645: Cake Zine: Forbidden Fruit

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0:31But it is just wild the like sheer number of varieties of fruit that exist in the world. I feel like one of the things that was so interesting about working on this issue and also sort of like, you know, looking through all of these pitches was there are so many fruits that I've never heard of or tasted. And it like really does stir your curiosity. This is Taste. I'm your host, Eliza Barbinell.

0:59Cake Scene is an independent literary food magazine co-founded by pastry chef Tanya Bush and me, taste-contributing editor Eliza Abarbanel. Our newest issue, Forbidden Fruit, explores how fruit fuels temptation, transgression, and fantasy. Today on the show, I invited Tanya into the studio to talk about the editorial process behind this seventh issue and fruits many cultural meanings. Tanya Bush, this is Taste X Cake Zine again. Thank you for coming back on the podcast. Here I am again. It's always such a fun time to get to put our conversations on the record as opposed to the millions of other times we talk during the day.

1:39And we're here to talk about the new issue of Cake Zine Forbidden Fruit. We are. I think it is a really interesting kind of new chapter for Cake Zine in some ways. It's the first time that we are doing a theme that is not necessarily a baked good, although I think fruit does fit into the kind of dessert framework that often cake scene finds itself in. So Forbidden Fruit is our seventh issue. It's exploring how fruit fuels temptation and transgression, and obviously it's tied to this biblical story in some kind of way, although we certainly go far past that. And I'm curious, like, why the forbidden element was of interest to you and kind of like the title that we had landed on.

2:22Well, I think, like, originally we sort of thought of this as our, like, biblical year and forbidden fruit is, you know, inextricably linked to this notion of the tree of knowledge and Adam and Eve's apple. But, you know, I think we have, as we always do, these sort of, like, broad interpretations of forbidden in the context of the magazine. Like I think about like stealing fruit and mangoes and then I think about like contraband. You know, we always have these sort of things that are like, you know, fruit adjacent, but maybe not fruit embodied. So I think of like the mango jewel vape or Jabba, which is like an energy drink in the Nairobi night scene.

3:01And, you know, these sort of like illicit substances that are like, you know, not necessarily thought of as like fruit in the same way, but are like adjacent to the fruit category. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it is just kind of the nature of fruit itself kind of ties into this idea. Maybe not only just forbidden, but just kind of fleeting or transient. I think that like most people live somewhere where there is not the same fruit available all year round. Certainly we can go to the grocery store and buy strawberries wherever because they're being grown all around the world. But to really crave a summer peach in the middle of winter, like that fruit is kind of forbidden in some way because it's out of reach and this thing that you're kind of fantasizing about.

3:43And I think it's interesting to have a theme that can talk about something that is so fleeting. And there are certain fruits that, you know, you can only get in certain parts of the world. You can't always be able to try and kind of have that fantasy element. Totally. Yeah. And I feel like when things are like available less often, they become more coveted. You know, like I think of like hype pastries or like, I don't know, like limited edition collabs or status items. And like, you know, that makes me think of like rhubarb, for example, like fruit is so, you know, seasonal and it's like a signifier of change.

4:12And so like, you know, when I'm baking at the restaurant in the winter, all we have is like apples or maybe like some pears. And when rhubarb hits in the spring, it's like this true luxury and relief. And it, you know, feels like, okay, like time is moving on and we finally have access to this thing that we're all like hungry for, you know, it's spring, it's ushering us into a new season. So I think that, you know, know, like seasonality is a really big part of the issue as well. Yeah, I love that you mentioned that. And I have to say, like, no shade to rhubarb, but I don't think people would like rhubarb nearly as much if it wasn't basically the first new spring piece of produce available.

4:46But it's so pretty. Yeah, but you can't really eat it raw. It's not very juicy. I am a rhubarb fiend in March, April, May, whenever it first becomes available. But last week I was at the farmer's market on the West Coast and my mom goes, oh, rhubarb, do you want some? And I was like, absolutely not. Like, where are the net greens? You're like, out of season. No, thank you. Right. I mean, clearly it is still growing, but it's not that girl anymore because there's other fruits that I would say are better that are available right now instead. What is your like peak summer fruit experience like? I'm so glad you asked.

