Every time I eat samlar (Cambodian soup) – any kind of samlar! – I love it so much, and find it so seductively mysterious, that I go into a kind of starry-eyed research haze and forget how to appropriately speak to Google. I ask Google questions like it’s Ask Jeeves: (“Why is Cambodian soup so good?” “What are the ingredients of samlar machu?” etc).
And Google, tolerant as usually it is of Ask-Jeeves-phrased questions, gives me a mere smattering! Nobody (in the English speaking world) seems to know much about Cambodian soup. I mean, Google actually tried to auto fill “Why is Cambodian soup so…” with the words “poor”, “corrupt”, and “low”. I mean, really? People are asking why their soup is corrupt, but I have to dig deep into the bowels of the internet to find out why samlar machu, despite having exactly the description of tom yum on most menus, is so much more delicious to me than tom yum? Or why samlar korko hasn’t supplanted chili as the stew-at-barbecues of choice, with its sweet-potato-esque kabocha, thick meaty eggplant slices, and fat-lined pork ribs?
Cambodian soups – at least any one of them individually, but certainly all as a group – should have at least the following of pho. At least. There should be samlar-spiced sandwich trucks plying DTLA. (There’s wordplay in there somewhere.) Kabocha and toasted rice powder should be showing up as a topping on tacos. Blanched banana blossoms and lemongrass would make a pretty good vegetarian burrito filling, come to think of it.
What shocks me almost as much as the fact that the above isn’t real life is the fact that I never wrote about any of the soups I ate in Cambodia, while I was actually in Cambodia. I remember feeling smiled upon by the gods of culinary luck every time I sat down at some blue-tarped roadside restaurant, pointed at an indecipherable jumble of Khmer script, and was served some wondrous, vegetable-filled mystery broth full of fish so fresh from the river it was practically sweet, but I never wrote about it! This was probably because I had no idea what I was tasting, and could not, therefore, put words to experiences. How was I supposed to describe bowlfuls of total unfamiliarity? Especially when the photos were so uninspiring, sometimes containing my finger and always not doing the taste justice?
Long Beach, luckily, is stuffed much fuller than almost any other American city with Cambodian restaurants. In fact, it contains the largest Cambodian community outside of Cambodia. I touched on some of these restaurants in this entry, but only briefly skirted the topic of soup, paying homage to a cloudy tamarind-leaf fish soup at Crystal Thai-Cambodian Restaurant. Since then, I’ve fallen in love with the samlar korko (kabocha/pork rib/eggplant/roasted rice) at the same place, and the samlar machu (sour soup with ginger and lemongrass) and the trey andaing (“farmer’s” catfish/banana blossom soup) at Monorom Cambodian Restaurant, a few blocks over and one block higher.
I ordered the trey andaing alone, and the waitress warned me: “You will need to take some home!” (Yeah yeah, I’m used to that, I’ve been to Korea-the-country and Korea-the-town-in-LA, where it is assumed that everyone is a championship eater and has banchan-pouches in the sides of their stomachs.) It came out perched atop a solitary but blistering flame, the stream of steam from the fire making me sweat profusely, adding to the authenticity of it all, just like being in Cambodia. The banana flower, blanched pure white, nothing like its oniony Vietnamese cousins that curl in bun bo hue, was soft, rather like bamboo, and sliced like noodles. Shavings of lemongrass drifted along like bonito flakes, occasionally catching on some circles of ginger that, when accidentally bitten, would flood and reset my tastebuds.
And the fish in it… now, I like catfish, but it tends to taste, unmistakably, like catfish: kind of a dirty, bottomfeedery, pungent, I-eat-mud-for-breakfast kind of thing. This fish, purportedly catfish, tasted nothing like that. It tasted clean, for all the world like it had just been fished out of the Mekong, even though that would have been impossible from 7000 miles away. What it tasted like, in actuality, was snakehead: this pure, clean, cloudlike white flavor and texture.
This flavor was perhaps the only flavor in the whole soup that could have been called mild. The rest of it was stinky and bold. The shrimp were skin-on, tiny, and sweet, but strong. There was a whole sac of fish roe just hanging out and falling apart all over everything. Prahok, the omnipresent Cambodian fermented mudfish that makes even Vietnamese purple shrimp paste taste tame in comparison, provided the whole bowl with an undercurrent of funkiness that mingled with the scent of the flame under the soup (Prahok, in all honesty, is probably the answer to the question I pose above about why Cambodian soup isn’t more popular. The first time I came to this restaurant, roughly two years earlier, my dining companion whispered from behind his cupped hand that my lunch smelled ‘like gorilla farts’. I guess I like gorilla farts!)
