Every possible kind of vehicle except a taxi is speeding around one of Muar, Malaysia’s frenetic roundabouts, especially vehicles that sort of look like they might be taxis from afar – just to mess with us. The weather might best be described as ‘steamy’. I have a destination address which is four miles away. In a less equatorial climate, four miles is walkable. Here, it’s a marathon.
But getting to this address is non-negotiable, because it’s the only place for miles around that serves patin tempoyak.
There is foreign food that you can’t get in the States, and then there’s foreign food you really can’t get in the States. Patin tempoyak is the latter. It’s Malaysian silver catfish somehow prepared with (rubbed in, soaked in a broth made largely from, etc) fermented durian.
For a typical American reaction to this prospect, I quote a friend’s comment on my Facebook post featuring this dish: “Why/how anyone would DARE to ferment a durian and then turn it into paste is utterly beyond me.”
For MY reaction to this prospect, see, well, the predicament I find myself in: fruitlessly circling a Muarian roundabout, surrounded on all sides by other restaurants (good ones! Novel ones!) and panicking because the fermented durian restaurant will be closing in a hour, along with my window to try it. This dish hails from Temerloh, and Muar is as closely as I’m likely to get to Temerloh in my lifetime.
Finally, I duck into a hotel (not my hotel) and ask for help in calling a taxi. The Chinese hotel owner looks doubtfully at the restaurant’s name, smacking his lips over the syllables, and says ‘Must be new.’ He also says he has never tried the dish, and from the way he says it, I know that he does not wish to try the dish. His kindness in helping a stranger find a taxi to a fermented durian restaurant he is obviously pretty sure she won’t like, however, does not go unnoticed.
Out in the ‘suburbs’ of Muar, on the green jungly edge of the nation-spanning Route 5, is a restaurant that looks like it could just as easily be a auto service/parts store. Not just because of the garage doors that haul up and down, which are featured on nearly every urban business in Malaysia, but because of the double-car sized dining area. Grills line the back, and vats, filled with orangish oily liquid. Surprisingly, the place doesn’t smell like much. I was expecting the air-thickening scent of my memories of the durian-heavy sidewalk market in Jayapura, Indonesia. I have never thought, like many, that durian smells like armpits or sweaty socks or onions. I think it smells like an unusually cheesy jackfruit. But a very aromatic cheesy jackfruit, one that can eclipse most other scents, even motorcycle exhaust or the smoke of a hundred satay stands.
My nose isn’t the only thing that’s surprised; so are the chefs and waiters, who later post on Facebook that we are the first Americans to ever come to their restaurant, adding pictures of us posing, sweating, and smiling with our banana-leaf-wrapped, durian-paste rubbed fish, and our big bowl of spicy durian-soaked fish soup.
For those two dishes, plus a line-up of starfruit and calamansi juices that we ask to keep coming as we sweat the previous ones right out, it costs something like US$7. For both of us. I’d pay severalfold that to be able to eat these dishes again less than 9000 miles from my home. (I’d be thrilled if I could even get starfruit or calamansi juice alone in my home, which is a reasonably warm, extremely ethnically diverse major city that imports all sorts of tropical fruit, so why not these?)
Flaunting all known culinary laws, fermented durian tastes LESS pungent than non-fermented durian. In the paste on the banana leaf-grilled fish, it tastes like the fermentation process simply concentrated the fruity note of the durian, turning it almost pineapply, if this pineapple had also been pickled in the manner of those pickles you find in South Indian thali. In the case of the soup, the spice is so instant and searing it’s hard to tell what’s going on until your tongue calms down a little. Then, the durian’s oniony notes come out and blend seamlessly with the rest of the herbs and vegetables floating in there. The fish itself – and when else is the fish’s quality an afterthought? – is pure white, naturally sweet, and covered in iridescent, soft, and fatty skin. The main accompanying vegetable is something right at the intersection of carrot, radish, and potato.
The chefs are amused that we’re loving this, some of our friends are shocked that we’re loving this, and it’s overall treated as a weird, adventurous experience by everyone involved, but zest for adventure aside, quest for novelty aside – this is legitimately one of the best meals I’ve ever eaten.
There are no taxis out in the untamed wilderness of State Route 5, still, and a relative of the chef’s who looks to be about 13 drives us back to the city. As goes a normal day in Malaysia.
