Taiwan: Above the Undercurrent

I went to Taiwan – yes, that Taiwan, the Taiwan guidebooks and mainstream food websites and niche food websites and travel blogs galore lose their minds over – over the Thanksgiving week in 2015, and never wrote about it.

It wasn’t because I didn’t enjoy it, or because I found everything too thoroughly explored already by others (though the latter is certainly an excuse I’d make). It was because I had this nagging feeling, even as I gorged on new-to-me things like egg-yolk-taro balls or oyster omelets or mystery shells stuffed with cheese or sausages stuffed with other sausages – that I was barely grazing the surface of what Taiwan had to offer. Beneath the seething mass of street stalls and teenagers, I felt there was an undercurrent, a base even, of a more careful culinary tradition that I wouldn’t be able to break into unless I traveled with a group of people. Better yet, a group of people who spoke the language (one of Taiwan’s three main ones, anyway).

I didn’t have a group. This trip was singularly solitary. I traveled around Taipei and the countryside alone, looking mesmerizedly out of the windows of trains and buses and mountain gondolas. There was a four day stretch where I used my vocal chords for less than 3 collective minutes per day. I loved it.

But when it came to dining, my chosen solitude and imposed linguistic ignorance limited me. It caused me to mainly mill around night markets, where I could assess visually what was on offer, point at what I wanted without using words, and enjoy my choice in single-serving sizes, sitting alone. Sometimes the food was on a stick, sometimes in a tiny paper bowl, sometimes in a bag. I got to eat it standing up, sitting on a curb, sitting in a park, or on my way to the metro. Occasionally I got snapped at if I tried to order something ridiculously small, like one egg-yolk taro ball (“minimum two!”) or a single skewer of cumin-rubbed mutton (“minimum three!”) but for the most part I was able to keep my portions small enough that I got to sample five or six different stands for each dinner.

Now, given the option, this is usually how I prefer to eat. I touched on the topic in my entry on Spain. I don’t go in for pomp and circumstance and decor and ambience and service and plating very often. I’m happier with my butt planted on a curb, eating out of a box, watching the world go by.

But as I sat, butt planted, world-watching, enjoying my bites, I knew that inside all the buildings with the indecipherable lettering, there were families and groups of friends sitting around tables enjoying a cuisine that was very different from my seafood sticks and grilled meats. I got a tiny taste of this wandering down Yongkang St one day, when I saw a restaurant that both had pictures of its menu items on the wall and looked relatively fancy. (Sadly, Taiwan largely lacks the Korean and Japanese tradition of molding plastic versions of their dishes to display outside the door.) I took this as the golden opportunity that it was, pointing excitedly at the picture of what looked like an entire bowl filled with shell-less oysters, plus a plate of mystery greens and stalks covered in what may have been either sesame or peanut powder.

I got the last seat in the restaurant. The other tables were full of groups, passing delectable-looking dishes back and forth or spinning them around on the tables’ Lazy Susans. They took chopstickfuls of food from the common plate and thoughtfully chewed – more thoughtfully than most do when they are also chatting. I saw the food arrest them, momentarily tear them away from their conversations. There was no mindless chewing or hurried swallowing between shouted sentences like, I don’t know, most American sports bars, for example. The food held a presence equal to another guest at the table.

When I received my bowl of oysters, it was large, with a bathtub-warm broth that softened its sticks of ginger and furls of seaweed. The oysters were a pillowy mess of ocean, and though it initially seemed crazily decadent to eat an entire bowlful of oysters without having to work to get them out of their shells, I finished them with little trouble or guilt. They were tiny sweet morsels with not a rotten one in the bunch. And the mystery greens, which I found out a month later from Yelper Karen L. were sweet potato leaves, collected just the right amount of bonito dew from their own warm broth. The powder on top was sesame, and somehow stayed dry and out of the path of the dew. The stalks crunched, but the leaves collapsed under my tongue.

This meal was the best in Taiwan, and worth every penny of the maybe $12 (US) it cost, but having it made me realize how much I was missing. For every restaurant with photos, there were twenty without, and who knew what lay within them? Having spent much of my life with a vegetarian boyfriend, I’m familiar with the feeling of loss that comes when I find myself in a restaurant with a family-style meat dish – Beijing duck, Sichuan whole fish, Tibetan yak stew – that I’d never be able to tackle on my own. But since that vegetarian boyfriend spoke Chinese, I had not yet experienced the loss of being a linguistic outsider and not even knowing what was on offer.

I wished there had been (or I’d sought out) a Taiwanese version of that couple who takes tourists around Saigon on motorbikes and has them eat snails and shellfish and goat.