I took a larger group back two weeks later for what I hoped would be a soup crawl, and we did get try two new soups: Monorom’s version of samlar korko and the samlar machu. The machu was ordered despite my protestations – I can’t stomach tom yum, which, like I mentioned above, machu is a cousin to – but the whole table loved it, and so, astonishingly, did I. The same sweet, globe-traveling fish floated around in the clear yet bitingly astringent ginger/lemongrass/citrus broth. It was coated, blanketlike, in tons of morning glory leaves. As though the tom yum aversion weren’t enough to try and turn me off of this soup, I also am not crazy about morning glory leaves, because one time I had a plate of them in Chengdu that were so heavily coated with Sichuan peppercorn that I couldn’t feel my throat for hours and thought I was dying. But even with that working against it, I still loved this soup. How could I not? It was more refreshing than lemonade.
The samlar korko was less well-received by the table, and even I had to admit that Crystal Thai-Cambodian does it better. But there’s something I love about the gritty texture of the toasted rice powder, coating everything like a dry spice rub, and how the kabocha tastes like a lighter version of pumpkin. There’s also something charmingly down-to-earth about how it’s impossible to eat the ribs without plucking them out of your spoon by hand and gnawing at them like you’re sitting around a fire 10000 years ago. I do wish they weren’t overcook them, though. (Something I notice about Cambodian food – both here in the States and in Cambodia – is that they tend to cook their fish to flaky, cloudlike perfection, but turn their meat into a woody, tough [albeit wonderfully spiced and fat-coated] mess. Monorom’s beef lok lak is another example of that. Oh well. Nobody’s perfect.
While I still have a long way to go working my way down menus of mystery samlar, I would love it if anyone shared with me a site that has good recipes. There’s an adorable youtube channel that consists entirely of videos of someone’s Grandma cooking delicious-looking dishes, but then suddenly – in every recipe – “chicken flavor soup base mix”! I don’t mind it if I don’t know it (more like I CAN’T mind) but I’m not going to use it myself. I’d feel like I was cheating.
Sunday, July 10, 2016
Sunday, June 19, 2016
Senses Smothered By Sheep
The first time China fed me some form of sheep was the very first day China ever saw me. I landed in Xi’an, Shaanxi, an odd city for a first-time tourist to cut her China-teeth on. It’s located in the center of the country and is noted mainly for its exhibition of terracotta warriors, which are showcased miles out of the city in their own warehouse and surrounding park.
The city itself was hot and grimy, and the air so bad I couldn’t see the ground from a tenth story window. We were at a hospital waiting for my boyfriend’s mom to get a couple root canals (PSA: China is not a good place for dental tourism), and I kept looking doubtfully out the window at how the air just slowly seemed to thicken until it became indistinct and yellowish-gray. It was like living in a cloud… a cloud of exhaust. A seasoned veteran of Los Angeles, I thought I’d seen pollution. I hadn’t.
When I got hungry, I thought we’d eat whatever the Chinese equivalent of hospital cafeteria food was; we were in sort of an industrial, restaurantless area. Instead, I was led outside onto the street, where the back of the parking lot of the hospital had been converted into what in the U.S. would totally count as a night market; sweating men and women, the lower halves of their faces covered in cloth, fanned at thick smoke billowing off a multitude of hot grills. Nearby, more vendors chopped fruit and scooped it into bags.
The grills, and whatever was on them, didn’t look immediately appetizing. The way the air was, thick and heavy, created an illusion that the smoke from the grills was what was creating the ambient haze. I didn’t feel like eating whatever caused me to feel like I was living in an exhaust-cloud city. Plus, it was hot, and the grills were hot. I wanted the cut fruit.