5:21I think there is a trope in food media that I try not to fall into, but I think I have to, which is the really juicy peach that you eat standing over the sink. Or sometimes I eat a peach in the shower. What? Excuse me? It's like, okay, it's really hot. You have a beautiful peach. That is not hygienic. What do you mean? I'm washing it off. Oh my God. Maybe like I shouldn't tell people this. Maybe this is too freaky, but I think it's good. Why in the shower? Okay. You know, when you have a peach that's so outrageously juicy that you know that it's going to just get everywhere. And you come home from the beach and you're kind of sweaty and hot and you take this peach and then you stand in the cold shower and you eat the peach.

6:03And then you put the pit to the side and then you wash yourself. I have personally never experienced this, but maybe I should try it before August ends. I do think it is just such an audacious thing to indulge in. And I think what I like about summer fruit is it is a little messy and too much and you have to eat it before it goes bad. Like an apple is very sensible for fall. It can last in the fridge for months. But summer fruit, you have to really kind of commit to. That's very true. I recently had a wild watermelon experience. I was visiting my friend Eliana upstate and she like sliced a watermelon in half and then drizzled it with olive oil and a little bit of balsamic and then just like crumbled some feta on top and we went in with spoons and it was a wild like outrageously decadent beautiful fruit experience like I don't think I've had like a salad assembled in the fruit itself before essentially and to me I was like okay this is this is this is summer this is summer embodied I do I do like that do you redo the toppings when you get further into the melon No, because it like soaks into the rest of the melon.

7:14So like the balsamic is sort of like worming its way into the bottom. And as you keep sort of like scooping it with your spoon, it like becomes seasoned entirely. Look, I love a peach shower. I'm down for a spoon melon. I'm transfixed by this. Was it a red or a yellow watermelon? It was a red watermelon. And how do you feel about swallowing the seeds? It depends on if they're like the big black ones or the little white ones. Okay. This one had the big black ones. So I was like spitting them and like having a lot of fun doing that. I felt like I was back in my inner childhood. But I also was like, I think someone somewhere along the way said to me like a watermelon will grow in your stomach if you.

7:58My mom said that to me. And this makes me wish that we had done a story in the issue about a watermelon seed growing in somebody's stomach or a cherry pit or something, because that is such a forbidden fruit thing. That is such a forbidden fruit thing. That's honestly, I don't even think we have a watermelon story, do we? We don't. I think it was really difficult for us to set the lineup for this issue more than any other issue in the past, partially because we received so many pitches. We received over 600 pitches for this issue, which is more than we've received for anything else. And also because we not only were thinking about diversity in terms of the types of stories that were in it and the contributors, but also what fruit was represented.

8:39And we received certain fruits that were like very overrepresented in the pitches and others that didn't really make it in at all. I know we received some watermelon pitches, but I would say that mango is probably the most represented fruit. Yeah, I feel like we got hundreds of mango pitches, which I feel like, I don't know, it's like a particularly like delicious fruit to me. And a lot of people have sort of like childhood associations with it. There's also a lot of apples, I think, which like brings us back to the old an apple a day keeps the doctor away adage or sort of like the American-ness of, you know, apple pie.

9:13But yeah, there were certain fruits that like I think were more popular than others. Yeah, the apple of it all was really interesting to me. One of my favorite pieces in the issue, although they all are so great, is Rafaela Baseli's piece, Mrs. American Pie. She's a Brazilian writer who is writing about moving to New York, falling in love with an American, and also learning to fall in love with apples as a result of this. And the kind of sadness of being a Brazilian who grew up in this tropical paradise with all of these incredible fruits and then having to kind of settle for apples, which I relate to because I grew up on the West Coast where, you know, we have citrus and strawberries basically year round.

