Not Southern Cooking

I grew up on a diet of Southern cooking. Corn bread. Country ham. Biscuits. (For UK readers, our biscuits are your cookies.) String beans and butter beans cooked with ham hocks. Skillet fried corn-off-the-cob with bacon drippings. Black-eyed peas. Skillet fried chicken. Full-flavored home-grown tomatoes. Pan-fried mashed potato patties. Grits with red-eye gravy. All these things and many more. And on the counter beside the stovetop stood a large container of bacon drippings. Southerners believe that there’s not much you can cook in a skillet that won’t taste better if you add bacon drippings.

But my once mostly-vanilla city has acquired a small but significant Mexican population. New foods have invaded the grocery store. I see tables filled with what I can only describe as weird stuff. I don’t know what these things are, nor do I know what to do with many of them. So one day I pulled out my phone and took photos.

	This is a batata. Batata is the Spanish word for sweet potato. (Patata is the Spanish word for potato.) It’s a different color from the sweet potatoes I buy, but then, there are many varieties of sweet potato.
	These are aloe vera leaves. If a leaf is cut open there is a gel inside. The gel is not toxic but the green leaf material contains carcinogens. It also causes gastric distress when eaten.
	These are cactus leaves. An edible cactus known as nopales was the vegetable of the month (March 2016) on WebMD, which states that its popularity is increasing in the United States.
	This is a ñame negro, which is Spanish for black yam. It’s pronounced nyah-may nay-gro. (The ‘r’ is rolled.) The ñame negro looks like nothing so much as a little log for my fireplace. This plant comes from Jamaica.
	This is a ñame yellow, or yellow yam, from Jamaica. I might try eating one of these. Just kidding.
	This is a malanga coco from Mexico. According to the folks at Vega Produce, it has a “woodsy taste with a hint of black walnut.” It is also known as yautia, big taro root, cocoyam, Japanese potato, tannia, and eddo.
	Speaking of eddo, this is a malanga eddo. It’s actual name is eddoe or eddo, but it’s called a malanga in Spanish-speaking places. It was developed in China and Japan and introduced into the West Indies, where it is called a Chinese eddo.
	This is a water coconut. It’s just an immature coconut that contains mostly liquid and no coconut meat. Coconut water is low in calories, is fat-free and cholesterol-free, with more potassium than four bananas.  It has sugar and contains those tasty “electrolytes” we see on the labels of sports drinks.
	This is yautia white. It is taro root and looks similar to malanga, but malanga grows larger.

These foods are merely a sample; there are other mysterious produce items at the store. I’ve wondered if any of these foods are cooked with butter or ham hocks or bacon drippings. Maybe in southern Mexico.