The word “taupe” comes from the Latin name of the European Mole, which has skin with the same color. The trail was named for Jesse Chisholm, who operated trading posts along much of the route. The Chisholm Trail was used in the late 1800s by ranchers driving their cattle from Texas to the stockyards and railroad termini in Kansas. “Wiki” is a Hawaiian word for “quick”, and is used because comprehensive content is created very quickly, as there are so many collaborators contributing to the site. The term “wiki” comes from the name of the first such site, introduced in 1994 and called WikiWikiWeb. Just please don’t forget the flan.Today’s Wiki-est Amazonian Googlies AcrossĪ wiki is a website on which users are allowed to create and edit content themselves. It can also be a kind of hodgepodge in its own right, as you can make all or some of the components, and assemble them as you please. And duplicating it at home is both an homage to a culture and an exercise in technique. It is a beautiful dish, a jigsaw of simplicity and aesthetics. Manzke’s halo-halo comes not from any jar, of course, but from the intersection of farmers market and pastry kitchen, of nostalgia and invention. Just really whatever your heart desires.” She says she likes the nata de coco, the coconut jelly used in the Philippines, but that so many of the halo-halo ingredients in restaurants there “come out of a jar.” “Kumquats, peaches, berries - in the winter, we put persimmons in it - whatever’s in season. “What I like about it is that you can change it,” said the mother of two, her long, black hair pulled back in a ponytail that made her look about half her 43 years. As she built the dish, it became a perfect equation of color and texture, contrast and temperature. And the chef’s beloved flan? The squares of custard could easily have been served alone, an example of lovely satin geometry. On the table, the halo-halo ingredients looked like a plated dessert diagram: frozen component, base, garnish, sauce, crunchy bits. white-tablecloth restaurants as Patina, Bastide and Mélisse, and earlier this year was a James Beard nominee for outstanding pastry chef. A Culinary Institute of America graduate, she’s an alum of such notable L.A. Instead, the dish seemed like a master class in pastry skills - a class Manzke would be highly qualified to teach. “I’m a sucker for anything flan.”Īs Manzke arranged the components of the dish at République, the gorgeous restaurant that occupies a legendary space in Los Angeles - before it was République, it was the bell tower-topped restaurant Campanile, and before that it was a brick edifice built for Charlie Chaplin - it was easy to forget halo-halo’s street food origins. “I never liked the beans.” If not beans, then flan, lots of it, smooth as silk and rich with caramel, made from a recipe Manzke got from her sister. “Growing up, I liked halo-halo, but I never liked some of the things that went into it,” said Manzke, a native of Manila who came to the U.S. And the beans - often a combination of mung, red and chickpeas - are noticeably absent. She has the tapioca, rich and silky with coconut milk, stand in for the evaporated milk that is in most renditions of the dish. “It’s a very traditional dessert,” said Manzke, “but we didn’t want to make it too traditional we wanted our own spin on it.” So instead of using ube ice cream (“ube is very predictable”), the distinctive purple concoction made from yams that is in most versions of halo-halo, Manzke uses either coconut or pandan ice cream. “But if you didn’t grow up eating it, you’d be like, ‘What? What were they thinking?’ It’s like whatever’s in the refrigerator.” “It’s a fun dessert,” Manzke said recently at République, the Hancock Park bistro she owns and operates with her husband, chef Walter Manzke. It’s also just a little weird, which may be part of its appeal. It is a homey dish, a childhood dish, the Southeast Asian version of our hot fudge sundae or banana split - a hodgepodge assembly of ice cream and crushed ice, gelée and fruit, tapioca and crispy rice that forms a colorful and deeply craveable dessert. Halo-halo - “mix mix” in Tagalog - is a deeply emblematic dish, sold on street corners in the Philippines and lately in restaurants all over America as part of the recent renaissance of Filipino cuisine. Consider Margarita Manzke’s halo-halo, a dish she grew up eating as a kid in the Philippines, learned long ago to make herself and now has translated to both of her Los Angeles restaurants - a little Filipino food stall and an ambitious French bistro. In the hands of a gifted chef, a dish can operate rather like an object lesson, the pattern of sauce and arrangement of ingredients demonstrating her relationship to a cuisine, a memory, a culture.
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