It's a Miracle!

A real taste changer. Along with a vintage holiday menu filled with surprises.

I remember the first time I tried Miracle fruit. I was a total skeptic, putting the bright red berry into my mouth and then taking a big bite of lemon. It worked! The sourness was gone, leaving behind nothing but a flood of sweetness in my mouth.

For a while I kept the berries in my office as a kind of parlor trick, offering them around like gumdrops just to watch the look of amazement on people’s faces. But then I discovered that the plants are covered with pretty flowers in the summer and really lovely.

Miracle Plants make wonderful gifts, especially at this time of year when they seem like little tropical Christmas trees. They’re an especially thoughtful gift for people undergoing chemotherapy, which often interferes with the sense of taste. Miracle Plants are also good gifts for diabetics since they give people a chance to avoid sugar and still experience sweetness.

You can find Miracle Plants any number of places: this one is in Connecticut and this one and this one in Florida

But you don’t have to grow your own. Miracle Fruit comes in many guises: a site called Mberry sells everything from tablets to freeze-dried berries and potted plants. Even Goldbelly has jumped on the bandwagon, selling freeze-dried Miracle Berry cubes.

This menu from the fifties fascinates me; it’s a classic hotel holiday meal, but the language is nothing like what you would have found had you celebrated Thanksgiving in a restaurant last week.

Modern menus emphasize the seasonal, local nature of their ingredients. Things were different in the fifties. This Hollywood menu starts off with a California fruit salad, and then travels all the way across the country to source its shrimp back east. Then it’s off to Utah for celery.

Utah Celery? Turns out that’s a real vegetable, developed in the early twentieth century and famous for its stringless stalks and mild sweet flavor. Known as Tall Utah celery (the stalks reach over a foot), it’s still available today. But I’ve never seen it listed on a menu. Have you?

But our traveling’s not over. Now we’re off to Carolina for yams. Were they really sourced in North Carolina? Certainly possible: the state is still America’s major sweet potato producer.

As for those silverskin onions - another term that’s new to me - they’re nothing more than our old friend pearl. Creamed of course.

For the beef we’re back East again. Surprising, given that California has a long and distinguished ranching history.

The menu offers a final anomaly: York Ham. That turns out to be dry-cured ham that’s been made from Large White pigs in England for many centuries. But unlike proscuitto, jamon iberico or most dry-cured hams which are sliced thin and served cold, this one is meant to be served hot. The tradition has all but disappeared, but if you’d like to read about it, there’s an interesting history here from a butcher in Yorkshire

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