doesn’t mean much here in Batad, where the Ifugao constructed rice terraces embracing the Cordilleras mountain range long before the birth of botanical nomenclature. The common name is blackjack, documented to be a notorious weed among farmers who leave the fields with its prickly burrs clinging in unwanted places. Inyoppeh simply calls it unwad. He plucks the plants from the stony wall surrounding his home, which is blanketed with leaves and ferns springing from its grooves and cracks.
“For ipo,” he says, before handing us the plant, pointing at its roots.
The roots of unwad are dried and stored, only to be used with a fresh batch of ipo. Inyoppeh uses an heirloom rice variety grown in Ifugao called Tinawon (which means planted once a year) for his. The ipo is made by soaking this rice and pounding it into a paste. The dried unwad is mixed with the rice paste before being hand-molded into a disc.
Inyoppeh then coats each disc with reserved pulverized ipo before storing it alongside the ones he had shown us prior. He tells us he learned to make ipo after his father passed away. Without it, he could not make rice wine to share with the village. We breathe in his words as we share bayah.
Bidens pilosa is considered a pesky weed to many, but its roots transform the rice of Ifugao into bayah. Perhaps if we knew more about our plants, we would think twice before calling them weeds. And perhaps resting on the tongues of the archipelago’s many different dialects are the vanishing words that have long brought our cultural diversity to life.
We have teachers all around us. Tapuey, bayah and its many different names are living wisdoms in a time that has ceased to hear. More than ever, it is time to listen.
Finger Food
On the pleasure and power of queer pasta.
TEXT Colleen Hamilton PHOTOGRAPHY Tropico Photo
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough, To pass among them or touch anyone, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then? I do not ask for any more delight, I swim in it as if in a sea.
Walt Whitman
THE FIRST TIME my girlfriend, Sarah, made me fresh pasta was on a sharply cold winter night in New York City. It was Valentine’s Day, and the steam rolled through her kitchen until we could draw looping hearts on the windows. It was one month before the coronavirus demanded citywide lockdowns; in hindsight, it was the end of an era. Both of us maneuvered around her comically small apartment, kissing without fear after hours spent riding the subway mask-less. We had the world at our fingertips and did not even know it.
Given the postage-stamp size of her kitchen, I was surprised when she told me she was making pasta by hand. assumed that she meant with a pasta machine: a silver contraption that rolls out pasta dough so that it can be shaped into languid, professional-looking shapes like farfalle, rigatoni, and spaghetti. These are the shapes that dot fine-dining restaurants across New York, from Via Carota to Carbone. Such meals have cemented pasta in the American imagination as a meal that is rich, expensive and loaded with meat and dairy. But was wrong: she was carefully crafting each sweet potato gnocchi by hand, until her kitchen counter resembled a multicolored spread of vegetables and wheat.
Today, pasta at New York City restaurants like Via Carota and Carbone, not far from our kitchen, can be $30 or more for a plate, but its origins are as a working-class food. Simple ingredients—flour, salt, water—made it accessible to the vast majority of the Italian population. This is particularly true in Southern Italy, where families had little access to the chicken and eggs that create the bright yellow doughs Northern Italians are known for. Instead, nonne mixed together water and flour to create shapes by hand. It is a simple way to care for your family, but also an act of deep love. It can take several days to make the dough, roll the pasta and dry it in the sparkling sun.
In Italy, pasta has always been a way to take what is available to you and create something that reflects your community. It is the alchemy of aliveness: forging something delicious despite conditions of scarcity. Like queerness, it is rooted
in the belief that extravagance is not always tied to wealth, but rather our relationships to each other and the world.
ON MARCH 16, 2020, the New York State government declared a lockdown due to the novel coronavirus. My partner and I decided to move into my small apartment in Bushwick, where the once-deafening crash of the J train became silent as lockdown orders crept from days to weeks, shutting down the subway and the life that buzzed around it. Like most New Yorkers during that time, we were terrified to leave our apartment. Often, the majority of our ingredients came from Cathy’s Green Gold, a bodega on our block that stocked potatoes, flour and onions.
However, my girlfriend was not deterred by these conditions. She was committed to transforming an experience that often felt unbearable into one of grace. On a warm afternoon in April, she walked to Home Depot and purchased a cylinder of wood, which she carefully sanded into a mattarello, or rolling pin. Each night, after spending hours on the phone helping people access urgently needed SNAP benefits, she closed her laptop and made pasta. As she rolled out each shape, I read Vicky Bennison’s seminal cookbook, Pasta Grannies , attempting to understand their distinct histories.