9:52And then when I started moving further east for college, I realized that people were kind of obsessed with apples and all these different varietals. And I had to kind of reframe my expectations for fall fruit and kind of like learn to fall in love with apples. How do you get through the fallow winter with just apples? Do you do anything fun to them? Well, I do. Apples are like my bridge fruit, I would say. I feel like late summer we still have stone fruit, other things. Then it's apples. Then in the winter I'm just buying citrus from Florida or California. That's really, I think, the vitamin C that I need.

10:26But I do love an apple with peanut butter. I think that is kind of perfect. 100%. I love an apple sliced with a little bit of cinnamon on top and a little bit of honey. That's my favorite. What's your go-to apple varietal? I think like a Granny Smith, honestly, which feels kind of like a lame answer. But I do love like something really like tart and hard and crisp. And I also love it with peanut butter. And I feel like it's kind of the perfect foil in terms of like textural interplay. You have like the sort of like soft, decadent richness of the peanut butter. And then the apple itself is so like crisp and hard and like never mealy.

11:02And so that's my perfect apple, I think. Yeah, I like a green apple also. There's a kind of apple called Mutsu that I think common at the farmer's markets here in New York that I don't really know what makes it different from a Granny Smith, except for I find them to be a little bit smaller. So I think it's a good size apple to eat like in the hand. Yeah, a Granny Smith can be monstrous. A terrifying apple. It's a lot to embark on. And I do appreciate, I think cutting fruit, as we've said before, can be such a love language. And there's certainly some fruits that you need to cut to eat. But I think my ideal apple can be just kind of crunched on in the hand.

11:41Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, I think that's also why I sort of like lunge for berries in the summer is that I can just like, if I'm making like a jam or a compote at the restaurant or something, I can just like toss a fistful into my mouth. And like there's no preparation involved whatsoever. Well, I think that's what makes donut peaches such an elite summer fruit is that they're easier to eat in the hand as opposed to a kind of bigger peach. They're too sweet to me. They are a little sweet. I think I've seen some farms that have the yellow kind and not just the white kind. And I prefer those because I think they have a little bit more of that kind of tangy spectrum of flavor.

12:14OK, you need to connect me with your rare fruit dealer. Eliza's got the connect, folks. I have been like developing a friendship with a man who sells hard to find fruits close to the Fort Green Farmers Market. He is named Jeffrey and he sells pawpaw, I think are one of his main fruits, which is something I've actually never had before. But I think is coming into season, I think, late summer. It's kind of similar to a custard apple and it's an indigenous fruit in the Midwest United States. I can't remember what book, but I remember being a kid and reading a book that had Pawpaw in it and really kind of falling in love with it in that kind of way.

12:57Have you tried this before? No, I've never had them, but our friend Bree loves them. I feel like they grew up with them in Ohio. They're from Ohio. Yeah, yeah. But it is just wild, the sheer number of varieties of fruit that exist in the world. I feel like one of the things that was so interesting about working on this issue and also sort of like, you know, looking through all of these pitches was, you know, there are so many fruits that I've never heard of or tasted. And it like really does stir your curiosity. Yeah. I remember there was a pitch about a Javanese snake fruit that I was really interested in trying.

13:31I've been on the Miami fruit website. Do you know this orchard? No. So they are a tropical fruit grower in Florida and they sell truly so many fruits that I've never heard of or tried before. And Hamel Whaley recently posted about this Ecuadorian fruit that he had bought from them. And so I was kind of going down this rabbit hole and trying to justify how much money I could spend on tropical fruit. But I think because we have so much good seasonal local fruit right now, I'm going to try to wait until winter before I start buying like, you know, they have like a single durian for$200. Like they have status fruit there.

