As ketchup is to Americans, as soy sauce is to Chinese, the favorite condiment in ancient Rome was garum, an anchovy sauce.

While the Roman Empire is long gone, a form of garum is alive and well. Today it’s called colatura di alici, or juice of anchovies. (It’s also called anchovy sauce or anchovy syrup; the latter is inaccurate, as a syrup is a thick, viscous liquid.)

As strange as “anchovy juice” may sound, colatura is an aromatic condiment that enhances any dish, adding flavor without fuss.

Ask any great Italian chef, and you’ll probably find that colatura is their secret ingredient (it’s an umami food). Chef Lidia Bastianich told the Wall Street Journal just that. She uses a touch of colatura instead of salt.

Colatura (the word comes from the Latin colare, to strain) is made by curing anchovies with salt and extracting the free-run liquid that drains from them. It’s a laborious and painstaking process to create a truly artisan food.

In fact, prior to the 20th century, Italian families would make their own colatura for home use and for gifts.

Today, they can use this time for other pursuits thanks to Cetara, a small fishing village on Italy’s Amalfi Coast. The town produces colatura as an heirloom food.

Is colatura a great secret waiting to be discovered? We think so. Even if you’re not an anchovy fan, colatura is a wonderful blending ingredient, adding a briny, zesty flavor that isn’t fishy. Unlike anchovy paste and Southeast Asian fish sauces such as nam pla and nuoc mam,* the flavor is briny (so use less salt in the recipe).
 
 
Pick up a bottle of colatura di alici online for yourself or your favorite cook. It’s also available on Amazon.

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*Colatura is the free-run juice of salted anchovies, a richer product than most southeast Asian fish sauces. The latter is brine in which fish (or fish parts) have been pickled.
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WAYS TO USE COLATURA DI ALICI

Over the decades, what was once a melt-in-your-mouth confection has acquired the personality of a cotton ball—but not as soft.

In the early 1950s, Kraft Foods developed a technique to make vast quantities of marshmallows commercially. The process drastically changed the delicate texture of handmade marshmallows, and the use of artificial flavors made the airy delight much less delightful. While mass-produced marshmallows are fun to pop into hot chocolate or toast for s’mores, how many of us enjoy eating them straight from the bag?

So today’s tip is: Seek out handmade gourmet marshmallows from a marshmallow specialist.

Think of gourmet marshmallows as you would fine chocolate. They’re an all-occasion gift with the bonus of being fat-free and gluten-free.

If there’s no artisan confectioner near you (or in your specialty foods store), check out our recommendations for the best gourmet marshmallows.

Brush up on the history of marshmallows.

FOOD TRIVIA

Marshmallows get their name from the marsh mallow plant (Althea officinalis), the root of which contains a sticky, white, almost jelly-like substance. The Egyptians combined it with honey as early as 2000 B.C.E., to make a candy.

Take these purple green beans, known as Royalty Purple Pods. While they were introduced in 1957, have you ever seen them? The trick is to arrive at farmers markets early in the day, before the unusual veggies sell out.

While the skin of the Royalty Purple Pod is purple, there’s a green bean underneath. The purple skin turns green when cooked. To retain the color, you can butter baste them in a pan. If you boil them, a pinch of baking soda in the water will help a bit.

Losing the lovely purple color is no fun. So we like to serve these unusual green beans raw:

But how can you resist a purple green bean? Even people who eschew green beans can be tempted to take a bite.

So today’s tip is: Look for something new and different at your farmers market. Make your goal a weekly fun food discovery. Then tell us what you found, and how you served it.

FOOD TRIVIA: What’s the difference between green beans and string beans?

The French call them haricots vert (green beans), the Brits call them French beans, and Americans call them green beans or string beans. The term “string bean” refers to the string that ran up the seam of the bean. It had to be removed before cooking.

The first “stringless” bean was bred in 1894 by Calvin Keeney, in Le Roy, New York, a town in western New York state that is also the is the birthplace of Jell-O.

