Treacle

In Turkey I made gingerbread cookies and molasses chews with pekmez. I could buy pekmez, a black sugary syrup, made from grapes, dates or mulberries. Mulberry pekmez I found to work best for cookies, though date pekmez was the thickest. We also used pekmez mixed with tahini for a couple of the years when we couldn't get decent peanut butter and hadn't brought any in. Tahini cookies became one of our Christmas cookies, too. They're not so pretty, but they are delicious. Roll the balls in sesame seeds before they're pressed with a fork like peanut butter cookies.

But pekmez is too thin to use without any modifications to the recipes and I was looking forward to finding the HK equivalen. Now that it's Christmas time, I have been able to buy everything I'm used to: Libby pumpkin in the can with the recipe on the side, Carnation evaporated milk in the size can that goes with the pumpkin, fresh Oceanspray cranberries, Pepperidge Farms stuffing mix, Swansons chicken broth and a 12 pound frozen Butterball turkey. It's not exactly the frontier. If I were British, I could get prepared mince, the mince pies already made or all the nuts and dried fruits for the pudding. But for some reason, there was no molasses.

The kids and I went to a store called Gateway that's in the basement in a local part of town on the recommendation of a guy who knows. It's there, he said, that you can get all kinds of N. American products. It was a wonderland full of products straight from Costco - in Costco sizes! We reveled in the beauty of huge jars of spaghetti sauce, quadruple packs of beef jerky, enormous boxes of cereal, gallon jugs of cranberry juice, kilo packs of coffee, bags of craisins and raisins that were bigger than my purse. We bought Kirkland pecans, cranberry juice, dried apricots (a concession to homesickness for Turkey) and chocolate chips.

But delightfully enough, there was no molasses and I was obliged to go looking for treacle. There's nothing quite so Dickensonian. Here is a picture of the can of treacle I bought. I found it in a fancy supermarket that sometimes sells fresh oysters on ice flown in from Brittany. This beautiful can was only about $2 US, though and so beautiful. It is thick, slow, sweet, black and altogether treacly! That word is so Alice in Wonderland!

If you look closely at the can, you can see in the logo the quote, "Out of the strong came forth sweetness." That is a biblical reference from the Samson story - as in Samson and Delilah. Here's the story: When Samson went down to take a wife, he killed a lion with his bare hands. A few days later, on his way home, he saw that bees had made a hive in the carcass. Samson ate some of the honey and took some to his parents, but he didn't tell them where it came from. When he went down to marry his wife he posed the riddle to the the guests. Out of the eater, something to eat, out of the strong came forth sweetness. If by the end of the feast, the brides guests couldn't guess the riddle, they would have to give linen robes to Samson's guests. For days, they couldn't figure it out until they told the bride to find out. She cried for three days that Samson didn't love her because he wouldn't tell her the answer. He said he hadn't even told his parents, but finally he did tell her. She told her people and Samson had to pay out the linen. But that made him mad, so he went to another village, killed 30 of the men there and took those linen robes to pay off his debt. Then he went home and his wife was given to one of the men who attended him at the wedding. Hmmm, treacle.