And I did get the cut fruit (watermelons mixed with carrots – weird), but my boyfriend insisted I also get what was on the grills, which turned out to be mutton skewers. This popular street food, ubiquitous in all parts of China but best-tasting, I think, in the western half, consists of mutton chunks skewered through and brushed with chili sauce, dried chilies, cumin, and salt. They’re handed to you scorching, so the experience has to begin with the smell, which is rich and spicy. Oil drips dangerously down the skewer towards your hand if you hold it too vertically, so you have to be careful with your angle. Once it’s cooled down enough to touch, you get the cumin first, a light coating all over your tongue, then the most explosive, fatty, gamey flavor. I don’t know why Chinese mutton and lamb tastes so much gamier than American mutton and lamb – whether it’s diet, the amount of fat left on, or the cooking method – but the difference is as big as if they were two different animals.
The second time China fed me sheep was in the prettier and much more touristy Muslim quarter, in a second floor cafe that looked like a converted shed draped in tapestry. I ordered yangrou paomo, a thick lamb broth filled with torn bits of bread and fat-streaked lamb chunks. It was delicious – rich and so gamey it felt like the used the essence of hundreds of sheep to make it – but regrettably so heavy I had to haul my stomach home and resume my Muslim Quarter culinary tour the next day.
I’ve never been able to find mutton skewers in Los Angeles exactly like they make them in China. I’ve tried. Most Angelenos will point you towards Feng Mao Mutton Kebab in Koreatown, but I find their version heavy on the gristle and light on the fat, and their staff way too trusting of patrons to cook their own skewers. You’re the experts, not me! If I could grill my own mutton skewers, I would – at home. Anyway, I think Omar’s Xinjiang Halal in San Gabriel comes much closer. In my own Yelp review I wrote that they got it ‘to the note’, but I was speaking comparatively. American restaurants are just too scared to embrace the fat. However, if you want to get as close as you’re going to get, go to Omar’s and make sure you order them with the garlicky cucumber salad.
I HAVE, however, been able to find gamey, lamby, pickled-garlicky replicas of Xi’an style lamb soup in the Los Angeles area, one with torn-up bread as the base and one with wide, hand-cut-and-stretched wheat noodles.
The torn-up bread version comes from Rainbow Bridge, a Ningxia province specialty restaurant in Irvine. The bread chunks here are perfect little tiny crouton-like squares. (I have no idea how they get them so uniform. Mechanical bread separator?) They cause the soup, at first glance, to resemble a bowl of white Legos. But they rapidly slurp up the thick cloudy broth and turn into puffy Legos with indistinct edges that, upon contact with your tongue, become lamb bombs. The experience of placing a spoonful of those in your mouth is not unlike placing a xiao long bao in your mouth, in terms of the shocking spurt of meat essence it releases. And if the lambiness of the bread isn’t enough, there are also hunks of lamb, almost appropriately fat-streaked, sitting in little wood-ear mushroom beds and wearing leek hats. The overall effect is added to by a pervasive taste/smell of pickled garlic; I’m not sure if this is because it was actually used for cooking or because the little plate of it next to my bowl was sending aromas wafting up to mix up my senses.
The noodly version comes from Xi’an Tasty in Monterey Park. Speaking of noodles, I think the noodles in this broth are secretly just one 20 foot long noodle. While attempting to serve ourselves, we kept unspooling and unspooling these monster noodles, splattering broth all over the table and the floor and our shirts in the process, trying to reach the end. Eventually, we ended up meeting in the middle. Usually, in situations like this, Chinese restaurants will offer scissors, but I think in this case they judged that the value of getting to laugh at us was greater than the value of satisfied customers with scissors. (Just kidding, our waitress was above-and-beyond sweet.)
The broth here is less aggressively gamey and garlicky than Rainbow Bridge’s, but mostly because it tastes like it may get a slight moderation from chicken broth. The lamb here is more tender, and falls apart at the first feather touch from a fork. The real fun of it, though, is the Mobius strip monster noodle. It’s so substantial it may as well be a rope of bread.
If getting your senses smothered in the essence of sheep sounds like a good time to you, northwestern China is the place for you, but in the meantime, Los Angeles, as always, at least approximates.
The city itself was hot and grimy, and the air so bad I couldn’t see the ground from a tenth story window. We were at a hospital waiting for my boyfriend’s mom to get a couple root canals (PSA: China is not a good place for dental tourism), and I kept looking doubtfully out the window at how the air just slowly seemed to thicken until it became indistinct and yellowish-gray. It was like living in a cloud… a cloud of exhaust. A seasoned veteran of Los Angeles, I thought I’d seen pollution. I hadn’t.