14:08Status fruit. I feel like the status fruit of the summer is the Zerbenati melon. Yeah, that's what New York Mag said. That's what New York Mag said. I do like them. I just think to me, watermelon is the best melon. Really? I'm not as interested in kind of cantaloupe or honeydew or something like that. This episode is brought to you by Aura Frames. If you're one of those last minute shoppers, you might know the feeling. Ideas are running low and the clock is ticking. Here's a fun idea. Aura Frames. Aura Frames is the solution with a gift that feels personal, a little curated, and sent with love.

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16:48But I want to talk about some of the interpretations of forbidden that we have landed on in this issue because I think there's a really nice span of them. I don't know if you have like a favorite interpretation of forbidden in the issue or maybe one that comes to mind as being kind of unconventional. Favorite is difficult, but I think like maybe one that I did not have on my bingo card was like a cross species love piece.

17:17Eliza is groaning. about basically a man who's sort of like sick of capitalism, sick of his sort of like mundane home life. And he falls in love with this giant golden crowned flying fox, which is a bat that's also like a frugivore. And he writes this sort of like ode to her. And then by the end of the piece, you sort of realize that he's like going to go like abscond in the night and live in the woods with her and like figure out how to, you know, sleep upside down and, you know, make love with bat. Okay, the last part is not. Last part is maybe an undertone to the piece. It's an undertone, guys.

17:56It's very PG. I do love that. I think as a kid, I grew up reading this book called Stella Luna, which is a children's story about a fruit bat. And so I think I have a soft place in my heart for fruit bats. And when we received this pitch about writing an ode to the largest fruit bat in the world, It just felt like such a sweet and kind of funny take on it. I did really enjoy that. And the frugivore of it all, which is someone who eats fruit, reminds me of another piece that I was not expecting that I really enjoy, which is by Amina Khan about fruitarians. So people who apparently subsist on only fruit, which is a kind of like ideology about people who believe that that is the best way for humans to survive.

18:39Steve Jobs famously was a fruititarian, and Amina is writing about a vlogger from an earlier era of YouTube called Freely the Banana Girl who apparently subsists on eating 30 bananas a day. And this kind of larger moment in a kind of earlier era of YouTube vlogging and kind of pseudo health practices that herself and other people kind of fell into. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, we, like, descend with her into this sort of, like, cult of people who are, like, you know, sort of, like, laundering their eating disorders as, like, a lifestyle that everyone else should, like, subscribe to, essentially. But it's wild.

19:20It's a very particular, like, era in the, like, 2010s influencer world. Yeah. And Freely, the Banana Girl's partner who makes a lot of appearances in the blog, his name is Durian Writer, which I think is such a funny. Iconic. At for it. I think we also have a lot of kinds of questioning about like illicit substances. You mentioned Jabba before, which is kind of a drink made from cot in Nairobi, which was kind of being used by truck drivers as a stimulant, but has become popular with the younger generation in the kind of nightlife rave scene by making these juice-like flavored drinks, which I think is interesting.

19:57But we also have a nicotine story, which I think is one of your pet favorites in the issue. I do love this story. I hate to admit that I was once a former Juul imbiber, but it's basically about like a contraband mango Juul pods sort of search. And this writer is talking about sort of like scoring them through the dark web and like going to like increasingly deranged lengths to, you know, stockpile essentially mango Juul pods when they become banned by the FDA. The FDA banned fruit-flavored vapes here in the U.S. Kind of similarly in the way that in previous decades the cigarette companies were being told that they couldn't do flavored cigarettes because they were being marketed towards children.

20:43So I liked thinking about, like, the fruit as the tempting vehicle by which the nicotine was being administered and how this guy was like, I can't switch to mint. I can't. No cucumber for me. I must do cucumber. I must buy mango jewel pods off the dark web from a grandma in Russia to get them. He quit, though, folks. He did quit. Not to spoil the piece. Not to spoil the piece. But there are, you're right, there are like a lot of sort of illicit substances happening in the context of the magazine. I also think of Chris Crowley's story, which is called Orange Crushed. And it's about sort of growing up and coming to realize that his father was drinking orange soda spiked with vodka as he was driving him and his brother around.

