There was no warning, none at all.
The afternoon sun shone mildly through the windows of the secluded Chelsea apartment where I was working in the 19th year of my 20-year assignment to write "The Oxford Companion to Food." Then my collaborator, Helen J. Saberi, casually asked the fateful question: "Do you know what bois de Panama is?"
There was nothing to suggest that she was opening a door through which both of us would be propelled into a nightmare world of stark white foams, rising out of bowl after bowl of macerated bark or root to enrobe an infinity of Lebanese and Egyptian sweetmeats; a scene which, for suave horror, outdoes any Breughelesque vision of Hell. There was no hint that I would become librarian of a newly formed international organization called INTERSPI (or International Spice Investigations, if you prefer), dedicated to hunting down those few rogue flavorings that eluded the attention of Vasco da Gama, Magellan and all the other spice-mad explorers of yesteryear.
In helping her friend Anissa Helou test recipes for a cookbook ("Lebanese Cuisine" Grub Street: London; 1994), Saberi had innocently become curious about the Middle Eastern habit of combining pastries with a non-dairy "cream" called natif (others have spelled it natife and naatiffe ), which calls for bois de Panama. Claudia Roden, in "A New Book of Middle Eastern Food" (Viking: 1985), described bois de Panama as "a pale, dry wood" that could be made to produce the foaming white sauce she knew as a child in Egypt. Helou had a stock of two sorts of bois de Panama her mother had bought in Lebanon--one a root, the other a bark--and though she could not give its botanical identity, she said she could make us natif from each kind.
*
Thus the nightmare began. Every five minutes, it seemed, Helou would bring yet another collection of aluminum trays full of foam, some made by herself and some by Lebanese confectioners in London. Foam enveloped us; not a light, frothy foam you could blow off your hands, but a thick, shiny, unctuous, marshmallow-like foam of an eerie whiteness that had nothing cream-like about it.