When I got hungry, I thought we’d eat whatever the Chinese equivalent of hospital cafeteria food was; we were in sort of an industrial, restaurantless area. Instead, I was led outside onto the street, where the back of the parking lot of the hospital had been converted into what in the U.S. would totally count as a night market; sweating men and women, the lower halves of their faces covered in cloth, fanned at thick smoke billowing off a multitude of hot grills. Nearby, more vendors chopped fruit and scooped it into bags.
The grills, and whatever was on them, didn’t look immediately appetizing. The way the air was, thick and heavy, created an illusion that the smoke from the grills was what was creating the ambient haze. I didn’t feel like eating whatever caused me to feel like I was living in an exhaust-cloud city. Plus, it was hot, and the grills were hot. I wanted the cut fruit.
And I did get the cut fruit (watermelons mixed with carrots – weird), but my boyfriend insisted I also get what was on the grills, which turned out to be mutton skewers. This popular street food, ubiquitous in all parts of China but best-tasting, I think, in the western half, consists of mutton chunks skewered through and brushed with chili sauce, dried chilies, cumin, and salt. They’re handed to you scorching, so the experience has to begin with the smell, which is rich and spicy. Oil drips dangerously down the skewer towards your hand if you hold it too vertically, so you have to be careful with your angle. Once it’s cooled down enough to touch, you get the cumin first, a light coating all over your tongue, then the most explosive, fatty, gamey flavor. I don’t know why Chinese mutton and lamb tastes so much gamier than American mutton and lamb – whether it’s diet, the amount of fat left on, or the cooking method – but the difference is as big as if they were two different animals.
The second time China fed me sheep was in the prettier and much more touristy Muslim quarter, in a second floor cafe that looked like a converted shed draped in tapestry. I ordered yangrou paomo, a thick lamb broth filled with torn bits of bread and fat-streaked lamb chunks. It was delicious – rich and so gamey it felt like the used the essence of hundreds of sheep to make it – but regrettably so heavy I had to haul my stomach home and resume my Muslim Quarter culinary tour the next day.
I’ve never been able to find mutton skewers in Los Angeles exactly like they make them in China. I’ve tried. Most Angelenos will point you towards Feng Mao Mutton Kebab in Koreatown, but I find their version heavy on the gristle and light on the fat, and their staff way too trusting of patrons to cook their own skewers. You’re the experts, not me! If I could grill my own mutton skewers, I would – at home. Anyway, I think Omar’s Xinjiang Halal in San Gabriel comes much closer. In my own Yelp review I wrote that they got it ‘to the note’, but I was speaking comparatively. American restaurants are just too scared to embrace the fat. However, if you want to get as close as you’re going to get, go to Omar’s and make sure you order them with the garlicky cucumber salad.
I HAVE, however, been able to find gamey, lamby, pickled-garlicky replicas of Xi’an style lamb soup in the Los Angeles area, one with torn-up bread as the base and one with wide, hand-cut-and-stretched wheat noodles.
The torn-up bread version comes from Rainbow Bridge, a Ningxia province specialty restaurant in Irvine. The bread chunks here are perfect little tiny crouton-like squares. (I have no idea how they get them so uniform. Mechanical bread separator?) They cause the soup, at first glance, to resemble a bowl of white Legos. But they rapidly slurp up the thick cloudy broth and turn into puffy Legos with indistinct edges that, upon contact with your tongue, become lamb bombs. The experience of placing a spoonful of those in your mouth is not unlike placing a xiao long bao in your mouth, in terms of the shocking spurt of meat essence it releases. And if the lambiness of the bread isn’t enough, there are also hunks of lamb, almost appropriately fat-streaked, sitting in little wood-ear mushroom beds and wearing leek hats. The overall effect is added to by a pervasive taste/smell of pickled garlic; I’m not sure if this is because it was actually used for cooking or because the little plate of it next to my bowl was sending aromas wafting up to mix up my senses.
The noodly version comes from Xi’an Tasty in Monterey Park. Speaking of noodles, I think the noodles in this broth are secretly just one 20 foot long noodle. While attempting to serve ourselves, we kept unspooling and unspooling these monster noodles, splattering broth all over the table and the floor and our shirts in the process, trying to reach the end. Eventually, we ended up meeting in the middle. Usually, in situations like this, Chinese restaurants will offer scissors, but I think in this case they judged that the value of getting to laugh at us was greater than the value of satisfied customers with scissors. (Just kidding, our waitress was above-and-beyond sweet.)
