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By
John Fladd They
are also a great way to get to know your community. • Manchester is an increasingly ethnically-diverse city. • It is important to gain at least some small insights into the cultures that make up the population of a city like Manchester. • One great way to be introduced to a new culture is through its food. • Trying new and foreign foods can be intimidating, but a fairly painless way to ease into a new cuisine is through its condiments. It takes a huge leap of courage to eat a dish from the Philippines made from aged duck eggs. It is infinitely easier to try Filipino banana sauce on your French fries. Condiment diversity comes to the Queen City Manchester is much more diverse than it used to be. According to the new figures from the U.S. Census, there are approximately 107,000 people living in Manchester. Of that population, 98,000 are white. That figure is deceptive. While the city’s population as a whole has remained relatively static, growing by approximately 7 percent between 1990 and 2000, its minority population more than doubled, from approximately 3,000 to more than 7,000 (or even more, depending on how the city’s Hispanic population is counted). Nowhere is this change more apparent than in Manchester’s food scene. Manchester has its fair share of ethnic restaurants, but the city has bloomed as a retail food destination, according to chef Brigid Flanigan, an assistant professor at the Culinary Institute at New Hampshire College. “It’s interesting,” she says. “You look and you see that the restaurants in town are just coming into their own but there’s a definite presence in town among ethnic grocery stores - a Caribbean presence, an Asian one - it’s really diverse. You can walk into a grocery store now and find a jar of pico de gallo as easily as mayonnaise. That’s a great development.” Flanigan views condiments as an important tool for getting a grip on new types of food. The key, she says, is to not overwhelm yourself with a new cuisine. “Condiments are wonderful that way,” she explains. “They’re a shortcut to a cuisine. A lot of things are just too much on your first try to take in all at once. If you add a teaspoonful or two of a condiment into your coleslaw, on the other hand, then suddenly you have something quite different.” Another advantage to experimenting with condiments, Flanigan explains, is that most of them come in relatively small packages. “You’re not locked into a 32-ounce jar of something you might not like,” she explains. “These are foods from cultures where 13-cubic-foot refrigerators are not the norm. The rest of the world shops every day and buys their food in small quantities.” According to Flanigan, there is one additional bonus to using imported condiments - to a large extent, what you see is what you get. “You see this especially with Asian condiments,” she says. “They’re very direct; for the most part. They have labels like ‘Hot Chili Sauce with Garlic’ - they don’t fool around with cutesie names.” Having the flavor of a new food explained explicitly can be particularly useful to someone who is just starting to experiment with a new type of food, she points out. The question
remains, however - which condiments are worth trying and which ones
aren’t? Manchester has dozens of superettes and small grocery stores,
each one of which is stocked with what seems like 872 different sauces,
salsas, mustards, chutneys, curry pastes and marinades. Just getting
started is a daunting process. Jufran
Banana Sauce Grace
Caribbean Style Hot Pepper Sauce Marco
Polo Mild Ajvar La
Costena Taquera Sauce (Hot) Lee
Kum Kee Peanut Flavored Sauce Tekemalli
Delcious Sauce From Russia La
Botanera Hot Sauce Kamis
Musztarda Grillowa Mang
Tomas Sauce For Roasts (Hot and Spicy) The future is tasty Looking at this brief overview of condiments, a natural question arises where do we go from here? This is where the census figures are especially telling. Manchester’s
Hispanic population has tripled in the past 10 years. The Black and
Asian populations have each doubled. In 1990 the Black population
was 968. Ten years later, it is now 2,246. In 1990 there were 1092
Asians. Today there are 2,487, according to most recent U.S. Census
figures. Following the growing population trends, stores have opened to serve these more diverse populations, which bodes well for the city’s supply of jerk sauces, chutneys and salsas. For example, just last year the Siagon Market opened. Today it serves a diverse Indian and Asian population. In thirty years, your grandchildren may be able to find more and more interesting and exotic condiments to put on their tater-tots. John
Fladd can be reached at johnfladd@hotmail.com.
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