Honduran food, make up your mind

It’s kind of crazy how different the food is here in Honduras from that of their close-by neighbors to the north, Mexico. I’d say we’re all pretty familiar with Mexican food with its spiciness and flavorfulness: salsa, colorful varities of beans, green chile sauce, mole, lime-marinated carne asada etc etc. I like Mexican food a lot.

And personally, I’ve grown to like Honduran food too. But let’s be honest. It’s not as exciting or distinctively zesty as Mexican food is. Some people may even go as far as to call it ‘bland.’ We’re talking generic brown beans, rice, plantains and scrambled eggs as the standard fare. It gets the job done but it seems to lack character or imagination. The beans are the highlight of the meal, if that tells you anything (In fact, one of the biggest Honduran films of the past decade is called "Amor y Frijoles," which means love and beans... see the screenshot).

Hondurans love their food though, and simply have no interest in trying much else. And for them, spicy food is a no-no. But then there are a couple irregularities in this bland agreement that Hondurans have made with their food that have shocked me:

First of all, for a people who don’t generally like strong flavors in their food, they LOAD TO THE MAX their coffee with sugar. And I’m talking practically a 1:1 ratio coffee to sugar. 2 cups coffee, 2 cups sugar. When I visit my neighbors I can feel my teeth start to rot out of my mouth with every sip, as I secretly wince to myself trying not to be impolite. Sure lots of people in the States find black coffee a bit too bitter for their liking, but this is taking it to another extreme. Some of my townsfolk here would probably rather just drink plain sugar itself and leave the coffee out if they could.

So their behavior with coffee would lead one to believe that Hondurans are generally quite opposed to bitterness. In fact, it would seem that they go out of their way to ensure that there is no trace left of the culprit’s original flavor. But that assumption is, in fact, incorrect on the whole. The second shocking irregularity to the bland food premise is their surprising love for superbly bitter food.

At the end of the dry season, people in Honduras excitedly harvest flor de izote, a white flower that grows at the tops of spiky palm shrubs. It’s a pretty flower, kind of rounded and curvy, bunching together into grape-like clusters. But if you decide to sauté it up with onion then scramble in an egg, which is the popular way to consume the flor de izote here, you will instantly realize that your mouth begins to shrivel, never having tasted anything as bitter in your life. Taste buds die one by one and all the moisture in your mouth is consumed by some instinctive emergency reaction. Forget trying to taste anything else for the entire meal. But, from what I can tell, Hondurans are connoisseurs and relish in this flower’s intense bitterness.

Then there’s the pacaya, a medium-sized stalk that grows in the wild, that is scorched over a flame for about 15-20 minutes then peeled. Inside you eat the white and scalding hot membrane plain or mixed into scrambled eggs like the flor de izote. And it offers about the same ultimate effect: mind-blowing and incongruous bitterness.

So I guess I am left a bit confused about how to define Honduran food. Blandish, cavity-inducingly sweet, or freakishly out-of-control bitterness.