The broth here is less aggressively gamey and garlicky than Rainbow Bridge’s, but mostly because it tastes like it may get a slight moderation from chicken broth. The lamb here is more tender, and falls apart at the first feather touch from a fork. The real fun of it, though, is the Mobius strip monster noodle. It’s so substantial it may as well be a rope of bread.
If getting your senses smothered in the essence of sheep sounds like a good time to you, northwestern China is the place for you, but in the meantime, Los Angeles, as always, at least approximates.
Wednesday, June 15, 2016
An Acquired Taste
Sometimes my sense of personal identity rewrites history. It has a such a strong sense of itself – myself – as an experimental eater that it assumes that Childhood Me constantly sought out new flavors, just like Current Me. It also takes Current Me’s negative attitude toward artificial flavors, sweeteners, and overly processed foods and extends them backwards, systematically wiping out memories of Childhood Me storing sour blue Warheads in her cheeks, begging her mom to buy Spaghetti-O’s, surviving all the way until seventh period lunch on daily cans of Dr. Pepper, and only being able to cook frozen dinners from age 16-20.
Recently I was talking to my mom about kids’ menus. I was (am) angry that they existed, because I thought (think) that catering to kids’ dumb preferences for boring, processed food both creates and reinforces such preferences, turning kids into Outback Steakhouse-seeking, Campbell’s soup-heating, Hard Rock Cafe-touring adults. “I never ate from a kids menu, did I?” I asked her confidently, sure I knew the answer already.
“Of course you did,” she responded, without even stopping to think. “You pretty much lived on bean and cheese burritos whenever we went to Mexican restaurants.”
Because I can’t conceive of making that choice now, I can’t conceive of having been the person who ever would have made that choice. I remember the parts of my childhood where I ate fish eyes on a dare, brought cream cheese and caviar sandwiches to preschool, and was the only kid in my group of friends to have tried sushi. I remember those things because those things fit with my narrative: that of the adventurous kid, becoming an adventurous eating evangelist.
Kids’ menus fit nowhere in that narrative. I have a knee-jerk negative reaction to them. When I’m sitting at a restaurant with an otherwise beautiful varied menu that chooses to offer children chicken fingers or a grilled cheese sandwich, I think, what is the message we’re sending here? Is it really that we’re catering to an inherently picky demographic whose tastebuds biologically prefer blandness? Or are we creating a false picky demographic by making that assumption?
This article argues that American children’s bland tastes were artificially created by an 1894 book called ‘The Care and Feeding of Children’, which was heavily referenced when kids’ menus came into existence during prohibition. The book claimed that fresh fruit, pastries, salty meats, lemonade, and other ‘fancy’ foods were to be reserved for adults. Prior to the publication of this book, which came as part of a larger scientific movement and era promoting different nutritional requirements for children, kids ate what adults ate.
But you can’t make the case that kids’ bland preferences aren’t wholly manufactured out of thin air. Children do have more tastebuds than adults (because adults’ tastebuds eventually stop regenerating) and so food tastes stronger to them. Basically, they’re supertasters. (Parenthetically, I know a self-proclaimed supertaster and she hates almost all ‘healthy’ food, and especially all vegetables.) Children also are programmed, as toddlers, to crave fat and sugar to gain energy and to avoid bitterness, which could have signaled poison back in ancient times when they were running around shoving unfamiliar plants from the forest into their mouths.
Why, then, do some children eat kimchi and borscht and carrots and peppers, while others subsist on foods marketed specifically for them, like chicken nuggets and mashed potatoes and fruit roll-ups? I’m pulling the lens back from the United States here: remember that set of photos that circulated early last year that showed what school lunches were like around the world? Here it is. Take a look. I can’t argue that these kids aren’t eating differently from their parents, as I’m not an expert on each type of cuisine pictured, but I can certainly argue that almost none of the international foods pictured in this set are as bland or texturally unchallenging as the American food pictured. Korea’s unsurprisingly, prominently features kimchi. That, plus Finland’s pickled beet and carrot salads and Greece’s vinegared dolmas, prove that acidity is not a dealbreaker for young palates, as the U.S. so often assumes it is by cutting out certain salad dressings or forgoing sharp sauces. Brazil’s bed of fresh arugula, Spain’s cut fresh peppers, and Ukraine’s cabbage show that raw veggies aren’t a no-go either, and that veggies don’t have to be boiled to mush to be enjoyed by children. And I mean, Ukraine features borscht. What could be more stereotypically offensive to most American children than a cold mushy soup made out of beets? What are other countries doing differently?
