Mastication
MASTIC, n. We had mastic candy from Turkey in our house this week. (This newsletter is not #sponcon, but the candy came to us through our Universal Yums subscription, which is incidentally also the reason licorice was on my mind a few weeks ago.)
I had never encountered mastic before, despite having visited Turkey. But I was young then and only had eyes for baklava. (The intervening fourteen years have not changed me at all.)
Mastic is a resin from the mastic tree, Pistachia lentiscus, that grows on the Greek island of Chios in the Aegean sea.
A screenshot from Google Maps showing the island of Chios.
The resin is edible and is popular in both sweet and savory dishes in cuisines all over the Eastern Mediterranean. It’s bitter when you first chew it, but after a moment, it releases a kind of pine-y flavor that people have been using to freshen their breath for thousands of years. Mastic is the original chewing gum. Indeed, the English word “masticate” (chew) is related to “mastic,” both through Greek.
Mastic only comes from Chios and from the nearby Turkish peninsula of Çeşme. The trees make little sap droplets like this, which is why mastic is sometimes called “the tears of Chios.”
Mastic droplets from a branch. Image sourced from Wikipedia.
People collect them after the droplets have fallen and hardened. The hardened droplets have to be cleaned of sand, which requires a lot of labor and time, so mastic can be very expensive. A cheaper alternative, if you don’t need the particular mastic flavor but you want something to bind flavoring into your food, is gum arabic, which usually comes from acacia trees.
The word “mastic” in English can also refer to various putty-like or adhesive construction materials. These don’t contain resin from mastic trees—that would be a very expensive way to bond your tiles—but they share sticky, gummy qualities, hence the name.
I read very little this week because I was feverishly working on a new collaborative writing project with two friends. It’s sapphic romantic fantasy and we’re all very excited about it.
Anyway, the only book I finished reading was Paladin’s Strength by T. Kingfisher, which was another delightful romantic fantasy full of humor and tenderness and many people getting stabbed. You know, the good stuff.
Apologies for this short, one-book newsletter, but as I said, I’ve been writing! I’ve also been working on tagging the archives to make perusal easier. A personal favorite tag is “animal words.”