Today, just about every bean sold commercially is a stringless bean; but the original name has been passed down through generations and is a legacy.
  

Chocolate panini: breakfast, snack or
dessert. Photo courtesy Vosges Haut
Chocoalt.

*Pain au chocolat is often called a chocolate croissant in the U.S., but this is incorrect; Croissant means crescent, and pain au chocolat is not crescent-shaped.

Katrina Markoff, founder of Vosges Haut Chocolat, was inspired to port the concept to Italian panini. From her large repertoire of chocolate bars, she selected her Oaxaca chocolate bar, 75% cacao bittersweet chocolate with guajillo and pasilla chiles. (Oaxaca [wuh-HAH-kuh] is a state in Southern Mexico thought to be the birthplace of chocolate cultivation.)

Adding raisins evokes Mexicao’s mole sauces. If you want to get even more creative, consider adding other mole sauce ingredients such as cinnamon, peanuts or pepitas.

Ingredients For One Serving

 
†Spiced chocolate bars return to the roots of chocolate, first served as a spicy drink by the Olmec and Maya. Vosges also makes a Red Fire bar: dark chocolate with ancho and chipotle Chiles and cinnamon.

Chop suey was first available to non-Chinese Americans in the mid-19th century, when Chinese restaurants began to appear outside of Chinatown areas. The dish was received with much acclaim [source].
There are several myths about how chop suey was invented in the U.S.

Chop Suey is actually a prominent dish in Taishan, in the Guangdong province of southeast China. It is a city of 95 islands and islets in the Pearl River Delta.

A dish called tsap seui is common in the area, and Guangdong province was the home of many early Chinese immigrants to the U.S. [source]. Thus, when immigrants from that area opened restaurants, it was on the menu.

In a stir-fry recipe, chop suey means “assorted pieces.” These can include beef, chicken, quail eggs or other cooked eggs, fish, pork, and/or shrimp, plus vegetables such as bean sprouts, cabbage, celery, and snow peas. Starch is added to create a thickened sauce from the oil and wok drippings.

What today we’d call a stir-fry, back then Americans called chop suey a stew.

American variations have included vegetables popular that are not in the original Taishan recipe; for example, broccoli, carrots, onions and zucchini. Numerous American recipes also “specialize”: beef chop suey or chicken chop suey, for example, instead of a mixture of proteins.

Chop suey went from exciting to mundane when Chinese immigrants realized the business opportunity of serving chop suey and other Southern Chinese dishes to Americans of all classes.

It was then that the authenticity of the dishes began to decline.

When a Chinese statesman visited New York City in 1903, he was shocked to find hundreds of Chinese restaurants serving substandard Chinese cuisine.

“As for what they call ‘chop suey,’” he fumed, “the cooking skills involved are so subpar that no one in China would ever eat it” [source].

 
 
CHOP SUEY VS. CHOW MEIN

In China, chop suey is typically served with a bowl of rice. Chow mein is chop suey that ditches the rice and adds noodles* to the recipe. In other words, if your “chop suey” contains noodles, it’s chow mein.

For a moment of beauty on National Chop Suey Day, take a look at photo #2, the painting of a chop suey parlor (as some such restaurants were called many years ago) by the American painter Edward Hopper. Here’s more about the painting.

Warning: You can find canned chop suey from La Choy. Caveat emptor: It may be tasty but is far removed from fresh-made chop suey.

> Check out more food histories.
 
 

[2] Edward Hopper, Chop Suey Parlor, 1929 (photo courtesy Wikipedia).

[3] Stir-fry this chicken chop suey. Here’s the recipe (photo © Recipe Tin Eats).

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*There are two styles of chow mein: crispy chow mein, which uses fried, flat noodles; and soft chow mein, which uses spaghetti-style noodles. “Chow mein” means stir-fried noodles. “Subgum” means “numerous and varied,” a chow mein that is a combination of ingredients (see chop suey list above) instead of all vegetable, all chicken, etc.