My guess (and this needs more research to substantiate) is that most other cultures don’t conceive of children’s palates and needs as a separate entity than the adults’; they simply, as in pre-1890’s America – make kids eat what the adults eat. This doesn’t mean that kids aren’t universally more particularly about what they are willing to try. I mean, the phrase ‘an acquired taste’ isn’t just something that appeared, baseless, out of thin air. Adventurousness seems not ingrained but earned, either through necessity (“there’s nothing else to eat!”) or a certain maturity (“this is going to be at least an interesting/broadening experience, and maybe I’ll even like it!”).
The former is foisted upon children by parents who take the approach of feeding their children what they themselves are eating: no other option. If the children don’t like it, the children go hungry. Eventually, they learn.
The latter comes – only sometimes – with age. I’d argue that children who are forced to experience the former are more likely to become the types of adults who reach the latter. While I don’t know anyone who sprang from the womb inherently frightened of ‘weird’ food like duck fetuses or pig’s blood, I also don’t know anyone who has overcome society’s judgments enough to try those things, preconceived notions firmly inculcated, without a little bit of gritting teeth and encouraging self-talk. Sometimes gritting teeth and encouraging self-talk is necessary to reach a point where a new food is fully appreciated and integrated into a diet! Personally, I had to pry apart a duck fetus with a fork until it didn’t resemble a bird anymore before I could eat balut for the first time; I didn’t know that the usual method involves scooping it out with a spoon, eyes averted or shut. I had to get over the fact that pig’s blood tasted like swallowing a mouthful of saliva after getting punched. Now I eat both things happily, because I appreciate the mingling of the flavors they often accompany: pate and Vietnamese coriander and salt and lime; iron and oxtail and lemongrass.
I feel my life would be less rich if not for these experiences, and I worry that American kids are being set up for a life of predictability when they’re not expected to cultivate an attitude of openness and curiosity towards food. I realize how pretentious this sounds, but it doesn’t change how I feel.
Recently I was talking to my mom about kids’ menus. I was (am) angry that they existed, because I thought (think) that catering to kids’ dumb preferences for boring, processed food both creates and reinforces such preferences, turning kids into Outback Steakhouse-seeking, Campbell’s soup-heating, Hard Rock Cafe-touring adults. “I never ate from a kids menu, did I?” I asked her confidently, sure I knew the answer already.
“Of course you did,” she responded, without even stopping to think. “You pretty much lived on bean and cheese burritos whenever we went to Mexican restaurants.”
Because I can’t conceive of making that choice now, I can’t conceive of having been the person who ever would have made that choice. I remember the parts of my childhood where I ate fish eyes on a dare, brought cream cheese and caviar sandwiches to preschool, and was the only kid in my group of friends to have tried sushi. I remember those things because those things fit with my narrative: that of the adventurous kid, becoming an adventurous eating evangelist.
Kids’ menus fit nowhere in that narrative. I have a knee-jerk negative reaction to them. When I’m sitting at a restaurant with an otherwise beautiful varied menu that chooses to offer children chicken fingers or a grilled cheese sandwich, I think, what is the message we’re sending here? Is it really that we’re catering to an inherently picky demographic whose tastebuds biologically prefer blandness? Or are we creating a false picky demographic by making that assumption?
This article argues that American children’s bland tastes were artificially created by an 1894 book called ‘The Care and Feeding of Children’, which was heavily referenced when kids’ menus came into existence during prohibition. The book claimed that fresh fruit, pastries, salty meats, lemonade, and other ‘fancy’ foods were to be reserved for adults. Prior to the publication of this book, which came as part of a larger scientific movement and era promoting different nutritional requirements for children, kids ate what adults ate.
But you can’t make the case that kids’ bland preferences aren’t wholly manufactured out of thin air. Children do have more tastebuds than adults (because adults’ tastebuds eventually stop regenerating) and so food tastes stronger to them. Basically, they’re supertasters. (Parenthetically, I know a self-proclaimed supertaster and she hates almost all ‘healthy’ food, and especially all vegetables.) Children also are programmed, as toddlers, to crave fat and sugar to gain energy and to avoid bitterness, which could have signaled poison back in ancient times when they were running around shoving unfamiliar plants from the forest into their mouths.
