This weekend was hot. Even 30 feet in the air.
Suzen and I were walking the High Line, the remarkable park in the sky on the West Side of Lower Manhattan. An old, rusting elevated train line near the Hudson was scheduled to be torn down. Instead, it has become a park, running 1 ½ miles parallel to the river and lurking over 10th Avenue. The HIgh Line is a meadering maze of mini-gardens ranging from grasses to broad leaf magnolias. There are benches, an airborne theater, and outlooks to watch the traffic to the east and the Hudson to the west. Millions of people come to trek this narrow park, just two rail lines wide.
Even the trees could not shelter us from the heat. But the High Line offers more than interesting pathways and vegetation. There is food. Local food.
At about 18th Street you encounter the cart from Fany Gerson’s LaNewYorkina. In the cart is a wondrous variety of Mexican ice pops or paletas. It may seem an oxymoron but, yes, a jalapeno ice pop can cool you off.
Entrepreneur and author Fany Gerson wrote the charming My Sweet Mexico in 2010 and immediately followed in 2011 with Paletas: Authentic Recipes for Mexican Ice Pops, Shaved Ice and Agua Frescas. Three years later, it is not clear if global warming is real or not — we’ve had a wet and cold summer upstate. But it is clear that Paletas is a book whose value and utility is expanding.
Ice pops are a growing industry. Fany’s firm is on the High Line, and so is People’s Pops [yes, they have a book, too, and yes it will appear here soon]. We all grew up with popsicles. And then they largely went away from our refrigerator shelves, replaced by Hagen Das and Godiva and Ben and Jerry’s. We’ve been swamped with chocolate and cream. We lost our fruit beginnings.
Paletas takes us back to those beginnings with a vengeance. Here are fruit treats galore, some apparently obvious and some radically new [at least to someone born north of the border]:
- Strawberry
- Cantaloupe
- Avocado
- Hibiscus-Raspberry
- Spice Tomato-tequila
- Roasted Banana
- Pecan
- Mexican Chocolate
- Caramel [of course!]
Yes, as a kid I think maybe once I had a strawberry popsicle. I don’t recall avocado popsicles in Portland.
For a dinner party this weekend, Suzen and I are on the hook for dessert. Our friends expect cake or pie or cookies. I am lobbying Suzen to bring Roasted Banana Ice Pops. In this one, roasted bananas are mixed with milk, cream, sugar, vanilla, rum and some other goodies. The mixture is frozen into pops and then can be licked into oblivion.
I’ll let you know if I succeed. My backup plan, should Roasted Banana fail to intrigue my wife, is a duo of Mexican Chocolate and Spiced Tomato-Tequila. Or, or, maybe we should do all three?
Besides the ice pops, there are two other excellent sections to Paletas. Raspados or shaved ices come in exciting flavors including:
- Tamarind
- Dried Apricot
- Mexican Eggnog
And there is a section devoted to agua frescas offering:
- Cucumber-Lime
- Guava
- Hibiscus
- Beet
- Cacao-Corn [Aztec-inspired]
As you can see, Paletas presents you with a barrage of sometimes sophisticated, always authentic and possibly new flavors — unless you were fortunate to grow up in Latin America and have already had the pleasure of these treats.
The remarkable thing to me is that these delights have existed in our neighboring cultures for decades if not hundreds of years — I don’t think the Aztecs had a lot of shaved ice. But this abundance of flavor has taken too long to percolate northward. Enjoy the ice pop revolution. Sample the treats of Paletas.