Eat This Podcast
Talking about anything around food

Edible aroids

26 May 2014 Filed under:

A Dutch food writer tries to discover the origins of pom, the national dish of Suriname. Is it Creole, based on the foodways of Africans enslaved to work the sugar plantations of Surinam? Or is it Jewish, brought to Suriname by Dutch Jews? So began Karin Vaneker’s immersion in the world of edible aroids. Aroids […]

purple-stemmed-colocasia

karin-vanekerA Dutch food writer tries to discover the origins of pom, the national dish of Suriname. Is it Creole, based on the foodways of Africans enslaved to work the sugar plantations of Surinam? Or is it Jewish, brought to Suriname by Dutch Jews?

So began Karin Vaneker’s immersion in the world of edible aroids. Aroids are a large and cosmopolitan plant family, more commonly known as the arum family, and they include some of the most familiar houseplants. Many of them have starchy roots or tubers, and although these often contain harmful substances, people have learned how to process them as famine foods. A few species, however, are widely cultivated. The best-known of these is probably taro, Colocasia esculenta, which originated in southeast Asia and spread through the Pacific and beyond. That, however, proved not to be the elusive pomtajer that Karin and the Surinamese inhabitants of Amsterdam were looking for, which turned out to be a species of Xanthosoma.

My conversation with Karin ranged far and wide, and to tell the truth I never did ask whether pom was Jewish or Creole. Most sources say it is indeed Jewish.

Notes

  1. The whole question of Jews in Suriname sent me scurrying to the search engines, to discover that starting in the 17th century there was indeed an attempt to establish an autonomous Jewish territory there, on the Jewish savanna. This I gotta read more about. And having found that, I rushed to Claudia Roden’s The Book of Jewish Food, only to be massively disappointed that neither pom nor Suriname feature in the index.
  2. The big photo is of purple-stemmed Colocasia, which I took at Longwood Gardens.
  3. As promised, a recipe for pom. You’ll have to find your own pomtajer.
  4. Karin has written on Cooking Pom and other edible aroids.

Food tours and cooking classes

12 May 2014 Filed under:

It is quite amazing how popular food tours and cooking classes are in Italy. When in Rome, many people seem to want to eat, and cook, like a Roman. Well, not entirely, and not like some Romans. I spoke to Francesca Flore, who offers both tours and cooking classes, and she reserved some choice words […]

ragu

Francesca coverIt is quite amazing how popular food tours and cooking classes are in Italy. When in Rome, many people seem to want to eat, and cook, like a Roman. Well, not entirely, and not like some Romans. I spoke to Francesca Flore, who offers both tours and cooking classes, and she reserved some choice words for those quintessential Roman dishes based on the famous quinto quarto, the fifth quarter of the carcass. Or, less obtusely, offal.

Francesca told me that she’s always been interested in food, and that while working in London she decided to take herself off to Australia to study Cooking and Patisserie at the Cordon Bleu School in Sydney. Back in Rome, she put all that knowledge to use catering private parties and branching out into food tours and cooking classes.

We talked about what people want, what they get, and how she views the past and future of Italian food.

Notes

  1. Francesca Flore’s flash website gives a taste of the food tours and cooking classes she offers.
  2. The Mercato Central in Florence has a website that is way too groovy for its own good. And, wonderfully Italian, an undated entry at a site called Florence Online, tells us both that the upstairs is closed and that “the vendors appear to want to stay where they are” in a tent below.
  3. Cover photograph, of Francesca supervising the sprinkling of icing sugar on cannoli, by Chris Warde-Jones for the New York Times.