Vermicelli. Thin, fried, string-like preparation made from gram flour. At "eeds" this is often as part of a celebratory breakfast dish called senvaya in which it is cooked in syrup until the liquid evaporates, becoming sweet and slightly crunchy.
Split gram lentils. Split chickpeas (US: garbanzo beans). Darker and smaller than the chickpeas generally available in the West.
Sapodilla. A fruit which can be round or oval. Its thin skin is slightly rough and the flesh is dull, beige to terra cotta in colour and slightly granular with flat black seeds. Peel the skin away to reveal the apricot-coloured, honey-flavoured flesh. If it is eaten slightly under-ripe it may leave a residue of gum in the mouth. This can be dispelled by eating something fatty or wiping the lips with butter. One variety provides the gum for chewing gum.
Black peppercorns, the fruit of a perennial vine with large leaves and white flowers. Green peppercorns are the unripe fruits picked early and pickled. Black peppercorns are picked just before they ripen and white peppercorns are the ripe, black peppercorns with the black skin flaked off. They are best kept whole and ground when required. Historically, pepper was one of the world's most important spices. Columbus sailed West, not East, in search of pepper in the East Indies. Instead he found the Americas and allspice.
Chayote. Custard marrow. A Central American food plant, it is a bulbous, pear-shaped gourd which grows on a vine, with pale green, ridged skin and about the size of an avocado. It is a bland vegetable, somewhat like a cucumber in flavour, with a little spice when fresh. It should be treated in the same way as vegetable marrow or aubergine (US: eggplant) and, like them, should be cooked before eating. Leaves and shoots are also edible when young.
Custard apple. Sitaphal. A tropical fruit which comes in a variety of shapes and sizes. When buying choose very soft fruits indeed. The skin of all of them is green or purplish-green and scaly, almost fir-cone patterned, in appearance. Inside, the flesh is creamy in colour and consistency, but has to be sucked from the shiny black seeds. The flesh has a sweet-sour flavour, sometimes slightly custardy and larger ones have the luscious and complex taste of banana, mango and vanilla. They are often made into fritters, or sliced and steeped in wine. The custard apples include cherimoyas, sweet sops, sour sops and atemoyas.
