Molli Chamoy Sauce: Go Figure

Sometimes in a recipe, or a menu, or a store, I run across something that makes me chuckle with glee because it is so telling.

That happened last week when I was shopping in Central Market, one of the upscale groceries of the Texas-based chain, HEB.

There sitting on the top shelf in front of me was a small jar of chamoy sauce produced by a company called Molli, though as you can see the label has two little dots over the ‘o’.

The label helpfully informs the customer that this sauce is:

inspired by the Japanese-influenced cuisine of Sinaloa in western Mexico. . . Chamoy sauce is a sweet and savory sauce with origins in “umeboshi,” a pickled Japanese fruit.  In Mexico it is better known as Chamoy.

Well, yes and no.  That there are Japanese influences in Mexican cuisine there is no doubt.  The popular “cacahuates japones” are simply Japanese mochi-covered peanuts. That chamoy is related to umeboshi, often translated as Japanese pickled or salt plums, is also without question.

But what about “chamoy?”  I puzzled over this when I went to Mexico. You could buy chamoy in big department store chains such as Liverpool or Sanborns, or on stands in shopping malls along with other “traditional Mexican sweets.”

A wet chamoy on the left and a very dry one on the right (li hing mui in Hawaii, dried umeboshi in Japan)

I looked up the word in Spanish dictionaries, in Mexican dictionaries, and in etymological dictionaries.  I asked friends. Everywhere I drew a blank.

Then the answer began dribbling into my brain, only because I happened to have spent time in Hawaii.  Chamoy was what in Hawaii was called crack seed.  Crack seed (I know, I know) is a collective noun that covers many, many small chewy, often salty, sometimes sweets, sometime liquoricey fruits, one of the most popular series of snacks in the Islands.

Lin’s crack seed. By Joel, Flickr, Creative Commons

In the days before Google, crack seed was a challenge. The anthropologist and historian of Chinese food, Gene (E.N.) Anderson, came to my rescue. Crack seed was Chinese, made from the fruits of Prunus mume, often called a plum, but actually closer to an apricot.   That, you will guess, is the same fruit that the Japanese ume is made from. And Chinese plum sauce. And much more The flower is depicted time and again in Chinese and Japanese art, the fragile white blossoms on a gnarled branch defying the bitter winter.  A potent symbol in Taoism.

I stray, though, because I could go on about the Prunus mume as souring agent, sauce, and snack for hours. Back to the matter at hand.  The Chinese (or maybe I should say the Cantonese name for crack seed is see mui (西梅; [siː muːi]).  It’s pronounced see moy.

Get it? See moy=chamoy.  Haha!  The Chinese took it to Hawaii in the nineteenth century when they went to work on the plantations.   When did they take it to Mexico?  It could have been with Chinese migration in the nineteenth century.  The romantic in me likes to think it was much earlier since Asians have been migrating to Mexico, willingly or not, since the galleons started sailing back and forth between Acapulco and Manila in the sixteenth century.

Mexican chamoy took a different path from Hawaiian see mui.  The latter was reinvented as a powder and used to flavor gummi bears (and much else). The former from the 1970s was reinvented as a sweet-sour-piquant red liquid to squirt on potato chips or anything else you fancied.  The firm Dulces Miguelito was particularly important in this.  (And don’t you love the cupid,, the papaya, the coconut?)

A bottle of thin chamoy sauce to sprinkle on chips

And now, the sauce or molli.  The company explains on their web site that molli means concoction in the language of the Aztecs (Nahuatl, still very much alive in Mexico). Or if you turn to Francis Kartunnen’s Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl, mölli (that should be a macron) is defined as sauce, broth, gravy, or the classic Mexican dish, mole.

Ah, but wait.  Is the sauce/mole equivalent that straightforward?  Apart from the classic savory moles in Mexico, there are also sweet huevos moles (egg mole made by adding beaten egg yolks to hot syrup and stirring until the mixture thickens).  In Portugal, where the dish probably originated before being picked up by the Spanish, it is called ovos moles. (There’s a whole fascinating history to this family of sweets, invented in Iberia in the fifteenth century, spreading across Europe and the New World, and now forgotten in northern Europe. That’s for another day).

The point here is that mole in Portuguese means soft, spreadable, or as a Brazilian historian specializing in the seventeenth and eighteenth century told me, saucy. So is mole a Nahuatl word or a Portuguese one? Or a happy consilience of the two.

Now perhaps you can see why the jar of Molli Chamoy Sauce so tickles my fancy.

A Chinese nibble, a Japanese pickle, taken across eastern Asia, as well as across the Pacific, the world’s largest ocean, a favorite in Hawaii with whole stores devoted to it and similar nibbles, and the west coast of the Americas, where Mexicans not only nibble on it but reinvent it as a sauce.

A series of names, from totally unrelated languages, that denote quite different collections of foods.

People who refuse to be constrained by boundaries, whether they be imperial, national, geographic, or ethnic.  What a richly mixed up world we live in.

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Oh, and what is the sauce like?  Quite piquant, consistency of chutney (don’t get me stared again) sweet sour. Ingredients: vinegar, dehydrated apricots (kind not specified), orange and lime juice, guajillo and piquin chiles, brown sugar and salt.

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