Passion fruit mousse is my new love. As many may know, passion fruit is one of my absolute favorite flavors. It is intense and sour but is very addictive. It mixes very well with other juices. One of my favorites that we made recently was a banana-pineapple-orange-passion fruit smoothie. We had it for breakfast one Saturday morning. Once when we visited Rio, I had a spinach-passion fruit smoothie at a great juice bar. Wow, was that amazing! I am completely obsessed with passion fruit. So one can imagine when I went recently to a cooking demonstration and learned how to make passion fruit mousse, I was in heaven. This week I made the mousse for a luncheon I attended. It was sooooooo good. The best part is that it is very easy to make. On the side here is a picture of a passion fruit mousse. I did not make that one but found the image on the internet.
One more quick note about passion fruit. I did a search on the internet to find out why the fruit is called passion fruit. It turns out that I read some pretty consistent stories. Most said that when the Spanish missionaries arrived in the new world the flower of the passion fruit reminded them of the different symbols of Christ’s death (or passion). I thought, “OK, that makes sense. Many of the names for things have religious roots.” However, after I thought about it, I realized that in Spanish passion fruit is called maracuya (in Portuguese maracuja). I can’t really figure out how that word – maracuya - has anything to do with religious symbolism in Spanish. I would guess that it doesn’t. The first story is probably a folktale and that the name actually has indigenous roots. I would gladly welcome any thoughts.
2 comments:
I, too, am a mousse de maracuja fan. It's the perfect combination of sweet and tart - YUM!
From our local linguistics professor:
I spent a little bit of time catching up with the various blogs that members of my family maintain, and your comment about passion fruit caught my eye. According to the OED, the connection to Jesus' Passion is correct ("< PASSION n. + FLOWER n., after post-classical Latin flos passionis (see quot. 1633 at main sense). Compare French fleur de la passion (1625 or earlier), Spanish flor de la pasion (1737; more commonly known as pasionaria), German Passionsblume (17th cent.). The flower is native to South America and was probably introduced to Europe from Peru by the Spanish physician Nicolas Monardes (compare MONARDA n.) after 1569. The parts of the flower were imagined to correspond to the instruments and circumstances of Jesus's Passion: the three stigmas to the nails, the five stamens to the wounds, the corona to the crown of thorns, and the ten perianth segments to the apostles. The lobed leaves and tendrils of the plant were also said to represent the hands and scourges of Jesus's torturers. Compare quot. 1613 at main sense and also Monardes' description (under the heading De Granadilla: see GRANADILLA n.)).
Maracuja is also the German word for this fruit, and a quick check of the Duden dictionary reveals that your idea about it being a borrowing from an indigenous language is also correct; it was presumably transmitted into German via Spanish.
As for why English calls this fruit something different, this is a pretty common process in language contact: one language uses the borrowed word, others may coin their own terms. A pretty good example of this is raccoon: the English word is borrowed from an Algonquian Indian language, while languages like German, Swedish, and Finnish went ahead and made up their own words (Waschbaer, tvattbjorn, and pesukarhu, respectively, all of which literally mean 'washing bear', presumably from the animal's habit of dunking its food into water in order to stimulate the production of saliva.)
And this is presumably more than you wanted to know, but I thought you might like to know that your hypotheses were correct.
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