Farmer's Market -- 22 July 2107 (Ryegrass Day, 4th of Heat, Year 225)

[neotoma]

Pita, spanakopita, mixed tomato-cheese handpie, olive bread, melomakarona, mango donut peaches, regular peaches, shiro plums, blueberries, yellow sweet cherries, a half-gallon of Mocha Moo, cheese curds, 3 lb of ivory and purple bell peppers , and spicebush (now called 'sorghum', because no one knew was 'spicebush' was) vinegar.

I made blackberry preserves and cut up the fruit for mixed stone fruit jam -- about half sour cherries, the rest plums, nectarines, and donut peaches -- to cook up tomorrow.

Comments

[temve]

I thought sorghum was a kind of millet? *confused*

We had a similar thing the other week though, when I was trying to figure out the English word for the bitter herb known as Raute in German or ruta in Latin (which is used in my favourite Roman recipe), and when Wikipedia told us it was 'rue', I was like 'oh... Shakespeare!'. Never dawned on me rue was a herb :)

[neotoma]

Sorghum isn't considered a millet in the USA, though I know it is in other parts of the world -- millet being a category of small-grained cereal. It's popularly grown in the USA as animal feed, biofuel, sweet sorghum syrup (traditionally used in southern states as if it were molasses), gluten-free foods and increasingly in alcohol.

The alcohol is the important part here -- the vinegar maker makes all of his stuff from scratch, and uses sorghum for the base and spicebush as the flavor in the variety I bought, so he just switched the name because everyone recognizes 'sorghum' as something edible, but he was having to explain 'spicebush' over and over -- even though it was his best-seller in person.

Ah. Yeah, I don't know that a lot of native English speakers know that rue is a herb -- it's not used that much in meat-and-potatoes style American cuisine. I do know that the plant vendor at the Takoma Park farmer's market has carried it for sale, though.

And yeah, that scene in Shakespeare is only sometimes acted with actually flowers, even though Ophelia is giving ones out with pointed meanings, so I'm not surprised rue didn't register as a herb.