Posted on: Wednesday, March 20, 2002
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Handy guide helps decipher mystery foods
By Wanda A. Adams
Food Editor
As much as I prize the fresh produce and enjoy the sights and smells of Honolulu's Chinatown, I'm often stumped and frustrated when I encounter unfamiliar ingredients and products there. It's an insiderish place and, as someone who comes from the olive oil and tomato side of the culinary universe, I'm often on the outside looking longingly in.
Most Chinatown shops don't identify fresh produce in English or, if they do, there's often no English label on the item that's most unfamiliar to me (probably because the shopkeepers rightly assume that the people most likely to buy already know what it is). Language barriers often get in the way of finding out more. I've also noticed different names on the same foods, and received different explanations about how to use things, depending on the ethnicity of the shopkeeper. (Typical exchange: "Is that what they call Chinese okra?" "No, that's Filipino okra!")
So I was excited to hear about "The Asian Grocery Store Demystified: A Food Lover's Guide to All the Best Ingredients" by Linda Bladholm (Renaissance Books, paperback, $16.95), one of a series of such guides to ethnic foods. My trusty "Food Lover's Companion" by Sharon Tyler Herbst is great, but it's an alphabetical listing with no pictures, and doesn't include many ethnic names, so you pretty much have to know a common English name to look anything up.
"Demystified" books are divided into chapters by type of food ("Noodles," "Flavorings," "Dried Goods," etc.) and include sketches of many products (color pictures would have been better). So you can flip to "Vegetables," for example, and scan for something that looks like your mystery food. Bladholm offers names in English and other languages, tells what to look for and how to use it and, in the case of packaged goods, even suggests brands.
Last week, a foodie friend and I set out to challenge the book against the bins, baskets and shelves in Chinatown and found it very helpful, although not completely foolproof. (Typical exchange: "What is this?" "Dry (inaudible and unintelligible)." "What???" "It's food!")
We spent some time deciphering the mysteries of bean and rice noodles, happy to find the products we were curious about named and described in the book. We finally identified a vegetable that had puzzled me in previous visits: It's bottle gourd, known in Chinese as po qwa or woo lo qwa or, in Thai, nam tao — a pale green, smooth-skinned, longish gourd with a white, smooth-textured flesh.
Our book consultations tended to hold up traffic, attracting no little attention but also a few helpers, who offered their own names for things, and even recipes. Like most residents, I hate that "you're acting like a tourist" feeling, but in this case, our obvious interest, with the book as prop, actually brought the bilingual helpers out of the woodwork. And it was great fun.
