Walking home on Saturday evening, I was struck by an uncommonly heavy aroma hanging on the breeze - sweet, very pleasant in fact (not at all the typical hutong smells of public toilets, fouled drains, and questionably 'delicious' local foods), and oh-so-familiar, yet I couldn't quite place it at first.
Of course - pineapple.
Quartered, freshly peeled pineapples, stored in buckets of weak syrup to keep them moist and served on a stick, are a popular summertime street snack in Beijing. And last Saturday - one of the first really sunny days to fall on a weekend this year - was obviously a bumper day for the pineapple vendors. On that short walk home, I must have passed dozens of sanlunche (the flatbed tricycles which are still the primary means of delivering produce here) parked up on the side of the street, piled with shavings of pineapple skin - like the found collage below.
One of the better things about the Beijing summer - although I don't think I've ever encountered quite such an intensely pineappley smell on the night air before. This was a somewhat freakish occurrence, but a very pleasant one.
4 comments:
Salivary glands: involuntarily activated. PINEAPPLE. Since it doesn't grow well around here, the most I encounter on a regular basis is in a) a sterile stack of a dozen at the big commercial market, b) sad pale squares displayed in plastic fruit platters, or c) (strangely enough, the freshest-tasting) cans. I love imagining this much of it, fresh, carved up, concentrated, all over the streets of the city. Thanks for sharing!
Not for the first time, I find myself berating the uselessness of my pocket digital camera. I found some of these patterns-of-peel quite fascinating, but I was completely unable to get a decent shot of them.
When I first saw this post title and photo the other day, before reading the text, I thought it was a photo of some sort of noodles -- and/or fried eggs. Which would have made the title much less happy-sounding!
The Missus has been dieting in recent months (so have I, less wholeheartedly). We've rediscovered the pleasures of fresh and, well, unprepared fruit in that time, especially pineapple. I think I may have to serve some up to myself in a few minutes...
Yes, unwholesome fried foods do account for the majority of our street snackage here, and so the smell of burning oil does tend to be rather stronger on the breeze than the sweetness of fresh fruit.
The most pungent smell is chou doufu, 'stinky tofu', which - like very ripe cheese - is supposed to have a much more satisfying flavour, if you can get beyond the fact that the smell makes you gag. Fried in streetside woks, it generates a distinctive - overpowering - stench, part old socks and part burning rubber.
Post a Comment