Dive in and avo good dip!

A recipe for Central Mexican guacamole

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If you’re in search of wonderment this first cheerless February week, look no further for inspiration than the avocado. By Sunday, over 45 million kilos of them (105 million pounds) will have been sold across the US to be turned into dip.

It’s the Super Bowl, the TV year’s prime excuse for its 98 million US audience to sofa-snack. Add to them another 50 to 65 million viewers worldwide, glued, this 55th year, to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers versus the Kansas City Chiefs, although they may not all be stuck into guacamole. 

You may have zero interest in the Super Bowl. But those figures surely inspire a frisson of shock-and-awe over the number of fans of not just a baffling game, but of a coarse-skinned pear with an enigmatic taste and the texture of a damp bar of soap. 

Yet there’s something luxurious about the avocado. In my Soviet Moscow years, anyone planning a weekend’s R&R escape in Helsinki would first call round and ask who wanted what bringing back. It was always a supply of avocados. 

On one return train trip, an expat who had filled two large suitcases with them was confronted in her compartment at the Finnish border by two Soviet customs officers with clipboards. This was unusual, it being unofficially understood that foreigners weren’t to be subjected to examination. 

They opened her suitcases. Both were packed edge-to-edge with avocados. The guards picked up a couple of samples of this unfamiliar and about-to-become contraband. They sniffed them, they rattled them, then they asked, “What do you do with these?” Knowing they would all be confiscated to the guards’ own kitchens, the woman looked them steadily in the eye and said, “You boil them very slowly for four hours.”

From decades of languishing in near obscurity beyond the borders of Mexico, this berry - yes, with its pulp and seed, it qualifies as a berry - recently received an extraordinary boost in popularity among fans of yoga wear and tracksuits when Gwyneth Paltrow repositioned it from favourite dip of couch potatoes to metrosexual breakfast with her recipe for avocado on toast in her 2013 ‘clean eating’ cookbook, ‘It’s All Good’.  

These are the same individuals responsible, in the UK, for a rise in hospital Emergency Department visits with stab wounds in their palms, the result of being unaware of the trick to safely removing an avocado’s stone. (Hold a sharp knife above the stone, slash lightly downwards to bury the blade in the stone, and twist. The stone will come out embedded on the blade.)

In Britain, rival supermarkets Marks & Spencer and Sainsbury both claim to have been the first to introduce the avocado, in the 1960s. Following Paltrow’s endorsement, avocados have had the third largest sales increase in the UK of any single grocery item. 

In Central America, evidence of them being eaten goes all the way back to around 10,000BC. 

How it survived so many centuries before man became a farmer is a puzzle. Fruits and vegetables are generally propagated by the animals who eat them excreting their pips and seeds. To any beast smaller than a hippo, the avocado’s pit is surely an excruciating digestive challenge.

With more than 34% of the market, Mexico is still the main provider of the āhuacatl, a Nahuatl (Aztec) word that also translates, for those who enjoy a titter, as ‘testicle’. It’s grown hundreds of miles further south, and east across the Caribbean, and up in California, and more recently in Israel and around the Mediterranean basin. 

The first person to give it the name ‘avocado’ was the English 17th century physician and naturalist, Hans Sloane, who referenced it in a 1696 index of Jamaican plants. But a Spanish conquistador, Fernández de Oviedo, is said to have been the first European to have actually eaten one. ‘A paste similar to butter,’ he recorded, ‘and of very good taste.’

While consumed in quantity as a matter of course in Mexico, California farmers who sunk their savings into planting groves in the 1900s found it hard to popularise the unfamiliar vegetable with an unpronounceable name, so reverted to ‘avocado.’ This didn’t help. Sales remained disappointing, with an annual consumption per capita of only half a kilo (just over a pound). 

Then, in the 1990s, the California Avocado Commission hired a PR firm to promote them. 

Targetting the Super Bowl, US TV’s top snack-guzzling sports event, to promote guacamole as a perfect dip, it came up with the ‘Guacamole Bowl.’ This involved NFL players sharing their favourite guacamole recipes, even if they may not ever have eaten any before they were stimulated to do so.

US sales rocketed by almost 70%. Now, annually, Americans eat more than 3kg/6.6 lbs per capita. 

If you’re going to be watching the Super Bowl and even if you’re not, here is a recipe for guacamole, different from the main, good any time of year. It originates in Central Mexico and comes from the dedicated research of venerable doyenne of Mexican cuisine, Diana Kennedy.

4 tablespoons finely chopped fresh coriander/cilantro

1 to 2 serrano chilies, stemmed and finely chopped, depending on how much heat you like

2 tablespoons finely chopped white onion

Sea salt

3 ripe avocados, halved and pitted

285g/10 ounces grape or cherry tomatoes, finely chopped

Tortilla chips, to serve

In a bowl, combine 2 tablespoons of the coriander/cilantro, the chilies, onion, and 1/2 teaspoon salt. If you don’t own a molcajete, a large pestle-and-mortar, mash the mix with the bottom of a dry tea cup until a rough paste forms, about one minute.

Scoop the avocado flesh into the bowl and coarsely mash with a potato masher or fork. Stir in the spicy onion paste and half the tomatoes until combined. Taste and season with salt.

Transfer to a serving bowl and sprinkle with the remaining cilantro and tomatoes. Serve near a comfy sofa with plain Tortilla chips to dip.