Thursday, April 20, 2017
Wednesday, March 15, 2017
Scared to be a Vegetarian
The thing that’s been keeping me from writing lately is not the usual (laziness, avoiding responsibilities, existential crises about my microscopic shot at being a self-sustaining food blogger), but rather, a creeping unease about the title of my blog.
Hannah Eats Everything. But lately, I don’t. My discomfort with the idea of eating meat has been around since college. At first, it was conveniently limited to discomfort with eating specifically the kinds of meat I already didn’t like (steak, chicken in any preparation other than fried, anything tough and sinewy, too much meat at one time, like in a chop), but it has been growing and getting a bit out of hand.
Trying to minimize my meat consumption started by not cooking it at home, which then became also not eating it when it was convenient/crappy, like free pizza at work, which turned into its current incarnation: not eating it unless A) it’s a rare opportunity to try a unique dish, B) I have it on good authority it’s going to be transcendent, or C) a friend or their grandma or something gives it to me and then stands there expectantly.
What I didn’t expect was that this stage was also where my tastebuds stopped being within my control. They started balking at certain meats, tasting something offensively gamy, like a subtle wet dog smell, where before they might have luxuriated in marrow, intestines, or liver. For example, the other day I couldn’t finish a bowl of Phnom Penh noodle soup because it was too liver-y. Too liver-y! For me! I used to order larb made of liver at North Hollywood Thai restaurants. I had a fridge full of Trader Joe’s truffle mousse pate. I mean, I judged Phnom Penh noodle restaurants on their ability to stand up against soup gentrification by using the ‘icky parts’ of the pig despite casual tourists’ squicked-outedness. And now I was pushing the liver down into the depths of the soup, hidden under the noodles, so I wouldn’t have to face the shame of my traitorous tastebuds.
I’m afraid to try pate, a former favorite. Popeye’s fried chicken, a guilty pleasure for years, hits my tolerance level after half a thigh. I used to eat burgers about once a month. The last time I ate one was October – and it was Korean-influenced – and I still didn’t like it. And this one pains me most: when my family follows my grandma’s recipe for essig-fleisch, it tastes like tomatoey straw with this unmistakeable farm animal smell-tang.
It shouldn’t pain me at all, or shame me, or even surprise me. I support eliminating factory farming, and would be happy to pay the inflated price for humanely killed meat. I believe we should cut meat consumption to a fraction of what it is now – that the worldwide trend toward increased meat consumption is the wrong direction. I believe animal flesh is something that should be consumed mindfully, with thoughts towards the sacrifice involved. I have wished out loud after watching some horrific factory farm video or reading “Eating Animals” or “Animal Liberation” that my body didn’t love and crave meat so much. Then, I’d be free to go vegetarian.
And now, it doesn’t. I am free(er) to go vegetarian.
I am, half-under my control and half-not, moving that way. I still eat seafood with abandon (or, abandon if it falls under my A/B/C three-stage rules above). For some reason, few seafood items have yet inspired even slight revulsion in me (exceptions: stingrays, which have the effect of a ropy combination of tuna and steak). But the proportion of mammal/bird meat in my diet is rapidly shrinking.
It pains me, I guess, because this blog is nothing if not a shrine to novelty. Newness is more important than quality, goodness, complexity, authenticity, or any other measure I might otherwise choose to rate food. And along with newness comes openness to experience, that Big Five Personality scale item that I choose mainly to apply to food experiences. How can I remain fully open, or claim allegiance to novelty, when there are now things towards which I hold prejudice? Not just “hey, I’ve tried this thing and don’t really like it” prejudice, but moral prejudice?
I will try to keep writing regardless, perhaps pointing my spotlight at more fish-and-veggie-centric experiences, as I figure this out – but the unease remains.
It’s kind of funny when you take a step back – I’m scared to be a vegetarian!
Hannah Eats Everything. But lately, I don’t. My discomfort with the idea of eating meat has been around since college. At first, it was conveniently limited to discomfort with eating specifically the kinds of meat I already didn’t like (steak, chicken in any preparation other than fried, anything tough and sinewy, too much meat at one time, like in a chop), but it has been growing and getting a bit out of hand.
