Eating In Translation

White Rose

Though reportedly also a component of more-complex dishes, shaved-to-order coconut tells you that this serving of tapia ($1.50), fermented black glutinous rice, was meant to be eaten on the spot. Tapia surfaces in different guises elsewhere in Southeast Asia, including Indonesian tape (Tah-peh); one version I encountered was sweet-sour, and exuded a dark reddish liquid that threatened to stain anything it touched. My tapia was firmer and less sweet, enough so that the counterman preemptively offered sugar to make it palatable. The first spoonful wasn't enough for my taste; the second, neither.

White Rose
716 Middlesex St. (near Branch St., in Pailin Plaza), Lowell, Massachusetts
978-710-6598
(From an August 2009 visit)

New Asia Market

At an apple a day, that's nearly a two-month supply. Undersized, sour crabapples like these ($1) are sold in shrink-wrapped snack packs by many of Lowell's Asian markets, typically with a bindle of chili salt. In New York the only specimens I've seen at market were much larger, though small crabapples do occasionally appear in condiment form.

New Asia Market
351 Market St. (Dummer-Worthen Sts.), Lowell, Massachusetts
978-441-9936
(From an August 2009 visit)

Battambang Market

Expansive market, with room to fill out its shelves still further. This bac bin ($1.30) was a more commercial version of the shredded-yuca pastry I picked up at the homier, unaffiliated Battambang Market in Revere.

Battambang Market
101 Church St. (George-Lawrence Sts.), Lowell, Massachusetts
978-454-1128
(From an August 2009 visit)

Yummy Express

Fish sour soup ($4): skin-on tilapia with many little bones, but lots of meat, too.

Yummy Express
21 Branch St. (near Nichols St.), Lowell, Massachusetts
978-458-6825
(From a September 2011 visit)

Grand Duke of Lithuania Vytautas Club

The DLKV was founded in 1920 on a (small) wave of Lithuanian immigration to Lowell, and rededicated during the 1950s even as the Soviet Union tightened border restrictions. Today the community is senescent. St. Joseph, home to a Lithuanian Catholic congregation for nearly a century, celebrated its final mass in 2003. As for the club, its door is still open in theory but apparently not often opened in practice.

Grand Duke of Lithuania Vytautas Club
477 Central St. (Union-North Sts.), Lowell, Massachusetts
(From an August 2009 visit)

Casa de Carnes Solucao

As used here, "açougue Brasileiro" — "Brazilian butcher" — is likely less a reference to a country of birth than to a specialty in meat trimmed to South American tastes. This day, however, I didn't have the appetite to ascertain whether this is truly the case.

Casa de Carnes Solucao
171 Appleton St. (at South St.), Lowell, Massachusetts
(From an August 2011 visit)

Elliot's Original Hot Dogs

Would you believe, that's with "the works."

Uneeda Biscuit

Package offer.

"No dumping, flows to river"

Same story, different script.

The Hood's building

Founded in the 1870s, C.I. Hood & Co. was a manufacturer of patent medicines to treat coughs and colds, headache, and heartburn, as well as long-forgotten maladies such as scrofula, salt-rheum, catarrh, and clergyman's sore throat.