Strozzapreti, a twisted shape from the Northern Italian region of Emilia-Romagna, literally translates to “priest strangler.” Some scholars believe the name hails from the story of a greedy priest who guzzled down the shape too quickly and choked. Others believe that nonne would curse the difficulties of their lives while rolling out dough, resulting in a pasta that ultimately strangled the clergy. Although the origins are hotly debated, historians agree that the name reflects the anticlerical sentiment of the region.
Tortellini originated a few miles outside of Bologna, where the goddess Venus is said to have stayed in an inn for the night. When the innkeeper poked his head through the keyhole to watch the physical embodiment of love undress, all he could see was her belly button. And yet, overwhelmed with inspiration, he rushed downstairs to his kitchen, where he created the famous shape.
And in the Sicilian region of Trapani, nonne use local grass to make Busiate, a “twizzled macaroni.” The dough is pressed and twirled around grass until it creates a delightfully slinky, uniquely Sicilian shape.
As I learned these stories, I couldn’t help but marvel at their inventiveness. Each simple combination of flour and dough spanned its own rivalries, desires and ecosystems. Rolled into each shape was the basic human urge to forge beauty
Through pasta’s history, we can reclaim pleasure as a human right, and see how food has always been a means to resist and commune.
from scarcity. This ability to make magic with our hands felt both ancient and familiar, as if we were remembering a long forgotten magic trick. We would spend hours pondering this force over bottles of Barbera and Nebbiolo from our local wine shop until we landed on the answer that felt so obvious, it was shocking we hadn’t realized it before: pasta was queer.
FOR QUEER WOMEN and nonbinary people in particular, using our hands to create magic is an instinct that comes naturally. In Pleasure Activism , adrienne maree brown describes the “brilliant design of our hands,” which can offer multiple forms of pleasure at once. She also notes the many ways in which homophobia has crept into our sex lives through concepts like “virginity,” which posit that sex with cisgender men is the only “true” form of intercourse. But, she wonders, what if we understood our hands as equally valuable?
I was curious if this observation could extend into the kitchen as well. Could we view tools as a delightful addition, rather than a necessary precondition, of a good meal?
Each night as we made pasta, my girlfriend and I meditated on this legacy. It felt radical to follow in the footsteps of older women, who have often been made into nameless, sexless tropes celebrated by cis, male chefs rather than creators of an entire culture in their own right.
We wanted to remember these women as they were and are—Adriana, Irma, Isolina—whose wrinkles and gapped teeth prove years of devotion, love and lust. Women who cursed at the church and perhaps, rolling out pasta side by side for years on end, even fell in love with each other on occasion.
By recalling the legacy of the nonne, we remembered that there is a hardwired, human urge to imagine a world outside of your current confines—whether through a blade
of grass or daydreams about choking priests—and to enact that world with all of the materials available to you.
As the scholar Sophie Lewis writes in Mal Journal, "The denial of pleasure to populations is a grave historic harm, and the denial by some leftists of the centrality of pleasure to liberation struggles is a correspondingly serious error."
In short, we need to feel good about the world we are making as we make it because the urge to adorn and decorate is as old as our species. Through pasta’s history, we can reclaim pleasure as a human right, and see how food has always been a means to resist and commune. We do not have to outsource our desires to fancy ingredients, cis men or expensive restaurants. We can create beauty here and now. Indeed, to exit this path of cataclysmic consumption, we must.
AS THE WORLD REOPENED, my partner and I became curious about what it could mean to return to this sense of pleasure for queer and trans people. What could pasta teach us about forging beauty from scant resources, which has always been the ethos of our community?
Through drag performances, lesbian bars and bathhouses, we have refused to deny ourselves pleasure due to social norms and standards. We know that wealth is not a prerequisite for lavishness and connection. Inventiveness is.
To answer these questions, we started to host "queer pasta parties" at our apartment. We spent hours rolling out the dough, boiling huge vats of salted water and simmering sauces to perfection. At first, it was just for fun. We loved pasta and wanted to share it with our friends.
Soon, though, the evenings became much more than that. The parties became a space for people to relax into the pleasures of an evening with no agenda, no rush and no check at the end. Once people sit down, the sense of relief is palpable. It is a form of attention and care that queer and trans bodies are too often denied.