Why, then, do some children eat kimchi and borscht and carrots and peppers, while others subsist on foods marketed specifically for them, like chicken nuggets and mashed potatoes and fruit roll-ups? I’m pulling the lens back from the United States here: remember that set of photos that circulated early last year that showed what school lunches were like around the world? Here it is. Take a look. I can’t argue that these kids aren’t eating differently from their parents, as I’m not an expert on each type of cuisine pictured, but I can certainly argue that almost none of the international foods pictured in this set are as bland or texturally unchallenging as the American food pictured. Korea’s unsurprisingly, prominently features kimchi. That, plus Finland’s pickled beet and carrot salads and Greece’s vinegared dolmas, prove that acidity is not a dealbreaker for young palates, as the U.S. so often assumes it is by cutting out certain salad dressings or forgoing sharp sauces. Brazil’s bed of fresh arugula, Spain’s cut fresh peppers, and Ukraine’s cabbage show that raw veggies aren’t a no-go either, and that veggies don’t have to be boiled to mush to be enjoyed by children. And I mean, Ukraine features borscht. What could be more stereotypically offensive to most American children than a cold mushy soup made out of beets? What are other countries doing differently?
My guess (and this needs more research to substantiate) is that most other cultures don’t conceive of children’s palates and needs as a separate entity than the adults’; they simply, as in pre-1890’s America – make kids eat what the adults eat. This doesn’t mean that kids aren’t universally more particularly about what they are willing to try. I mean, the phrase ‘an acquired taste’ isn’t just something that appeared, baseless, out of thin air. Adventurousness seems not ingrained but earned, either through necessity (“there’s nothing else to eat!”) or a certain maturity (“this is going to be at least an interesting/broadening experience, and maybe I’ll even like it!”).
The former is foisted upon children by parents who take the approach of feeding their children what they themselves are eating: no other option. If the children don’t like it, the children go hungry. Eventually, they learn.
The latter comes – only sometimes – with age. I’d argue that children who are forced to experience the former are more likely to become the types of adults who reach the latter. While I don’t know anyone who sprang from the womb inherently frightened of ‘weird’ food like duck fetuses or pig’s blood, I also don’t know anyone who has overcome society’s judgments enough to try those things, preconceived notions firmly inculcated, without a little bit of gritting teeth and encouraging self-talk. Sometimes gritting teeth and encouraging self-talk is necessary to reach a point where a new food is fully appreciated and integrated into a diet! Personally, I had to pry apart a duck fetus with a fork until it didn’t resemble a bird anymore before I could eat balut for the first time; I didn’t know that the usual method involves scooping it out with a spoon, eyes averted or shut. I had to get over the fact that pig’s blood tasted like swallowing a mouthful of saliva after getting punched. Now I eat both things happily, because I appreciate the mingling of the flavors they often accompany: pate and Vietnamese coriander and salt and lime; iron and oxtail and lemongrass.
I feel my life would be less rich if not for these experiences, and I worry that American kids are being set up for a life of predictability when they’re not expected to cultivate an attitude of openness and curiosity towards food. I realize how pretentious this sounds, but it doesn’t change how I feel.
Saturday, June 4, 2016
Everyday Eating
If you fall too deeply into the vortex of food writing, it starts to seem like everyone in the world is consistently subsisting on rakishly tilted sliders hand-shaped from some kind of nontraditional meat, cute salads of citrus and cured raw fish, street tacos from the window of a brand new truck, five-country-fusion in a ‘pop-up’ in some insider’s living room, or new artisanal goat cheeses from the farmers market. Nobody ever seems to eat anything pedestrian, or merely tasty, without being… momentous, or noteworthy in some way. We know they do, of course, but it’s not getting written about, so in the collective foodie consciousness, everything mundane or everyday simply ceases to exist.
In real life, though, non-noteworthy meals definitely exist. We don’t go out for every meal. We come home late and throw things in a pot, or in the microwave, or even, if things get dire, open a crinkly bag.
So what do we food-obsessives eat when we’re not ‘on’? What do we crave when we know it won’t go into an article or be recommended to a friend? What’s our comfort food, our most dog-eared recipe? What do we always restock when we go to the grocery store?
Yes, I’m asking you!