Trying to minimize my meat consumption started by not cooking it at home, which then became also not eating it when it was convenient/crappy, like free pizza at work, which turned into its current incarnation: not eating it unless A) it’s a rare opportunity to try a unique dish, B) I have it on good authority it’s going to be transcendent, or C) a friend or their grandma or something gives it to me and then stands there expectantly.
What I didn’t expect was that this stage was also where my tastebuds stopped being within my control. They started balking at certain meats, tasting something offensively gamy, like a subtle wet dog smell, where before they might have luxuriated in marrow, intestines, or liver. For example, the other day I couldn’t finish a bowl of Phnom Penh noodle soup because it was too liver-y. Too liver-y! For me! I used to order larb made of liver at North Hollywood Thai restaurants. I had a fridge full of Trader Joe’s truffle mousse pate. I mean, I judged Phnom Penh noodle restaurants on their ability to stand up against soup gentrification by using the ‘icky parts’ of the pig despite casual tourists’ squicked-outedness. And now I was pushing the liver down into the depths of the soup, hidden under the noodles, so I wouldn’t have to face the shame of my traitorous tastebuds.
I’m afraid to try pate, a former favorite. Popeye’s fried chicken, a guilty pleasure for years, hits my tolerance level after half a thigh. I used to eat burgers about once a month. The last time I ate one was October – and it was Korean-influenced – and I still didn’t like it. And this one pains me most: when my family follows my grandma’s recipe for essig-fleisch, it tastes like tomatoey straw with this unmistakeable farm animal smell-tang.
It shouldn’t pain me at all, or shame me, or even surprise me. I support eliminating factory farming, and would be happy to pay the inflated price for humanely killed meat. I believe we should cut meat consumption to a fraction of what it is now – that the worldwide trend toward increased meat consumption is the wrong direction. I believe animal flesh is something that should be consumed mindfully, with thoughts towards the sacrifice involved. I have wished out loud after watching some horrific factory farm video or reading “Eating Animals” or “Animal Liberation” that my body didn’t love and crave meat so much. Then, I’d be free to go vegetarian.
And now, it doesn’t. I am free(er) to go vegetarian.
I am, half-under my control and half-not, moving that way. I still eat seafood with abandon (or, abandon if it falls under my A/B/C three-stage rules above). For some reason, few seafood items have yet inspired even slight revulsion in me (exceptions: stingrays, which have the effect of a ropy combination of tuna and steak). But the proportion of mammal/bird meat in my diet is rapidly shrinking.
It pains me, I guess, because this blog is nothing if not a shrine to novelty. Newness is more important than quality, goodness, complexity, authenticity, or any other measure I might otherwise choose to rate food. And along with newness comes openness to experience, that Big Five Personality scale item that I choose mainly to apply to food experiences. How can I remain fully open, or claim allegiance to novelty, when there are now things towards which I hold prejudice? Not just “hey, I’ve tried this thing and don’t really like it” prejudice, but moral prejudice?
I will try to keep writing regardless, perhaps pointing my spotlight at more fish-and-veggie-centric experiences, as I figure this out – but the unease remains.
It’s kind of funny when you take a step back – I’m scared to be a vegetarian!
Sunday, December 4, 2016
Hong Kong
I.
There is a lady of indeterminate age sitting across from me, studiously avoiding my eyes as she transfers her short rib dish from the steamer into her bowl. She raises a disapproving and painted-on eyebrow at the sauce she’s been forced to use after requesting another sauce and being rebuffed.
Or that’s what I assume has happened, since it was all carried out in rapid Cantonese (not that the speed matters when the number of Cantonese words I know is two). Everything has been Cantonese since I arrived at this small dim sum place in an industrial-ish area of Kowloon, purportedly the cheapest Michelin-star-festooned restaurant in the world.
I hear tell of crazy lines and long waits, but I am shuttled in within five minutes, albeit coupled with this strange lady and shown to a tiny table barely big enough to take my jacket off at without knocking all of the silverware on her side into her lap. I smile and nod at her, but she doesn’t look up once. She looks everywhere except at me: at her menu, at the six girls next to us who have so many pork buns on their table that they line the edges like Christmas lights, at the ceiling, at the waitstaff, at the rain.
