Fresh Pressed Cashew Apple Juice

It was cashew season again. This time, the single backyard tree just wasn’t going to be ignored. So it produced enough red fruit that the mother just had to sit up and take note.

She was getting ready to follow some research trail or other all the way to Joburg, when the mass of fruit arrived.

The mass of nuts would have to be dealt with later, but the fruit would not wait. She knew from last year they were like petulant children: they’d spoil by the very next day if she didn’t pay attention.

So she decided to press them. None of the cooking-straining process as last year’s fizzies, just straight pressing.

She used an old potato ricer which she’d once-upon-a-time bought on sale, just because the tool was fascinating. Was fascination worth the price? Guilt had followed her–but now, at last, was redemption. Nothing else was equal to the cashew apple’s robust fleshiness; nothing else would deliver with such speed.

Soon, there were bottles of fresh pressed juice. Next, a treatment with rice kanji (or “congee”)–water drained from freshly cooked rice, which would cause the tannins in the cashew apple juice to precipitata.

The mother paused, thinking of the precision of modern rice cooking techniques with pressure cookers and electrified rice cookers deliver to our tables the fluffiest most fragrant rices with no water to drain off, no waste–and no “kanji thanni” or rice water. No kanji with which to cure our iron cooking pots, no always-there kanji to feed anyone who might be convalescent. What a shame, this loss of a natural cooking process that resulted in kanji. But that would be a story for another time.

She poured a half cup of kanji (also freshly made) into each liter bottle of pressed juice, and watched the precipitate form and settle.

Then she skimmed off the clear liquid on top, and poured it into the nicest glasses she could reach.

Soon, the dog and the boys would come by, curious, wanting a taste. She shooed them off, but to no avail. One managed to sneak away a glass as her camera focused.

Then followed the antics, with the handle of an old plastic helicopter toy, which the salesman had promised “would never break.” The mother marveled at her younger son’s capacity for pareidolia and a sort of puppeteering.

When he’d had his fun and run off with his brother to the table-tennis room upstairs, she was left with alone with one.

She sipped it the quiet of her garden, enjoying its light and unassuming character, and wondered if the boys would finish what she’d bottled–or forget all about it, and whether she’d have home-brewed feni of a sort awaiting her return. She rather hoped she would.