Eating In Translation

Vintage Curry

Dum pakht (or dum pukht) is a means of slow-cooking under tight seal. Often a strip of wheat dough weds the cooking vessel to its lid, encouraging the return of juices and aromas to the simmering food. For our generously seasoned lamb curry enriched with heavy cream, dough was fashioned into the lid itself. (It covered the serving vessel but probably replaced a permanent lid just before the final stages of cooking.) At the table we sliced open this now-bready lid, called a pardah ("curtain" or "veil"), and spooned our curry over rice, then employed torn bits of the pardah to swab up after.

The dum pakht technique was developed in northern India and neighboring Pakistan is but evidently well-established in the United Kingdom: Vintage Curry proclaims itself a home for "British style Indian" food and Chinese halal cooking, too.

Vintage Curry
8777 168th Pl. (Hillside-88th Aves.), Jamaica, Queens
718- 206-4206
www.VintageCurryNYC.com

Tesser's Meat Market

We have ways of ensuring your loyalty: Tesser's roster of specialty items is uncommonly extensive and varied. But complete? No — missed it by a nose.

Tesser's Meat Market
87-84 Parsons Blvd. (Hillside-88th Aves.), Jamaica, Queens
718-523-1041

Romanian picnic at St. Andrew's Orthodox Church

Each was rolled, each had its virtues. The sarmale (sar-Mah-lay), or stuffed cabbages, featured a moist pork-and-rice filling; in its favor, my sarma was also accompanied by a generous portion of the chopped cabbage in which it had been slow-cooked. All the clătite (clah-Tee-tay) bore marks of the crepe pan, but my clătita — thanks to a guide who led me to the sanctuary of the downstairs kitchen — had cooled only for as long as was needed to spread it with jam. (Apricot.) And each, in its turn, vanished oh so quickly.

For more photos, see the EIT page on Facebook.

Romanian picnic at St. Andrew's Orthodox Church
90-34 139th St. (90th-91st Aves.), Jamaica, Queens
www.Facebook.com/sfantulandreiny /posts/1000639916733556:0
(The picnic was held on June 3, 2017)

Luncheonette

Forgotten New York postulates that this lettering is what remains of a privilege sign that once promoted Coca-Cola. Compare a well-preserved example from wild and woolly Passaic, New Jersey.

Luncheonette
Surviving signage, 150-18 Tuskegee Airmen Way (150th-153rd Sts.), Jamaica, Queens

Kaieteur Express

My vegetable sampler ($8) sported potatoes and sweet potatoes, chickpeas and soy chunklets, long beans, callaloo, and spinach — uncommonly spicy spinach — all atop a bed of white rice that had been wetted down with dhal.

Meals like this give me the dietary latitude for indulgences like a footlong link of lamb black pudding ($7 when I bought it, years back, at a Queens location of this Guyanese mini-chain). Loose-knit and somewhat crumbly, the mildly spiced pudding could be squeezed from its casing like a boudin, though eventually I found myself scarfing up considerable spillage from the carryout tin.

Kaieteur Express
4379 White Plains Rd. (East 237th St.-Nereid Ave.), Wakefield, Bronx
718-231-8700
(One of several locations)
www.Facebook.com/Kaieteurrestaurant

Ola African Market

(This venue is closed.) There's no mystery about how the alligator pepper got its name. Within the gnarly pod are dozens of seeds; a few are shown, poorly, in the lower right corner of the first photo. Though cardamom is a closer botanical relative, the dried seeds resemble small peppercorns and, in West Africa, have similar culinary uses. Medicinal uses, too: A fellow customer offered that a few seeds, swallowed with honey, help to clear the lower respiratory tract.

Can the seeds also properly be called "grains of paradise," which some marketers maintain is a distinct and superior spice? Especially in Nigeria, the previous home of this market's proprietor, both alligator pepper and grains of paradise have been identified with Aframomum melegueta, even in the scientific literature. My own further research hasn't clarified the matter; it's not so much a mystery as a muddle.

Ola African Market
182-13 Jamaica Ave. (182nd St.-182nd Pl.), Hollis, Queens
646-765-5178

Kacha Bazar

"Pitha" (Pit-uh) describes many Bangladeshi and Bengali cakes that may be savory or sweet, fried, baked, or steamed. For this sticky-sweet batch ($3.99), a home-printed label identified the ingredients as rice flour, oil, and sugar and gave the name kori pitha. Jhinuk, or seashell, seems to be a much more common name for this variety; perhaps kori specifies cowrie.

Kacha Bazar
168-25A Hillside Ave. (at 168th Pl.), Jamaica, Queens
718-725-0277

Caribbean Delights

The unusual crust caught my eye. Fashioned from a stiff dough that binds grated cassava to grated coconut, and baked, cassava pone has a moist, dense, starchy body and, typically, a smooth, lightly browned, humdrum topside. This rugged Guyanese version ($2) offered a little textural adventure as well as a livelier-than-usual dose of black spices, pepper among them.

Caribbean Delights
215-21 Jamaica Ave. (at 215th Pl.), Queens Village, Queens
347-894-8521
www.CaribbeanDelightsQV.com

Portuguese American Deli

Things that say "Portugal": sun-faded stripes, in national green and red, to the left of the entrance. A short stack of Portuguese-language newspapers, on the ledge inside the window, side-by-side with the New York tabloids. Jars of honey and bottle of olive oil imported from the old country, and lupini beans packaged in New Bedford, Massachusetts, a magnet for Portuguese immigrants since the whaling days of the 19th century. And presunto, a dry-cured ham, which like all the sandwich meats can be served on a hero — but why would you pass up a Portuguese roll ($4.50)?

Portuguese American Deli
220-17 Jamaica Ave. (220th-221st Sts.), Queens Village, Queens
718-464-8321
www.AllMenus.com/ny/queens-village/364199-portuguese-american-deli/menu

Sranan Dei (Suriname Day)

The cuisine of Suriname, a tiny melting pot of a country on the north coast of South America, has been featured in at least five Queens restaurants. All have come and gone. My favorites were Warung Kario, where conversations were conducted in English, Dutch, and Javanese, and its successor Caribbean Suriname Restaurant, where the lingua franca was a creole language called Sranan Tongo.

The creole name of this event, Sranan Dei — Suriname Day — brought to mind a specialty of the latter restaurant, a creole chicken casserole called pom. Its namesake ingredient, pomtajer, pomtayer, or simply tayer, is a New World tropical plant that yields a starchy tuber; you may know it as yautia or malanga. This annual outdoor get-together was a chance to compare three different renditions of pom. Though I appreciated the crispy edges on the corner slice in the platter above, also shown in closeup below, the consensus favorite of our crew was the pom whose color was most suggestive of sour orange.

For a few more photos, including a plate of spicy liver and gizzard coupled with salt fish, the duo of trie and telo (fried anchovy and fried cassava), and bakabana, fried ripe plantain spread with a tangy, granular peanut sauce, see the Eating In Translation page on Facebook.

H/T David Druce

Sranan Dei (Suriname Day)
Roy Wilkins Park, Merrick Blvd. at Foch Blvd., St. Albans, Queens
www.Facebook.com/SrananDei
(The 2015 celebration was held on August 9)