November 2020: THE CHAYOTE GLOBETROTTERS
In light of the current COVID-19 pandemic stifling human mobility and redefining the dynamics of social interactions, The Kitchen Scholar will continue to promote virtual distancing in the kitchen, albeit through a different approach. Instead of focusing on several ethnic dishes or national delicacies, which is what the website generally did last month on Georgian cuisine, I decided to concentrate on a particular ingredient and place it under the gaze of different countries and cultures, thus turning the home kitchen into a gateway of vicarious travel and tourism.
Demographics and accessibility were the criteria behind the main ingredient this month. Since launching the website three months ago, I noticed the Philippines as the largest audience of The Kitchen Scholar, accounting to three quarters of the population. Certainly, this statistical result may have an algorithmic connection with me being based in the same country and with Filipinos being the largest social media consumers in the world. With the goal of culinary and gastronomic education in mind, I chose a vegetable that almost every website visitor can afford and relate to if they want to learn how to cook and expand their taste buds, in hopes that they can find inspiration from foreign perspectives, break their conceited walls of isolationist cookery, and push the evolution of local cuisine toward the next step. An eligibility assessment led me to arrive at the globetrotting but humble chayote as the theme for this month.
A member of the squash or gourd family, chayote or Sechium edule rivals, if not surpasses, carrots for the title of “Most Versatile Vegetable Crop”. The prickly pear-shaped fruit, which most people are familiar with, is consumable whether raw, cooked, or preserved, is compatible with all known culinary methods, and can manifest as a salad, a soup, a main course, and even a dessert. Like its cucurbit relatives, the seeds and the vine leaves and tendrils are edible and find their respective places as a light snack and a vegetarian stir-fry. Meanwhile, the hard tubers, when mature, are equally palatable, similar to any root vegetable. In terms of botanical utility for the kitchen and the dining table, no other vegetable is as solely prodigious as the chayote.
The culinary versatility of chayote is a product of its colonialism-triggered diaspora. Before the transatlantic Age of “Exploration”, the dietary distribution of chayotes was only within equatorial civilizations lying between North and South America. From Mesoamerica, the gospel of chayote spread to the West Indies. Later, Haitian slave traders expanded the agricultural reach of the plant as a slave food to its settlements in Louisiana and East Africa. The transpacific galleon trade between Acapulco and Manila helped the chayote extend across the Indochinese region. For this reason, chayote has circumnavigated the world by sea.
By limiting the emphasis on the fruit, The Kitchen Scholar will feature an eclectic number of chayote dishes this month, representing diverse nationalities and ethnicities and manifesting in different plated servings of an ordinary meal. The dishes are an eye-opening adventure in the kitchen worthy of exploring, and I can only hope for my audience and visitors to show a greater degree of cultural and gastronomic appreciation.