I believe that such connection has never been more important. In the past 10 years, the strings tethering the queer community to one another have frayed. According to the Lesbian Bar Project there were 200 lesbian bars in 1980. Today, there are fewer than 30.
As gay and lesbians gained more rights (specifically, the ability to marry), many turned their backs on the most vulnerable members of our community, trans and nonbinary people, whose bodily autonomy has been attacked in unprecedented ways. At the same time, affordable, DIY-spaces like The Palms that defined queer
life for generations have largely disappeared and with them, a sense of social cohesion and trust. These colliding factors have destabilized our bodies and our movements.
Handmade pasta, then, in its own small way, is a reclamation of queer roots. It is a commitment to what we can do with a bag of flour and our hands.
Pasta is expedient not only because the ingredients are simple, but also because you can make so much of it. Through our queer pasta parties, we draw on these legacies of abundance to forge a space where each person knows they are enough. Using our hands, rather than a pasta machine, exemplifies the magic queer people continue to forge with very few material resources but an abundance of spirit. Sometimes, as my queer older sister Veronika says, wanting what you have is its own kind of wealth.
THIS EMBRACE OF PLEASURE is a map toward the world so many of us long for, and it might be closer than we can imagine. As Michel Foucault writes in The History of Pleasure “the virtuous hero who is able to turn aside from pleasure, as if from a temptation into which he knows not to fall, is a familiar figure in Christianity—as common as the idea that this renunciation can give access to a spiritual experience of truth and love that sexual activity excludes.” This is the relationship to sexuality and food that many of us were raised with: self-denial as the singular path toward exaltation and redemption.
And yet, what if the inverse were true? What if an overflow of pleasure has as much to teach us as its abdication? If, in fact, the process of eating (or eating out) leads to an equal dissolution of the self, a feeling of oneness. In short, what if queerness is demonized precisely because it is another entry point toward God? During our pasta dinners, I can feel this God all around us. A God of ease, abundance and deep love. A God who delights in your pleasure. Encourages it, even. All you need is flour and dough.
Pl á tanos & Politics
On mangú and race in the Dominican Republic.
DTEXT Vanessa García Polanco
ILLUSTRATION
Lena Tokens
ominicans are in denial. We’re in denial of who we are and where we come from. That denial is promoted by false narratives of race and national origin that you can find in our favorite dishes and what food we decided to celebrate. Endorsed by the Dominican government, media and Dominicans in general in order to create a whiter and more neoliberal Dominican identity closer to the west and white supremacist ideals, we have created a menu where
not everything produced and recreated in the island gets to be Dominican.
For decades now, the Dominican state and elite have gone out of the way to remove our connections to Haiti, to our Black and mulatto heritage, instead promoting narratives of mestizaje and whiteness (I am looking at you Dia de la Raza, aka Columbus Day). Where only white and lightskinned Dominicans can be Dominicans. As Dixa Ramírez has called it, ghosting, as we have decided to ghost, disappear and minimized traits connected to our negro pasado, our Black heritage and present.
In the Dominican national identity project, la bandera, eating rice, beans and meat, are presented as the national
dish that is supposed to match the red, white and blue of the Dominican flag. For years, during the famous dictators of the island, these staples crops were given to solidify the Dominican identity and diet, creating a national foodways. For many Dominicans in the island and Diasporic Dominicans like me, these race-blind, nationalismseasoned narratives are missing the sazón of nuance and decolonizing a past full of missing dishes.
Instead, when ask what is a “purely” Dominican dish, I answer mangú. Like some scholars have argued, the Caribbean cuisines, identities and historical sources about Dominican foods are fragmentary, revealing once again the global and multilingual routes of the region and its historiography. Dominicans might tell you that they owe their success in baseball to the many plantains consumed daily on the island (“Plátano power!” as they say).
Mangú is mashed green plantains, usually mashed with cold water, salt, fat (oil or butter) and red onions in vinegar. It’s served with fried cheese, fried salami and fried eggs; this is often called the three strikes or tres golpes.
Usually a working class and breakfast food in the Dominican Republic, it has become a food mostly associated with Dominicans (because of the plantains) to distinguish ourselves from other Latinos that have heavy rice and beans foodways as well.
