By Joel Denker

The taste of the passion fruit ice tea lingered on our palate throughout the meal. The drink seemed fitting in a restaurant whose inventive creole kitchen under the leadership of Paul Petit has been turning out gumbo, jerked shrimp, Caribbean chicken curry, guava-laced barbecue, Southern fried chicken, and other dishes since its opening. My wife, Peggy, and I were enjoying a meal at Rocky’s Cafe, an Adams-Morgan eatery (Rocky’s Cafe, 1817 Columbia Road, Tel. 387-2580.)

Owner Rocky Scott was drawn to passion fruit because of its “tropical” associations. She infuses her hurricanes with passion fruit puree. The drink blends the puree with orange, pineapple, and lime juice with doses of light and dark rum and triple sec. Petit also uses it in the restaurant’s chutneys. The tingle of the fruit enhanced my sorbet dessert. Its tartness balanced the creaminess of Peggy’s cheese cake.

The taste brought back memories of the year I spent in the Indian Ocean city of Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania, the East African country. It was in this sizzling port that I made an early acquaintance with passion fruit. I always had the juice on my weekly excursions to Haleeds, an Arabic-Persian hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Dar. Its fresh acidity went well with my standard order of moushkaki, spicy chunks of beef barbecued on a grill outside the restaurant, and chapati, the Indian round bread.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, the fruit contributed to the sensation of Hawaiian Punch, one of my favorite childhood drinks. The large blue can of tropical potion passed for exotica during the barren 1950s.

Despite these experiences, I knew little of passion fruit lore and history. I set out to plumb its mysteries by reading botanists, agronomists, and culinary specialists.

The fruit, which I assumed to be African, actually originated in the Americas. Purple and yellow passion fruit, the most widely marketed species, were native to Brazil, the world’s largest grower of the products. It was later transplanted to Australia, New Zealand, East Africa, and South Africa. It is also grown in Florida and California.

In the Caribbean and Latin America, the egg-shaped fruit was made into jams and jellies, sauces, sherbets, and ice creams. Passion fruit refrescos, cooling and richly aromatic drinks, are immensely popular. Condensed milk is often added to make a juicy shake.

The Puerto Ricans call it parcha. The Dominican name is chinita. The most common word for the fruit in the Spanish speaking countries is granadilla, “little pomegranate,” an allusion to the many brown and black seeds that fill its orange-yellow pulp.

The Brazilian word for passion fruit is maracuya, a name they took from the Indians. The maracuya, which refers to both the plant and the fruit, is a climbing vine known as much for its brilliant blooms of white, orange, red, and purple flowers as for its bounty of luscious fruit. (Its scientific name, passiflora, refers to the flowering plant.)

The flower provides the hummingbird a perfect landing spot for pollination. The pollen brushes off the bird’s forehead while it is drinking the nectar. So well-harmonized are the bird and the flower that some scientists believe that the plant and many hummingbird species in the tropics evolved together.

The ideal setting for the vine is in the wildness of the tropical rain forest. Nurtured by heat and humidity, the vine can climb 15 to 20 feet a year. Clinging with its tendrils, the maracuya pushes its way to the canopy of the forest.

Spanish missionaries in Latin America transformed the flowers into religious symbols. In the eyes of the proselytizing Christians, each segment of the flower became an emblem of the crucifixion.

Jacomo Bosio, a 17th century monastic scholar working on a treatise in Rome on the Cross of Calvary, popularized the image of a sacred flower. Bosio seized on the drawings and descriptions of a singular flower sent by priests from “New Spain.” He wrote that the flower represented Christ’s torture. The floral crown with its blood red fringe symbolized the crown of thorns, “the Scourge with which our blessed Lord was tormented.” Its 72 filaments represented the exact number of thorns on Christ’s head. The three stigmas stood for the three nails on the cross and the stamens for the five wounds Jesus suffered.

The Christian fathers began calling the plant “passion flower” to evoke the Passion of Christ, his trials and sufferings before his death. Missionaries used the flower in their campaigns to convert the Indians. It was a tool, writer Clara Ines Olaja argues, to teach “the infidel Indian the truculent history of the passion of Christ.”

Maracuya is also valued for its medicinal properties. Walter Mors in his Medicinal Plants of Brazil reports that a calming tea brewed from its leaves is used a remedy for insomnia and for respiratory ailments. Italian chemists have extracted a natural tranquillizer, passiflorina, from its leaves. Some Brazilians turn to passion fruit juice for a heart tonic.

This fruit was more than an object of pleasure. It fused the sensual and the spiritual. A secularist myself, I wrestled with the seeming contradiction. As I pondered the paradox, it heightened my enthusiasm for the fruit rather than dampening it.

A trip to the Grill from Ipanema, a Brazilian restaurant not far from Rocky’s on the other side of Columbia Road that featured some novel passion fruit creations, would be a test of my commitment (Grill From Ipanema, 1858 Columbia Road, Tel., 986-0757). I ordered the batida, a blended drink which combined passion fruit, vodka, and cachaca, a powerful sugar cane brandy, whose name food writers Cora, Rose, and Bob Brown link to the Portugese word cachacao (“cuff on the neck”). Sugar and a little condensed milk are added to the confection. The pleasing sourness of the passion fruit, teamed with the bite of the alcohol, packed a wallop.

A passion fruit mousse capitalized on the maracuya’s distinctive flavor. Its astringency played off the rich cream of the dessert. The religious and the hedonistic alike would have approved of my evening’s intoxication.

 

Originally published in The InTowner: http://intowner.com/food-in-the-hood/