By Joel Denker
We had to be taught to eat and enjoy the once-exotic food. The avocado, the ancient fruit so vital to the indigenous peoples of the Americas, is eaten by most of us as a party dip or restaurant appetizer. Most of the guacamole we scarf down is consumed during our annual bacchanals, the Super Bowl and Cinco de Mayo. How many of us have ever sampled avocado soup or savored the fragrance of an avocado leaf? Gladys Fernandes, a waitress at El Tamarindo, the Salvadoran restaurant, once told me that the avocado of her homeland “huele bien” (smells good). In Latin America, the avocado is commonly treated as a basic staple. Families grow the tree in their door yards. “Four of five tortillas, an avocado and a cup of coffee—this is a good meal,” a Guatemalan saying put it. In an earlier day it was dubbed the “poor man’s butter.”
A member of the laurel family—which includes cinnamom, bay leaf, and sassafras—the avocado plant shares their tantalizing aroma. The curious tropical vegetable, anatomically actually a fruit, has long been a source of puzzlement. It has been variously called alligator pear, avocado pear, butter fruit, and butter pear. In Mexico, where seeds dating back to 7000 B.C. have been discovered, the Aztecs called the tree “ahuacacuahatl.” The “testicle tree” bears fruits that hang in pairs from long stalks. The Spaniards shortened the name to aguacate.
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To learn more about avocado, see The Carrot Purple and Other Curious Stories of the Food We Eat, coming in October from Rowman & Littlefield: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442248861/The-Carrot-Purple-and-Other-Curious-Stories-of-the-Food-We-Eat.