So I look at my phone. It’s evening in Los Angeles, a reasonable time to text friends, so I text friends. I text them a picture of my menu, because I think that’s what someone at a famous and decorated restaurant might do. I’d just as soon play the game of ‘Who Can Avoid Eye Contact The Longest?’ with my tablemate, who seems vaguely disapproving of my menu-capture, except I have the handicap of facing a wall instead of the rest of the restaurant. Luckily, her shortribs arrive before too long, and I have those to stare at. Dim sum-style short ribs have always tasted somewhat spam-like and looked somewhat pimple-skinned to me, so I haven’t ordered them. I’ve ordered the most white-girl-ish order possible: BBQ pork buns and shrimp dumplings.
To be fair, the BBQ pork buns are what everyone raves about – otherwise, I wouldn’t have ordered them. Tim Ho Wan’s pork buns are the fried, crispy kind. The kind with sugar poured on top in a kind of bun-ruining splat. The filling of the buns is fantastic, though not terribly Chinese-tasting – the BBQ sauce wouldn’t be totally out of place at a Texas rib joint – but the sugar-splatted bun is reminiscent of the first time I bought a loaf of bread in Indonesia and discovered that apparently Indonesians think bread, even in loaf form is dessert. (I tried to make a grilled tempeh and mustard sandwich with it. This didn’t go well.) If I was writing a judgment-free review of these sugar buns, though, I’d have to admit that the sugar forms a teeth-pleasing crunch, like the top of a creme brulée, to supplement the rest of the crackling, fried, crumb-flaking bun. But these, sugar and crunch and Texas BBQ sauce and all, are but a mere memory once I put a shrimp dumpling in my mouth.
These shrimp dumplings are first example of something I run into time and time again in Hong Kong: there is something magical in the rice wrappers. I’ve been eating dim sum all my life – in Chicago, in San Francisco, in Los Angeles, in Beijing, in Guangxi, even in Osaka – and never knew the wrappers didn’t have to be at least kind of gummy. I never even noticed the gumminess until its absence here in Hong Kong, where the rice wrappers serve their purpose by holding in the goodies, provide a mild chew, then magically disintegrate into nothing when they’re no longer needed. Once the shrimp’s skin bursts and that salty ocean flavor, tempered by wine, garlic, and pork fat, floods the mouth, the wrapping just disappears as though it was never there. It wouldn’t want to interfere.
I see this here, at Tim Ho Wan; I see it in the green glass dumplings at Sai Yung Kee, which LOOK fat and substantial, but melt all the same; I see it at Mak’s Noodle, a no-nonsense diner where the only hint to its fame is the laminated newspaper write-ups stuck under the glass of the tables (and the presence of a branch at the Peak Galleria, but I don’t know that yet).
Mak’s Noodle does a lot of things right other than the magical disappearing wonton wrapper. Its saltwater prawn dumpling/pork-wood ear mushroom wonton/egg noodle soup tastes enough like the soups I had in American-Chinese restaurants all throughout my childhood (but not since) to make me feel familiar with it, but tastes dissimilar enough to feel like an adventure. The skinny clumps of egg noodles, for example, are made fresh with duck eggs, and are a departure from those tangled nothings you find dried in grocery stores. And the broth, said to be made from flounder, pork bones, and dried shrimp, goes so far beyond the normal weakly five-spiced chicken/MSG water as to be a different species entirely.
The tiny bowl disappears too fast. I’d been waiting all morning for it to open, erroneously assuming Hong Kongers eat noodle soup for breakfast just as the Vietnamese and Cambodians do, opening their pho, hu tieu, kuy teav, and nom banh chok stalls as early as 6am. But Mak’s opens at 11, leaving me wandering through the bizarre K11 Art Mall with my stomach growling as I observe blocky birds flying through the entry way, fluorescent mosaic exit doors, and graffitied understairwells. I keep out of the rain under building-sized plastic shower curtains and, while still lukewarm on Hong Kong as a whole, wish we museumed our malls like this.
II.
“Is that… gold?” I ask incredulously as I use the end of a chopstick to lift the tiny, but unmistakable sparkle away from its off-purple base pile of paste.
The concerned but smiling face above me inclines towards the paste. “You should try that before you mix it. Just to make sure you like it.”
There is a lady of indeterminate age sitting across from me, studiously avoiding my eyes as she transfers her short rib dish from the steamer into her bowl. She raises a disapproving and painted-on eyebrow at the sauce she’s been forced to use after requesting another sauce and being rebuffed.