In the diaspora, we celebrated mangú as something purely Dominican, not the bandera, to celebrate our national identity as Dominicans. Curiously, mangú’s main ingredient, green plantain, is the same fruit that connects us more strongly to our African heritage, plantain being a common staple across Western African cuisines today and having made its way to the Americans to feed the enslaved people from African brought over to the island during the colonial times.
Plantains, its cousin bananas and other derivatives continue to fuel Dominican bodies. In 2019, plantain production in the Dominican Republic was around 1,027,491 tonnes. The country had approximately 48,977 hectares under plantain cultivation and is a leader exporting organic bananas and plantains to the European Union for example.
Today, Dominican national racial identity does not allow for anyone to be less than white or white-adjacent, and the Dominican government is engaged in active deportations of racial minorities like Haitian workers to preserve the whiteness of a country that refuses to acknowledge itself as a mulatto country. see the cultural embrace of a symbol like the plantains, without its connection to our African heritage, as further ghosting of our Black and
African cultural heritage to perpetuate an imaginary of racial identity that focuses on whiteness.
That is why choose mangú with its tres golpes as a better narrative to celebrate Dominican identity, because it allows plantains to be center stage, in a culture and country that erases and ghosts our mulatto and Black heritage. As my Indigenous People’s Day (known still as Columbus Day or Día de la Raza) Brunch invitation reads, “Colonization sucks, but it births foods that are now part of our national identity so here we go. Come eat mangú!”
I hypothesized that fried salami and fried cheese were added as side dishes to mangú and part of the three golpes because of Jewish and Lebanese migration to the island in the 20th century. Both white Jewish and Lebanese immigrants came to the Dominican Republic with support from the Dominican governments to help whiten the country and mejorar la raza, a racist expression that is used when more white people are added to your bloodline and more European and white centric features are promoted.
Jewish immigrants opened embutidos sausages and cheese factories in the north of the country. Lebanese immigrants brought with them cabbage rolls, niños envueltos, kibbeths or kipes, rice with fideos and halloumi, fried cheese that can now be mostly associated with mangú .
I said I hypothesize, because the Dominican narratives stay silent on classism, colorism and racism but celebrate and promote whiteness. Thus, food dimmed to Black and working class can never be fully authentic Dominican, because that would be to acknowledge that we are still a neoliberal colony with a white elite extracting and abusing Black and Brown workers. Now, we’re a majority Black and mulatto country that doesn’t self-identify as such, still preferring dictator-era labels like indio (brown), indio claro (light brown) y café (coffee). We can have a white Lebanese, third-generation president and elite that look just like him where wealth and resources are still extremely disappointingly distributed.
Mangú celebrates our mulatoness. Thus, you won't find that word in the vocabulary of many Dominicans. This dish, as Dominican food scholar Lidia Marte says, can be reinvented and reseasoned as an emblem of enslaved people’s longing for freedom and can continue to fulfill such a role for its descendants today. As Dominicans in the island and abroad continue to organize for democracy, racial inclusion, political transparency and gender justice, I hope we will be able to celebrate and acknowledge mangú along with our racist and colonial past and present.
The Taste of Polish Mountains
Shepherds preserve a cheesemaking tradition and a way of life.
TEXT & PHOTOGRAPHY Karolina Wiercigroch
Long summer days start and end in darkness for baca and juhasi, who spend the grazing season in hale mountain pastures in the Polish Carpathians. And while today's wake-up calls come from modern smartphones, the traditional ways of herding sheep and turning their milk into cheese have not changed for centuries.
During the grazing season, which typically lasts from late April till early October, baca, the head shepherd, and juhasi, their helpers, reside in traditional wooden huts, bacówki, built up in the mountain pastures of the Polish Carpathians, through the ranges of Beskids, Tatras, Gorce, Pieniny and Bieszczady.
Their days start with the morning milking session, often scheduled for as early as 4 a.m. It usually lasts from two to three hours, depending on the size of the herd and the number of people available to help. Milking a herd of 500 takes three people about two hours. It is done by hand, in relative silence, so as not to stress the sheep. In the beginning of the grazing season, each sheep can produce up to 1 liter of milk per day, and 5 to 7 liters of milk are needed for a kilo of cheese.
The Gorals—ethnic highlanders—claim that milk should not be drunk, but eaten in a form of cheese. The milk is turned into cheese immediately after
each milking, two or three times a day. When it’s finally time to rest, at least one person sleeps with the sheep in order to protect the herd from wolves and bears, which are a major threat in the mountains of Poland and Slovakia.