The question feels almost intrusive, like asking to see a someone’s underwear drawer. But I think it says a lot about the way our taste buds differ before we deliberately twist them to try and like things that are new or experimental or ‘in’.
I’m not knocking the deliberate twisting of tastebuds here. (Obviously; my entire blog promotes the willingness to do this.) Some of my favorite foods were acquired by the deliberate twisting of tastebuds. I learned to like olives by stolidly continuing to eat them, forcing them past my gag reflex, until they suddenly, beautifully, morphed into the slick, rich, pungent, and delicious morsels they are. I put them in hummus regularly now, and will suck up olive tapenade at work events like a vacuum cleaner. Similarly, I balked at pork blood jelly for a long time, until I realized bun bo hue was an obstacle course of bones and cartilage without its silky texture. I’m currently trying very hard to like celery by slowly incorporating it into juice.
But when I’m not eating to expand my boundaries or as research? When I’m tired and revert to the comfortable?
For dinner, at least once a week, I have a salad concoction that’s like a deconstructed California roll without the krab. Sushi rice, cucumber, carrot, avocado, sesame seeds, shredded seaweed, soy, wasabi. Sometimes I’ll use kimchi, fish roe, and sesame leaves instead of the cucumber, carrot, and avocado. If I’m feeling really fancy I’ll get some raw fish and make it poke-esque. But boy, do I love vaguely Asian rice salads when I’m feeling like not making a big production about food!
I also like fancy potato chips (there are 8 bags in my pantry, with flavors ranging from dill pickle to horseradish-cheddar), granola (noun) so, well, granola (adjective), that it’s unsweetened and made in small batches in an unmarked storefront by an unsmiling hippie, grapes (they’re my M&M’s), eggs on the exact line between hard- and soft-boiled, impossibly oily eggplant/tofu stir fry, and candied ginger, which I eat by the handful.
What do you subsist on that you never write – or talk – about?
In real life, though, non-noteworthy meals definitely exist. We don’t go out for every meal. We come home late and throw things in a pot, or in the microwave, or even, if things get dire, open a crinkly bag.
So what do we food-obsessives eat when we’re not ‘on’? What do we crave when we know it won’t go into an article or be recommended to a friend? What’s our comfort food, our most dog-eared recipe? What do we always restock when we go to the grocery store?
Yes, I’m asking you!
The question feels almost intrusive, like asking to see a someone’s underwear drawer. But I think it says a lot about the way our taste buds differ before we deliberately twist them to try and like things that are new or experimental or ‘in’.
I’m not knocking the deliberate twisting of tastebuds here. (Obviously; my entire blog promotes the willingness to do this.) Some of my favorite foods were acquired by the deliberate twisting of tastebuds. I learned to like olives by stolidly continuing to eat them, forcing them past my gag reflex, until they suddenly, beautifully, morphed into the slick, rich, pungent, and delicious morsels they are. I put them in hummus regularly now, and will suck up olive tapenade at work events like a vacuum cleaner. Similarly, I balked at pork blood jelly for a long time, until I realized bun bo hue was an obstacle course of bones and cartilage without its silky texture. I’m currently trying very hard to like celery by slowly incorporating it into juice.
But when I’m not eating to expand my boundaries or as research? When I’m tired and revert to the comfortable?
For dinner, at least once a week, I have a salad concoction that’s like a deconstructed California roll without the krab. Sushi rice, cucumber, carrot, avocado, sesame seeds, shredded seaweed, soy, wasabi. Sometimes I’ll use kimchi, fish roe, and sesame leaves instead of the cucumber, carrot, and avocado. If I’m feeling really fancy I’ll get some raw fish and make it poke-esque. But boy, do I love vaguely Asian rice salads when I’m feeling like not making a big production about food!
I also like fancy potato chips (there are 8 bags in my pantry, with flavors ranging from dill pickle to horseradish-cheddar), granola (noun) so, well, granola (adjective), that it’s unsweetened and made in small batches in an unmarked storefront by an unsmiling hippie, grapes (they’re my M&M’s), eggs on the exact line between hard- and soft-boiled, impossibly oily eggplant/tofu stir fry, and candied ginger, which I eat by the handful.
What do you subsist on that you never write – or talk – about?
Sunday, May 29, 2016
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.
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.
Sunday, May 22, 2016
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.
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.
Wednesday, May 11, 2016
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.
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.
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