Or that’s what I assume has happened, since it was all carried out in rapid Cantonese (not that the speed matters when the number of Cantonese words I know is two). Everything has been Cantonese since I arrived at this small dim sum place in an industrial-ish area of Kowloon, purportedly the cheapest Michelin-star-festooned restaurant in the world.
I hear tell of crazy lines and long waits, but I am shuttled in within five minutes, albeit coupled with this strange lady and shown to a tiny table barely big enough to take my jacket off at without knocking all of the silverware on her side into her lap. I smile and nod at her, but she doesn’t look up once. She looks everywhere except at me: at her menu, at the six girls next to us who have so many pork buns on their table that they line the edges like Christmas lights, at the ceiling, at the waitstaff, at the rain.
So I look at my phone. It’s evening in Los Angeles, a reasonable time to text friends, so I text friends. I text them a picture of my menu, because I think that’s what someone at a famous and decorated restaurant might do. I’d just as soon play the game of ‘Who Can Avoid Eye Contact The Longest?’ with my tablemate, who seems vaguely disapproving of my menu-capture, except I have the handicap of facing a wall instead of the rest of the restaurant. Luckily, her shortribs arrive before too long, and I have those to stare at. Dim sum-style short ribs have always tasted somewhat spam-like and looked somewhat pimple-skinned to me, so I haven’t ordered them. I’ve ordered the most white-girl-ish order possible: BBQ pork buns and shrimp dumplings.
To be fair, the BBQ pork buns are what everyone raves about – otherwise, I wouldn’t have ordered them. Tim Ho Wan’s pork buns are the fried, crispy kind. The kind with sugar poured on top in a kind of bun-ruining splat. The filling of the buns is fantastic, though not terribly Chinese-tasting – the BBQ sauce wouldn’t be totally out of place at a Texas rib joint – but the sugar-splatted bun is reminiscent of the first time I bought a loaf of bread in Indonesia and discovered that apparently Indonesians think bread, even in loaf form is dessert. (I tried to make a grilled tempeh and mustard sandwich with it. This didn’t go well.) If I was writing a judgment-free review of these sugar buns, though, I’d have to admit that the sugar forms a teeth-pleasing crunch, like the top of a creme brulée, to supplement the rest of the crackling, fried, crumb-flaking bun. But these, sugar and crunch and Texas BBQ sauce and all, are but a mere memory once I put a shrimp dumpling in my mouth.
These shrimp dumplings are first example of something I run into time and time again in Hong Kong: there is something magical in the rice wrappers. I’ve been eating dim sum all my life – in Chicago, in San Francisco, in Los Angeles, in Beijing, in Guangxi, even in Osaka – and never knew the wrappers didn’t have to be at least kind of gummy. I never even noticed the gumminess until its absence here in Hong Kong, where the rice wrappers serve their purpose by holding in the goodies, provide a mild chew, then magically disintegrate into nothing when they’re no longer needed. Once the shrimp’s skin bursts and that salty ocean flavor, tempered by wine, garlic, and pork fat, floods the mouth, the wrapping just disappears as though it was never there. It wouldn’t want to interfere.
I see this here, at Tim Ho Wan; I see it in the green glass dumplings at Sai Yung Kee, which LOOK fat and substantial, but melt all the same; I see it at Mak’s Noodle, a no-nonsense diner where the only hint to its fame is the laminated newspaper write-ups stuck under the glass of the tables (and the presence of a branch at the Peak Galleria, but I don’t know that yet).
Mak’s Noodle does a lot of things right other than the magical disappearing wonton wrapper. Its saltwater prawn dumpling/pork-wood ear mushroom wonton/egg noodle soup tastes enough like the soups I had in American-Chinese restaurants all throughout my childhood (but not since) to make me feel familiar with it, but tastes dissimilar enough to feel like an adventure. The skinny clumps of egg noodles, for example, are made fresh with duck eggs, and are a departure from those tangled nothings you find dried in grocery stores. And the broth, said to be made from flounder, pork bones, and dried shrimp, goes so far beyond the normal weakly five-spiced chicken/MSG water as to be a different species entirely.
