A large variety of eating apple with a yellow and deep red marbled skin having yellowish-white flesh but little flavour. It is a well known southern apple, probably raised in Tennessee, Kentucky or Virginia around 1800. May also be used for culinary purposes. It is a late-season variety, picked from mid-October in South-East England. It keeps well and mellows on storage and is at its best from December to March. This apple has a huge number of synonyms.
A speciality created by Jennie Benedict in Louisville in Kentucky of a spread made with cream cheese, cucumbers and dill dyed with green food colouring.
Chickpeas (US: garbanzo beans), channa. These are darker and smaller than the chickpeas generally available in the West.
On whatamieating.com there is the biggest and most comprehensive Bengali-English food dictionary in the world. It has nearly 700 Bengali food terms, with names of foods and descriptions of dishes. It has particularly good information about fish, going back to Latin names, many with photographs and guidance as to what can be done with each one. The Bengali script is provided as well as the English phonetic pronunciation. For this I am grateful to Siddhartha Dasgupta who has given his help very generously.
Agar agar. A gelatine-like product which is extracted from a brownish-white seaweed with thorny projections called tengusa. It is a useful vegetarian alternative to gelatine. It is dried in the sun and then boiled creating a viscous substance which is sold after processing into thin, transparent, white sheets. When dissolved in water it cools to a jelly. It has a great capacity for absorbing liquid. It is available in other forms, of which the most common are bar and powder. Agar-agar sets quickly and does not melt at room temperature. It is used by the Japanese in soups and confections, by the Chinese in yokan and the food industry in everything. It is represented by E406.
A punch made with sparkling wine and dry red wine, Barbados rum, curaçao, orange juice, orgeat, pineapple and lime juice.
Bael fruit; a close relative of the citrus. The fruit is about the size of, and has the appearance of a greyish-yellow orange with a thin woody rind. The floury pulp is pale orange in colour and has numerous seeds. Dried slices are soaked and boiled and the resulting liquid sweetened and drunk. Used for medicinal purposes.
