Luxury Eats

Growing up in the suburbs of New Jersey, I never had much use for Easter Sunday. In my town, restaurants and stores closed early as people gathered at home with their families, leaving the empty streets to us bored heathen teens with no better option than to hang out at the local Dunkin Donuts. The day felt interminable. I never looked forward to it.

Now I have a better reason to dread Easter Sunday: it marks the end of fanesca season.

Ecuadorians celebrate Holy Week, the days before Easter Sunday, by preparing fanesca, a delicious, labor-intensive, and unbelievably rich soup of salt cod stewed in milk. Traditionally, fanesca contains twelve different kinds of grains — including many types of beans, hominy, and even tiny potatoes — one for each of the apostles. Last year, with my curiosity piqued by a Calvin Trillin article that had appeared in The New Yorker six months earlier, I decided to track down fanesca here in New York. It didn’t take much work — the first restaurant that I called assured me that they had plenty of the soup on hand.

We arrived at El Tesoro, in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, late on Good Friday. Even at that hour, the restaurant was busy, awash in neon colors and packed with Ecuadorian expatriates. Unsure of how big the portions would be — and unaware of how filling fanesca is — we each ordered our own serving, and requested a ceviche for the table. We didn’t realize our mistake until after the waitress had brought us our order. As we ate, we marveled at the meal. It was dazzling — especially the soup, which was nearly overwhelming in its complexity. Each spoonful rewarded us with distinct recombinations of ingredients; there were flavor and textural variations in every bite. But it all seemed like just a bit too much food. Soon our waitress arrived bearing plates of whole fried fish alongside heaps of rice and beans: one for each of us. We hadn’t ordered this, we objected, but she explained that it came with the fanesca. Oh, yes. We had ordered far too much food.

But how could we say no? Everything tasted great, and we knew that we wouldn’t have a chance to eat fanesca again for 51 weeks. So we did our best, only reluctantly setting aside the last of the fanesca to take home. We did that to leave room for the dessert we had ordered ahead of time: humitas, the Ecuadorian version of sweet corn tamales. (Humitas, a close relative of Mexican-American green corn tamales, had been a favorite dish of mine on an early trip to Ecuador, and they were as good as I remembered.)

By the time we left El Tesoro several hours had elapsed, and we were no longer feeling light on our feet. Still, the experience had been worth it — now we only had to figure out how to pass the next 51 weeks idly until fanesca was available once more.

Even more so than the inevitable scent of suntan lotion, it's the taste of fresh coconut juice that marks the beginning of warm weather.

Walking around in a pleasant, warmth-induced daze this afternoon, I decided to make a several-block detour in order to enjoy the first fresh young coconut of the season. Outside of a favorite Chinatown grocery, I stood behind a flirtatiously bantering (proto?-)couple as they waited for the grocer to lop the tops off their coconuts. Ah, spring.

The couple moved on, I asked for a coconut of my own, and waited. But not long; the grocer quickly scalped the fruit and handed it to me with a straw. I began to walk, but at the first taste of the juice — standing on a busy Chinatown corner — I had to stop and get my bearings. Where did I want to sit and enjoy this? The juice was better than anything I remembered. It was sweeter, and fresher, too. Without wandering too far, I sat down on a stoop in direct sunlight, enjoying every sip and trying to make the juice — and the experience — last.

Then I walked the five paces back to the grocer and asked him to split the fruit open so that I could get at the coconut meat inside. He laid the nut on the sidewalk and thwacked it with his cleaver. Short of actually being in the tropics, this was a fantastic way to experience warm weather.