“Being a baca is not the same as being a sheep farmer,” Józef Michałek says, as we drive though sleepy villages. “The role of baca holds a very special place in mountain communities.”
Józef is Poland’s leading expert on pastoral communities, and he holds a unique role of wojewoda wałaski—an official facilitator for bacas. We just left Bacówka na Skawicy at the foot of Babia Góra, the highest peak of the Beskids, where we watched juhasi curdle fresh milk with rennet. The enzyme traditionally used in the form of strips of dried stomach from unweaned calves is bought in liquid form in stores nowadays. It’s still early in the morning and we’re heading to Hala Barankowa for some more cheesemaking.
“A baca may not have his own sheep at all,” Michałek says. “The majority of the herd will come from several local farmers, who entrust their sheep to baca for the summer.”
“Baca’s most important role is one of building relationships in the community—he is the keeper of mountain meadows and pastures, as sheep help maintain the biodiversity of the grasslands.”
Apparently, a baca doesn’t usually own any pastures either. They make agreements with local landowners to use fallow land.
“Baca’s most important role is one of building relationships in the community,” Michałek says. “He is the keeper of mountain meadows and pastures, as sheep help maintain the biodiversity of the grasslands.”
Sheep are left to eat whatever they fancy, choosing from grass, flowers and herbs, and they transport seeds from one pasture to another in their hooves. This wild menu gives their milk a unique taste, which can be tasted in the cheeses.
At Hala Barankowa in Zawoja, baca Jakub Ciężczak pours us generous cups of żętyca, a traditional welcome drink offered to anyone visiting a bacówka . Served in a carved wooden cup called a cyrpok, żętyca is a refreshing fermented drink made of pasteurised whey, a byproduct of making cheese. Gorals swear by its healing properties and shepherds use it to add tanginess to traditional Polish soups such as żurek or barszcz.
We watch Jakub as he turns freshly curdled cheese into shapely balls, which he then presses into wooden molds.
The most famous mountain cheeses, oscypek, gołka and redykołka, are all made using the same method but have different forms and patterns. They can be served fresh or left for smoking, hung by the ceiling and exposed to smoke from the watra, a small fire, always smoldering inside the hut
In a corner of the room, cheesecloths strain bundz, a fresh, mild cheese made by curdling sheep’s milk. If left to mature for a couple of weeks, bundz can be milled with
Rita Santos, General Coordinator of the National Association of Baianas do Acarajé.
salt to create bryndza, a creamy, tangy, crumbly specialty. Delicious on its own, it also makes a tasty filling for pierogi along with mashed potatoes, crispy pork scratchings and black pepper. Stored in a cellar, bryndza can keep for up to a year, which helped Gorals survive many harsh winters. Today considered a delicacy, it used to be associated with scarcity and hunger.
The history of cheesemaking in the Polish mountains can be traced back to the Vlachs—the Balkan tribe of nomadic
shepherds who migrated to Poland along the Carpathians in the Middle Ages, bringing the traditions of sheepherding and cheesemaking with them. This is why Poland shares pastoral practices with other countries on the Carpathian Arch: Romania, Serbia, Ukraine, Hungary, Czechia and Slovakia.
“One Romanian visitor was surprised that you could buy Romanian cheese in Poland,” says Maria Kohut, who runs a bacówka and an educational center in the beautiful village
of Koniaków in Beskid Śląski. “He couldn’t believe that I made that bryndza here!”
The word bryndza comes from Romanian brânză and simply means “cheese,” implicitly white and salty.
“Romania is the main producer of sheep bryndza in Europe and the cradle of shepherding traditions,” Kohut says. “But the first bryndza registered in the UE was the one from the Polish Podhale region.”
Traditionally, the profession of baca has been passed from father to son and this is still often the case. At Bacówka Baligówka, we’re greeted by baca Jan Hryczyk and his son
Andrzej, who cuts thick slices of fresh bundz for us to try. It’s creamy and slightly sweet, still very fresh.
The family of Jarosław Buczek, however, had no shepherding traditions. When his region, Gorce Mountains, had been left without a baca he decided to take up the baton. His bacówka on the slope of Ochotnica is famed for an ancient type of aged cheese, brusek.
“My grandmother used to make this cheese, it could last the whole winter,” Buczek recalls. “But then people stopped making brusek; they thought it was old, dry and not tasty.”