The tiny bowl disappears too fast. I’d been waiting all morning for it to open, erroneously assuming Hong Kongers eat noodle soup for breakfast just as the Vietnamese and Cambodians do, opening their pho, hu tieu, kuy teav, and nom banh chok stalls as early as 6am. But Mak’s opens at 11, leaving me wandering through the bizarre K11 Art Mall with my stomach growling as I observe blocky birds flying through the entry way, fluorescent mosaic exit doors, and graffitied understairwells. I keep out of the rain under building-sized plastic shower curtains and, while still lukewarm on Hong Kong as a whole, wish we museumed our malls like this.
II.
“Is that… gold?” I ask incredulously as I use the end of a chopstick to lift the tiny, but unmistakable sparkle away from its off-purple base pile of paste.
The concerned but smiling face above me inclines towards the paste. “You should try that before you mix it. Just to make sure you like it.”
“The crab paste?” I know it’s crab paste, because I read the menu. I already know I like crab paste. But to accommodate him, I taste the crab paste. “Mmm. I like it. But… is that…?”
“Good!” he exclaims as he glides off towards the end of the miniscule bar to grab another customer’s tray of soup, which may or may not also feature a tiny speck of gold leaf atop a mountain of crab paste.
The bowl in front of me looks tangentially like the ramen I’m used to, but for the gold leaf and the fact that the broth is bleeding black from a shot of squid ink. Nobody thinks the fact that there is gold in the soup is weird, and upon further reflection, neither should I, given that I’m in Hong Kong, a city which appears to have more people than square feet and more jewelry stores than people.
My Kowloon hostel sat on a block with at least seven of them, several of them clones, despite the congested apartment blocks rising from those ground floors where people all lived jumbled on top of one another, their incense wafting into each other’s windows, the laundry on their lines fluttering against one another’s, their drying foodstuffs clogging the hallways, and their elevators sagging and clunking with illegal loads. Where are the people who are keeping these jewelry stores in business?
The gold leaf is decoration, of course, like gold anything, and goes down without comment or fanfare. The ramen, similarly, is more pomp than substance. While the squid ink bleeds dramatically, oil-like, into the pork bone broth, the whole thing tastes vaguely of iron. I muse in the background of my bites that I shouldn’t have mixed in the crab paste, that I should have eaten the whole pile of it in one mouthful.
The whole time I’m eating, the waiter and I are having a spirited conversation about what the best countries in the world to live in are (him: Germany; me: Taiwan) that takes a left turn into autism when he asks what I do. We speak easily. But when he asks me whether I like my bowl, I turn shy. “It’s interesting!” I say, as though that isn’t code for “Please don’t make me state an unequivocal opinion!”
“I can tell,” he replies, but I, for one, can’t tell whether he’s saying he can tell I like it or can tell I’m lying.
“Good!” he exclaims as he glides off towards the end of the miniscule bar to grab another customer’s tray of soup, which may or may not also feature a tiny speck of gold leaf atop a mountain of crab paste.
The bowl in front of me looks tangentially like the ramen I’m used to, but for the gold leaf and the fact that the broth is bleeding black from a shot of squid ink. Nobody thinks the fact that there is gold in the soup is weird, and upon further reflection, neither should I, given that I’m in Hong Kong, a city which appears to have more people than square feet and more jewelry stores than people.
My Kowloon hostel sat on a block with at least seven of them, several of them clones, despite the congested apartment blocks rising from those ground floors where people all lived jumbled on top of one another, their incense wafting into each other’s windows, the laundry on their lines fluttering against one another’s, their drying foodstuffs clogging the hallways, and their elevators sagging and clunking with illegal loads. Where are the people who are keeping these jewelry stores in business?
The gold leaf is decoration, of course, like gold anything, and goes down without comment or fanfare. The ramen, similarly, is more pomp than substance. While the squid ink bleeds dramatically, oil-like, into the pork bone broth, the whole thing tastes vaguely of iron. I muse in the background of my bites that I shouldn’t have mixed in the crab paste, that I should have eaten the whole pile of it in one mouthful.
The whole time I’m eating, the waiter and I are having a spirited conversation about what the best countries in the world to live in are (him: Germany; me: Taiwan) that takes a left turn into autism when he asks what I do. We speak easily. But when he asks me whether I like my bowl, I turn shy. “It’s interesting!” I say, as though that isn’t code for “Please don’t make me state an unequivocal opinion!”
“I can tell,” he replies, but I, for one, can’t tell whether he’s saying he can tell I like it or can tell I’m lying.
Sunday, July 10, 2016
Secret Samlar
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.
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, 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?
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