So, my memories of Taiwan are fond, but consist mostly of slices of night market life. Watching a man scoop fried squid out of a steamy metal bucket, wondering at its crunch and how it retained it with all the steam.

Choosing between five varieties of egg custard – flecked with sesame seeds, swirled with burnt caramel, topped with cream cheese.

Discovering street sushi that reminded me of a Japanese festival in Orange County. Eating something that was either intestines or penis while a crowd gathered to closely await my reaction.

Smelling the combined smoke of hundreds of of pieces of smoldering meat and letting the background noise coalesce into a hum.

Next time, I’m bringing a Chinese speaker, so that hum distills into connection.

Authenticity

If you run an ‘ethnic’ restaurant, authenticity is gold. Foodies strive for it as an ideal placed somewhere beyond ambrosia or the fountain of youth.

You see this all the time in restaurant reviews:

“I’m from [country], so I know [country-ese food], and this place [does/doesn’t] measure up.”

“I took a trip to [country] last year and this place’s [specific regional dish] is [exactly/nothing] like what I had in [specific region].”

“This place is the best [country-ese food] in town, aside from my grandmother’s cooking, of course!”

It also crops up in how people automatically discount Chinese restaurants full of white people. (I’m not judging; even as a white person, I do this.) Also in the tendency to disparagingly remark that one’s sushi or luleh kabob or panang curry or whatever is being made/assembled by Mexicans. (I AM judging this. I think it’s racist. Don’t extend your judgment of the authenticity of food to a judgment of the authenticity of a person.)

Why are we so obsessed with authenticity, even sometimes over flavor?

I started considering this question way back in 2012, when I had mì quảng in Huế, Vietnam, for the first time. This was not the first time I’d had mì quảng; I was introduced to it in Orange County. So for me, I found myself in the odd position of comparing my Vietnamese (Huế-ian) mì quảng served right off a local family’s back porch, to the ‘ideal’ of Ngự Bình Restaurant’s mi quang. Obviously, the mì quảng from the source – Huế – was more authentic, and should have served as the anchor of reference.

Here’s the thing, though, and this is where cognitive dissonance started creeping in – I didn’t like the Huế version as much. It was just not as flavorful or complex. The noodles were white, rather than the turmeric-sunny yellow I was used to, and the shrimps were tiny, red, and a little mealy. The crackers, usually sesame filled, were airy and tasted like puffed rice, and the pork meat was tougher and seemed unmarinated.

But in terms of authenticity, it scored an A+. I was nowhere near the tourist areas of Huế. I was in a field, actually down an alley, having followed a handwritten cardboard sign that said ‘My Quảng’. I was on a Vietnamese family’s porch while women crouched nearby peeling and chopping vegetables and pounding fish into paste. It was a hundred degrees and my whole body was dripping with sweat. The only sounds were the sounds of peeling, pounding, motorcycle horns, and bugs buzzing. And of course, I was squatting on a miniscule plastic stool.

But Ngự Bình’s mi quang tasted better.

You’re probably thinking, “well, maybe this wasn’t a good restaurant, and you could have found a better incarnation elsewhere.” Undoubtedly that is true, although I have to say I ended up trying it three or four more times in different areas in Vietnam and still liked the Little Saigon versions better. But it doesn’t matter. What’s ‘better’? What is the incarnation that’s the most true to form? What is the version that stays true to the original? Do we just choose the one that tastes the best and is from the closest area to the region it’s supposed to be from?

Do we then discriminate against versions that have improved upon the original, as measured by terms as simple (and yet unmeasurable and indescribable) as ‘tastiness’?

I’m not talking about fusion cuisine here, which is alive and kicking and maybe even dominating and spreading, so it’s clear that combining ‘the original’ with ingredients and twists from wholly different areas of the globe is totally fine with foodies. I’m talking more about the ability to source a wider variety of vegetables and herbs in California and thus being able to combine fresh mint and banana flower and cilantro and lettuce and green onions and turmeric and chilies in one bowl. Even if that’s not always possible in mì quảng’s home country, should California do it? It may be making it less authentic by carrying it further away from the source, but it’s sure tasty.

My opinion? I’m glad we do it. I’m glad cooks take advantage of their location and connections to make their dishes taste even better than the version they grew up with or remember. I’m as guilty as anyone of comparinglocal versions of foreign dishes to their ‘home’ counterpart, but that’s usually because I’m trying to paint an evocative picture of what the dish is like when you order it where it ‘lives’. Putting taste aside, it’s an utterly different experience eating, say, lamb hand-pulled noodle soup in a scorching, noisy, side street of the Muslim Quarter of Xi’an and eating lamb hand-pulled noodle soup in a sterile, almost banquet-hall-like second-floor restaurant above a grocery store in suburban Los Angeles. The second setting isn’t interesting. We all know what that’s like, and even though that is what the reader will be literally experience should s/he choose to heed the reviewer’s call and go to the restaurant, s’he’d rather hear about what it WOULD be like if s’he were in Xi’an.

