Colt's Bolts

Colt's Bolts
Nashville Airport, $1.99

On the one hand, a Colt's Bolt is a dressed-up Reese's Peanut Butter Cup; on the other, it's a country song wrapped in foil.  

On the label of each confection is a 1980's glamor shot of blonde in a red power suit, company owner Mackenzie Colt.  A teenage wife and mother with talent and ambition, Colt was a regular at open mic nights at the Ramada Inn lounge near her St. Louis home, where she was discovered by Buck Owens.  After touring as Owens' protege, she moved to Nashville for a six-season stint as a scantily-clad "Hee Haw Honey." 

When she aged out of her Hee Haw role, Colt had a Plan C waiting in the wings:  a lifelong passion for baking and confectionery.  In 1984 she began to combine chocolate, peanut butter, and roasted almonds into candy cups she called Colt's Bolts.  At first she mixed all of the ingredients in her own Cuisinart and wrapped the finished cups in the foil left over from chocolate bars she melted down for her coating.  All that had to change after Colt's Bolts won the Fancy Food Show's Outstanding Confection Award and a Japanese distributor ordered 60,000 pieces. 

Abu Afif Sweets

Assorted nougat
Abu Afif Sweets

Established in Baghdad in 1973, Abu Afif Sweets makes a wide range of traditional Arabic pastries and candy.  The descendants of founder Mounir Jamal's have continued to expand into new markets, adding more modern sweets such as chocolate to their offerings at a growing number of retail stores. 

Luckily at least a few of Abu Afif's fresh sweets travel well, making plastic-wrapped bites like those pictured a great souvenir of the region.  On the top left is a square of something that may be called helawa (I'm guessing--it's not identified by name on the Abu Afif website), pistachios held together by a dense, chewy, slightly sticky, and translucent brown gel.  To the right, the same helawa is surrounded by milky nougat and a strip of qarmar-el-deen, a tart apricot fruit leather.  On the bottom is a ball of the same nougat simply caked in pistachios. 

Versions of nougat have been made and enjoyed throughout the Arab world for centuries.  In Iraq it's known at min el sama (or mann al-sama, etc.).  In Iran, it's gaz, derived from from gaz-angebin, a reference to an indigenous tree.  White, nut-studded panish turrón was probably the product of long-ago Moorish settlement, and it likely influenced the development of Italian torrone. 

Since nougat is such a tradition in the Middle East, I wondered why all of the recipes I found online called for corn syrup, a relatively modern ingredient.  Wikipedia to the rescue!  The sap that gives gaz its name is found on the plant but doesn't come from it:  "The sticky white substance, exuded from the anus of the last instar nymph of a small insect which lives on the plant, is collected annually and is combined with other ingredients including pistachio or almond kernels, rosewater and egg white."  Corn syrup is a modern substitute for the insect excretion. 

Zunda Mochi

Day forty-one: Zunda Mochi

I learned a new Japanese saying recently: Miyagemono ni umai mono nashi, or "Among souvenirs, there are no delicious things". I found this a little hard to get my head around; given the Japanese emphasis on giving souvenirs, packaged delicacies wallpaper every train station and airport; historically, local food souvenirs have been seen as giving the folks at home a way of participating in the journey; and surely, food gifts, no matter how undelicious, gather less dust than a snow globe?

But today gave me a little more insight. I spent most of it backtracking to Tokyo in order to take my ailing computer to the Mac store. Several hours into my train journey (I'm still stuck on local trains) I realized that I had somehow managed not to pack the fresh, delicious and expertly-made sweets that my friends at the Tokinoka Yawargi shop had set aside for me; it was like waking from a dream where you're lolling on a pile of treasure to find yourself in a single bed on IKEA sheets.

Rooting around in my bag, I managed to find a box of souvenir sweets that had been with me since Sendai. On the north end of Japan's main island, Honshu, they make something of a speciality of zunda, young, fresh soybeans that are boiled, sweetened, and ground into mealy paste. Zunda shows up in a number of incarnations, but here it is slathered over tiny balls of mochi.

There's no denying that the package was attractive, sturdy, and a welcome respite from a sweets-free day on the trains. The zunda was bright green on a scale somewhere between hi-lighter and fava, smelled of fresh chlorophyll, and tasted inoffensively sweet. But while the color shouted "freshness", the stiff, gluey texture of both the paste and the mochi whispered "extended shelf-life".

Perhaps the trick to getting delicious souvenirs is not buying foods that are packaged specifically as souvenirs?

Shiogama

Day thirty-three: Shiogama

In the last year or so I read an article about gourmands, a quirky category of perfumes that evoke things one would like to eat--cake or bacon, say--rather than things one would usually just sniff--e.g. flowers, twigs, old ladies. Of all the perfumes dicussed, the one that really struck me is called Sel de Vetiver; the writer was in raptures over its ability to smell so powerfully like something--salt--that doesn't actually smell like anything at all by smelling like things that we associate with salt.

Shiogama pulls off much the same trick. Named for a town that was once a center of salt (shio) production, shiogama looks like an old-fashioned salt tablet and smells like sea air. The bulk of the sweet is powdered uruchi-mai, non-glutinous rice, and such is shiogama's simplicity that the raw flavor of the the rice is pleasantly perceptible. The rice powder causes a bite of shiogama to foam slightly in the mouth, while sugar and a tiny amount of actual seasalt add flavor and grit. What really brings it all together is the sprinkling of dried shiso (perilla) leaves, which gives shiogama a refreshing flavor and a tangy aroma.

Nakamise-Dori Treats

For several centuries the street leading to the Asakusa Sensoji temple has been lined with shops and crammed with tourists. Nakamise-dori demands a high level of coordination; you have to be able to throw elbows with one arm and stuff your face with the other. These are just a few of the treats on offer.



















Various fruits (in this case a pickled plum) swirled in gooey candy and displayed on a block of ice.



















Shaved ice and summer kimono.



















Softcream.



















Yokan.



















Senbei, hot off the grill.



















Stall selling pre-packaged boxes of souvenir sweets.



















Age-manju: deep-fried wheat-flour bun filled with bean paste and flavored with matcha tea powder.