It took Buczek three years of trial and error to recreate the recipe for the round, aged cheese, matured for anywhere between six months to two years. It was well worth it. His brusek is delectable, with cheese crystals and a deep, complex flavor.
The large, spindle-shaped oscypek is the most often faked cheese in Poland. According to EU regulations, it must weigh between 600 and 800 grams, contain at least 60 percent sheep’s milk and can only be produced between late April and early October, when the sheep feed on fresh mountain grass.
In colder months, sheep’s milk is reserved for feeding young lambs. For many Poles, smoked oscypek, grilled and served with a dollop of cranberry jam, is the taste of summer holiday in the mountains. It would be difficult to imagine hiking trails without the sounds of sheep bells or the smell of smoked cheese. Today, traditional mountain cheese is made by fewer than 150 people in Poland.
The Dishes, the Museum and the Empire
Ceramics tell stories of form, function and what has been deemed worthy of saving.
TEXT N.A. Mansour
Every now and then, when I walk through the Islamic art gallery at the museum where work, eavesdrop, listening in on museumgoers as tuck my employee badge into a pocket. I take notes on what can do better, as one of the collection’s caretakers.
Once, when walking by the case with the Iznik ceramic plates from the Ottoman Empire, I heard someone refer to them as “dishes.” Another time, heard a visitor saying that people ate off of those same thick ceramic plates, with their red tulips and thick blue vines set against a backdrop of white.
I keep walking down the gallery, distracted by my evergrowing to-do list or whatever meeting I have scheduled next. But I will never fully forget these little comments; they’re cataloged away in my mind under “things to be thought through slowly.” They will bubble up to the surface when I’m least expecting it.
One such moment is cleaning my favorite plate at home, a wooden plate sectioned into three parts. The smaller parts are perfect for a few olives and tomato slices to go along with bright white cheese and bread for breakfast. I like
that I can pour olive oil and sprinkle some black seed onto the tomato without all the juices running into my carefully toasted bread.
My plate, no matter how well-designed and no matter how much it looks like all other plate-like objects, is not like the ceramics in the case at the museum. Those Iznik plates were not made to be sturdy, at least not enough to withstand meal after meal. Those plates were made, not to sit flat, but to bear to the world their curved base. It is both here and along the rim that you can see the many features that make Iznik ceramics iconic: The starkness of different blues set against a white background, a thick red that seems to bulge forward; some greens to animate the vines and leaves. They are beautiful but they are certainly not “the dishes.” Their aesthetic is to delight the eye.
But oftentimes, Iznik ceramics are all you see of the Ottomans; at that, they’re the bulk of what you see of Muslim-majority societies displayed in museums in North America and Western Europe.
There’s an assumption embedded here in those observations that the Iznik ceramics are just dishes. These are assumptions enforced by society at large; museums are just a part of these collaborative matrices pushing forth neatly packaged ideas for audiences to gobble up in a single bite. They work together with mass media and education systems to make people controllable. It is thus that the walls of museums whisper, telling you what and who you should think is important.
A case full of Iznik ceramics tells you that these are the finest things the Ottomans produced and at that, perhaps they were eaten off of. Embedded here is a perception of not just the Ottomans, but of anything shelved under the term “Islamic.” And eating off of their most pretty and precious things, isn’t that quaint? And isn’t that just a little bit wrong? It is for the best that they’re here now the museum walls whisper.
Though it doesn’t happen nearly as often as I eavesdrop in museums, I am sometimes the visitor speaking loudly in the galleries. In these moments, I am probably worse than the people I listen to. I audibly bristle at the slightest bit of institutional racism and when institutional racism is harmful, I do double duty. I am rolling my eyes and whining, all while counting the ways in which the same harm is perpetuated by the collection I care for. In other words, am a curator’s worst nightmare.
The Ottomans made Iznikstyle tankards not to drink from, but because they saw European tankards and made their own.
Such is the scene when I go to encyclopedic museums, which claim to have something from every part of the globe on display or in its collection. But this aspiration to completeness also means most museums in North America and Western Europe have similar collections of everything. And they use them to set forth similar ideas.
Hailing from the town of Iznik in western Asia Minor, the Iznik ceramics are particularly over-represented. Every museum has plates with dark blue swirls of flowers drawn in the cross-section or pitchers with tulips on both sides. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, even have the same lunettes: intricate tiles laid out in the shape of a half-moon made for the space above a door.