21:29And it's this like really interesting and like unsentimental meditation, I think, on like, you know, something that was like entirely out of reach that shaped his childhood in a certain way. But is also sort of, I think, at the same time, like railing against this notion of like nostalgia around food writing. and he's not really saying like, oh, this was like a formative trauma of mine. He's sort of saying this is like a part of my identity and family and something that happened to me, but that doesn't mean that I've like entirely lost my taste for orange soda or that it has like, you know, fundamentally like shaped the way that I am.

22:02Yeah, absolutely. And I think the stories we've been talking about also show how we've been able to not only talk about fruit on its own or fruit in a dessert, but how drinks or vapes or things that still have this kind of juicy essence fall into the issue. We do have some stories that are talking about a kind of like forbiddenness in a more legal or kind of like governmental way. There are a couple of stories that are talking about fruits like the tonka bean or Mexican guava, which were being regulated by the FDA as being forbidden in the United States. I know that tonka bean is kind of a pet ingredient for you, actually.

22:38I do love a tonka bean. Yeah, I wrote a like small story about it a couple of years ago. And I'm just like obsessed with it sort of like spicy almondy vanilla scent. And I actually didn't know. I mean, this makes a lot of sense in retrospect, but there's a tonka fruit and that is the seed of the fruit, which Rose Wild, who's the author of a gooey tonka bean butter cake recipe in the issue, grew up eating in Ecuador. but I don't know I think it's like it's akin to vanilla but in so many ways far superior and was banned and I think actually remains banned contemporarily my sense is because of racism and also probably because of some like nefarious vanilla lobby or something because the donka bean is so much cheaper than a vanilla bean and it stretches so far you can use like one bean to flavor like 30 plates of dessert.

23:34And it has just like such a beautiful and unique scent, and it's often used in perfume. So I was really excited to have Rose sort of delve into that history. Yeah, I will say the ostensible reason for which it's banned is that it has a high level of a poisonous compound in it, but it actually is no different than cinnamon, I believe. And you would have to consume like many beans for it to somehow have an adverse effect. So it seems more that it's kind of from a regulatory side, similar with the Mexican guava, which we have a guava nicotole recipe from Yara Herrera in the issue, who's the chef at Hellbender here in New York.

24:09And Mexican guava was banned in the United States for a long time because of associations with a fruit fly. And I think people were worried that if you brought the fruits into the country, the fruit fly could have adverse effects on agriculture here. But over time, that was proven to not really be a concern. And now this fruit is actually available again. Yeah, I've actually never had a guava, like a fresh guava. Have you? Yeah, all the time. Really? Really? I haven't. I know. I've had guava paste, but I've never like broken into a guava. Wow. I feel like I've failed you a little bit. I should have picked one up.

24:41Yeah, you're the one who's supposed to bring me the fruit. I know. I brought you the weird smoothie instead. So true. Probably because I grew up in California. I would say they're very common, this kind of pink, smaller guava that she's talking about. But also the Taiwanese, like Asian guava, which almost looks like a chayote squash. and they sell down on Canal Street or in Asian supermarkets, has a really nice flavor as well. I think that guava, you kind of eat it when it's more firm, and the Mexican guava you eat when it's a little bit softer. But I do really enjoy fresh guava. Okay, let's go after this.

25:12Yeah, we have to. I'm wondering if you could maybe speak to one or two more of the recipes we have in this issue. We've talked about two, but I think there are so many good ones. Yeah. I mean, I love them all. I think another fruit that I have regretfully not tried is a durian. I know. I'm like, Eliza is aghast. I've never had a durian. But Mei Liao made this beautiful like snow skin moon cakes recipe that includes sort of like a creamy, cheesy, like durian filling that she sort of calls her like gateway durian dessert. that and she writes a little bit about the history of the durian as this like status fruit and like how they're going for like you know six hundred dollars but that you're also not allowed to carry them on public transport in places like Singapore because they have such a uniquely perhaps like sulfurous odor which I've never smelled before.