Sometimes I think authenticity is so highly prized because we’re all trying to turn our backyards into mini-vacations. We want to feel, even though we just drove a little way up the 405, like we’re ‘there’, wherever ‘there’ is. We want to close our eyes and have traveled thousands of miles. And we’re willing to fool ourselves a little to do it.

11/30,000

I read recently in a wholly un-food-related book that although there are 30,000 edible plants on our planet, only 11 plants account for 93% of the plants we eat. Then I immediately dropped the book and got on the internet.

Is there a list of those 30,000 plants somewhere? How do we know about them all? Are they all actively eaten by someone, somewhere, or are they all just theoretically edible in the sense that they wouldn’t kill us?

And where/when can I start eating my way through them?

I’m into plant food. As far as animals unconventionally used for food go, I’m rarely blown away by any difference in the taste of meat alone. The whole ‘it tastes like chicken’ thing may be overly simplistic, but in my heart of hearts, that’s kind of how I feel. Frog tastes like slippery, somewhat fishy chicken. Rabbit tastes like diluted dark meat chicken. Ostrich tastes like beefy chicken. Even though I’m a gamey-meat-lover, I haven’t found something that gets to my umami receptors quite like a good fat-coated hunk of mutton or goat – the more ‘exotic’ venison and bison included.

When I’m excited about the taste of something it’s usually because it’s either seafood or a particularly unique blend of spices. Even sea snails, which I tend to write about as though they’re infallible, don’t excite me without some tamarind sauce, or at the very least some chili salt, lemon, and Vietnamese coriander. I love po’ boys because of the Cajun coating on the shrimp, larb because of the dry-ricey, limey, strongly minted rub, amok trey because of the lemongrass-scented coconut milk, and hot pot because of the Sichuan peppercorn.

None of the plants I mentioned are in the top 11. Well, other than the wheat needed to make the bread on the po’ boy, the cornstarch in the coating used to deep-fry the shrimp, the rice needed to rub the larb, possibly whatever kind of oil is used to fry/stir-fry/saute/drizzle on all of this stuff…

So actually, many of them are. The top 11 are probably at the top for a reason, or really, a combination of reasons, ranging from ease of cultivation to convenience to a good helping of path dependency. My point is, though, that they may make up 93% of our food, but they certainly don’t make up 93% of my enjoyment, and probably not anyone else’s enjoyment either. I want to taste those plants – fruits, vegetables, spices, herbs, and grains – that I haven’t tried, because if I’ve only tried a tiny percentage of them, and I still love food this much, how much more potential do I have to love food if I raise that percentage?

The mind boggles.

I’m trying to locate a list of these 30,000 plants. The closest I’ve come is from pro-foraging websites, Wikipedia, and an organization that wants to add diversity to global crops to increase sustainability, whose database is the biggest at 7,000 plants. I don’t expect a comprehensive document, but I’d like at least something I can use as a reference list to start searching for those little-known, little-used plants. I’m sure that many are confined to isolated, far-flung jungles and steppes and forests – in other words, I may not be able to drive there on the freeway – but I’m not opposed to an eventual rare-plant-seeking/critiquing world tour.

Spain: Something Beyond the Taste of the Food

Running through every review I’ve ever written, every recommendation I’ve ever given, and every posh place I’ve pooh-poohed is one common thread. That thread has propped up my dedication to holes in the wall, endeared me to food truck gatherings, and justified my disdain for places whose acclaim comes mainly from decor, atmosphere, service, fame, or history. And that thread is:

Nothing matters, nothing, except the taste of the food.

I’ve proclaimed so many times that a meal isn’t truly good unless it’d also be just as good wrapped in foil, leaking onto my hand, with my butt planted on a curb in a soulless suburban parking lot. I viewed any attention paid to plating – drizzling sauce in whimsical patterns, striping fruit slices like bright zebras, any grill markings not branded organically – as wasted. Same with cushions, lighting, wall hangings, deliberate acoustics, or attempts to recreate the atmosphere of either home or foreign countries (or jazz clubs, or rustic country inns, or…)

In Spain, though, I found myself charmed by something that was not the taste of the food. It was also not any of the other things I claim(ed?) to not care about. It was the almost aggressively casual attitude towards eating. People draped themselves all over patio chairs at 3PM like they were in their living room, draining endless beers, occasionally ordering some food, and feeding their dogs on the ground next to them. People packed themselves into tiny, earsplittingly loud bars starting at what in the States would be considered embarrassingly-early-o’clock to drink wine and stagger around with skewers of seafood and ham piled on top of bread. At all hours, windows opened in walls so cooks could hand through cheap kabob wraps.