Beginning in the 16th century, the ceramicists of the Iznik style produced duplicates of designs for elites because it made sense to make them; collectors prized beauty, not uniqueness. The ceramics then found their way onto the art market in the 19th and 20th centuries that were then snatched up by major museums like the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Part of the work of caring for a museum collection is not just listening to how people react to museum galleries, but studying the collection, most of which is in storage. But I get distracted by the things that are so common to museums, their strangeness is forgotten.
In particular, I find myself most fascinated by the dozens of Iznik-style tankards scattered evenly between museum collections. They’re large cylinders, made in the classic colors 16th and 17th century ceramicists knew how to work well. I go to the storage galleys of my own institution and look at the tankards we have off-view. Sometimes, I try to slip my gloved fingers into the handle and lift, like I would a mug. But it’s too heavy and awkward to make drinking anything from it really worth it. That, and, its gargantuan
shape means my drinks wouldn’t stay the temperature want them to, no matter if they are cold or warm.
The Ottomans made Iznik-style tankards not to drink from, but because they saw European tankards and made their own, but these were to adorn their own homes. It’s a basic rule of history: Elites sometimes imitate elites. The ceramicists even tried to adapt the Iznik style to get a leatherlike texture. They applied—of all things—blue scales to the white glaze. The pieces would then rest on full display in someone’s home as a marker of taste. So the story goes: Elites imitate elites from other parts of the world and then, when those objects fall into disuse or when the market makes selling them necessary, other elites collect these pieces and put them in museums.
But there’s a catch. When you go to a major museum’s European art gallery, there are typically different sections with different themes. The masterpieces are on display. Like Iznik tankards, most of these museums have a Monet and a Van Gogh. While on the wall to say something about European art being supreme, these landscapes or portraits also prepare you for the next rooms in the European art wing, the ones with European china. But elites in England and France—the fancy Europe—likely did eat off of these plates. These ceramics mean something different.
What we see in museums is not trying to capture the essence of what it was to live an ordinary life. The elites who were behind shaping the great museums of North America and Western Europe did not seek out the clothing of ordinary people or their dinnerware, even in their own contexts. Those things erode with use, with many ladles of soup being poured into them and having chopped many carrots and potatoes.
Instead, elites collected the things they themselves owned and gave them to museums. They took that method and did the same thing with the rest of the globe. They collected what elites elsewhere, of other empires and kingdoms, had commissioned and were now discarding or selling, but those objects would have to tell a different story.
sometimes call the Iznik ceramics case “the Ottoman case.” I sometimes bristle in front of it, feeling the critiques bubble up within me. The case is in an Islamic art gallery, taking up so much space that could be afforded to other cultures, other cultures that produced beautiful things but that aren’t afforded space because when museums were forming their collections, they focused on other empires and elites; empires and elites they thought less of, sure.
But empires nonetheless. It’s a balancing act of derision and snobbery, for elites to collect other elites, but lesser ones.
I also bristle because encoded in my DNA and the DNA of people I love is the harm done by empires, some by the empires in front of me, the empires that commissioned the plates from people who may have looked like me, and the empires that museums hold up. I bristle at the way the Ottomans are used as shorthand for all Muslims, or all people who live in Muslim-majority contexts. All these thoughts are tied together, thoughts onto thoughts onto thoughts.
Sometimes, after I’ve used and washed my own prized dishes in my own kitchen, my mind drifts back to the Iznik ceramics. call the Iznik ceramics “dishes” now, and I want to eat off of them. Somewhere, between untying and retying knots of empires and museums, I’ve realized that in my hands and in my voice, to call them dishes is a small act of power. It denies museums the right to shape history and its consumption in networks of knowledge.
To eat off of the Iznik ceramics goes a step further. In my fantasies, I pile white cheeses next to mounds of olives in a bowl with swirling vines of blue across its base, chipped slightly at the rim by the centuries. In another, I mix bulghur dressed with herbs. I fill the tankards with tea and let them go cold on my desk, the way I do so many cups of tea over the course of a day. eventually drink them all, no matter the temperature.
In a pitcher, I mix a drink known to many across the globe: karkade to some, agua de jamaica to others. Its deep pink will seep into a crack in the white and blue Iznik pitcher and stain the piece. I don’t mind. I’m trying too hard to assemble foods shared by people who lived under empire, were persecuted by empire. I’m piling them on these bowls and eating with my hands, letting the tips of my fingers graze the glazed surfaces as I do.
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