First
off, sorry cheese lovers for the lack
of communication over these past
few weeks.
I was out of town, playing serious
hooky and eating as much
Costa Rican
cheese as I could get my paws on. The mecca
to conduct this
glorious (and a bit gluttonous)
sampling was none other than San Jose's
historic
central market, a sturdy, amiable, and decidedly
simple edifice
nestled into the heart of town.
 Walking
into the cramped, bustling corridors of this 1880's market gave me
pause because for many years, customers entering the Essex Market for
the first time, though they hail from destinations across the globe all
have the same comment: 'This market reminds me of home.' There is some
kind of universal sensibility that allows people to recognize and
immediately identify with a public market. They wander the aisles, their
eyes taking in the myriad piles of fruits and vegetables, ogling tiers
of baked goods, smelling bunches of dried herbs hanging from hooks, and
sizing up slabs of meat.
In
many ways, San Jose's Central Market is
very much like Essex: a simple
square of a
building, low to the ground, stalls divided from
one another
by steel beams, with high ceilings
and skylights of glass enmeshed with
shatterproof
wire to let the daylight seep through. However,
if the Essex Market boasts 30 stalls, San Jose's
has 300. The place is
absolutely labyrinthine,
or perhaps more appropriately, onion-esque,
with a core of stalls at the center extending
outward towards the edges
of the building
in hectic concentric layers.
The
sensation of wandering this market is one
of true wonder (and a bit of
vertigo) as you try
to make your way around, and is even more baffling
when trying to find your way back to a particular stall.
Hansel and
Gretel's breadcrumbed and backward
GPS system would have definitely come
in handy
more than a handful of times as I tried to
retrace my steps back to some especially
lovely vendors.
There
was the old gentleman with all manner
of knives... I was in search of
one small enough
to make a picnic with, but his shop was a nod
to the
overwhelming nature of the rainforest,
agriculture, and the sprawl of
the city over
the years. He sold everything from pocket
knives to full
on machetes. Coils of lasso with
varying thicknesses and colors adorned
the
walls from floor to ceiling.
Then
there was the helados shop, a business
started in 1901 and thriving
till the present day
with just one perfectly sweet and refreshing flavor
of sorbet: vanilla mixed with cinnamon. Young boys
in blue caps and
aprons served a clamoring clientele
that flanked the stall's three
outward facing
countertops, dutifully scooping mounds of the
ochre-colored confection as quickly as it
was gobbled up.
The
cheese shops were simple affairs, consisting
of refrigerated display
cases filled with trays of
locally made fresh cheese. The most popular
was
a cheese called Turrialba named after a nearby town.
Soft
and queso fresco-like, the cheese was sold in three
stages of ripeness:
'tierno' meaning soft and fresh,
semi-curado, and curado. Then there was
the
queso palmita: a mozzarella-like ball of cheese named
for
its likeness to heart of palm.When cut open,
circular layers of cheese
surround one another
concealing a tart and lemony core of fresh curd.
 But the most impressive sights
of all were the sodas,
diminutive
mom and pop lunch counters
that served quick, hearty, and
simple meals to marketgoers.
The one that we stopped at
made me blush
for ever calling
my own shop small. It was no
more that 6 feet by 6
feet,
and contained three workers,
a cutting board station, a sink,
and a
small flat-top grill where
my lunch of tortillas and salchichon
with
shredded lettuce and crema
was prepared. We cozied up next to our
neighbor on two
of their three stools and savored our delicious lunch.
The kicker came when the woman washing the vegetables
loaded a bus tub
of dirty dishes onto what appeared to be
a low-hanging shelf, only to
watch it be hauled up via pulley
onto their second floor of operations! A
tiny room was
perched atop the I-beams of the diner, cloaked in
corrugated metal. It is to this day the tiniest restaurant
I have ever
seen.
So
I sign off this week with a rallying cry (and I guess
a bit of a gushy
love letter) for markets. In their very
humble way, they are among our
cities' most important
assets.
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