There was this wonderful freeing feeling like there was no wrong way to eat, and that made the food taste better than it actually was.

I don’t often feel that way – like there’s no wrong way to eat – so this feeling was like letting out a long-held breath. In my life in the States, I pretty much always feel like people think I’m eating wrong. I don’t order wine in fancy restaurants – or ever – and that’s weird. I can’t finish a lot of food in one sitting, which means I have to either not order that much of it or share small portions with companions. That’s sometimes just weird, but other times actively not allowed: some restaurants have a minimum-order-per-person rule.

Not in Spain. Two of us could walk into any open restaurant at any time of day, order a small dish, share it, and walk out. It could be 3 in the afternoon, purportedly siesta time. The dish could cost €2. We could be in a bar, and ignore all offerings of alcohol. We could linger for hours nursing tap water and one stick of delicious grilled squid, and nobody would blink an eye. They’d come back to give us our bill when summoned, and not a minute before.

I remember us walking straight into a wall of sound, a tiny Basque tapas bar stuffed with screaming drunk people (it was perhaps 7pm) wobbling around these tiny standing tables sticking out of the walls. There was no room for the bar to store its wines aboveground, so there was a hole in the floor behind the bar with a ladder sticking out of it and waitresses periodically going down there to grab bottles. We sidled up to the last two seats at the bar and ordered a cod omelette, a skewer of shrimp and potato, and one piece of squid. This totaled less than €10. There was no change of expression on the bartender’s face indicating that this might be odd.

Another time, we had, again, the last two seats at a bar that was laid out in a long line from entrance to exit. Here, we really ordered a full dinner, but people started lining up behind us and having their tapas handed to them right over our heads so they could eat standing up out in the street!

Had I approached my summary of Spanish eating simply by looking at the raw ingredients, it would have gone something like this:

I never want to eat bread again.

Spaniards put bread under EVERYTHING. Ham and cheese? Bread. OK, that’s understandable. Blood sausage, pimiento, and quail egg? Bread. O…K, that’s, I guess, at least a platform for it. Smoked salmon with roe and cream cheese? Bread. Well, I wish it were a bagel, but fine. Shrimp, artichoke, and sesame sauce skewer? Bread. Why? A perfectly grilled squid tender enough to melt into a bite and needing no accompaniment, especially not bread?

It wasn’t even particularly good bread. In France, there was BREAD. The club of crusty bread they served with their soups made sense. This bread was aggressively yeasty and with a crackly crunch that sent clouds of flour billowing into the air, with the inside gapped with holes all ready to soak up the broth. Their croissants were cloudy air giving way to stretchy insides that snapped like taffy. But in Spain, the bread was just acceptable white bread; much better, of course, than any United States grocery store bread, but nothing that, say, I wanted in my mouth at every meal, distracting it from whatever amazing sea creature was cohabitating with it, which leads me to my next point:

Spain is amazing at seafood, especially the touchy, leaning-towards-tough types like octopus and squid. Every single tentacle I found on a skewer or sliced in rounds was tender, with the precious, necessary layer of fat between the flesh and the slippery skin intact. That fat provides the oil needed to soften the rest of it. Galician-style octopus, for example, is just sliced tentacles with oil, salt, and hot paprika – but what wonderful little oily coins! At a highly lauded Basque tapas bar in San Sebastian, we tried overwrought, fusiony dishes like sea urchin cream in a shell, whitefish pepper salad with a bizarre dissolving cracker, and a mushroom tower held together with aspic, but the only things we really wanted to order again were the octopus and squid skewers.

I also loved every bite of salmon I had, from the fusiony place’s stiffened, crisp version topped with its own roe to the lightly smoked billows topped simply with onions and tomatoes and perched on (what else?) bread. Even France stepped in and stole Scandinavia’s thunder with a smoked salmon crepe, leaving the fish plentiful and pillowy and only lightly dilled up.

So technically, I’m afraid to eat seafood again too, but only because I’m afraid it won’t measure up.

All that is fine and good and even accurate, but it doesn’t capture how at ease I felt wandering in and out of open-sided restaurants, in and out of grocery/marketplace/food stall/bar hybrids, eating exactly how and where and how quickly and how much I wanted. When I want to go back, when I have brief dreams of up and moving there, it’s because of that feeling. Eating doesn’t have to be an inherently judgmental experience or a big production or even a prenatal Yelp review.

That, and the markets are so sprawling and so full of fresh and novel ingredients that I know I’ll never understand the cuisine until I have a home with a kitchen.