The Best American Magazine Writing 2020

by Sid Holt

  For Troffer—whose half-Japanese mother didn’t cook Japanese food often but always had nori and a pot of rice at the ready—there is no distance between East and West. “I’m being very clear to myself that I’m not doing Japanese food,” he says. “I want to explore what it is to be Japanese American.” The results reflect an attunement to the full range of possibility latent in each ingredient: He layers and deepens flavors by using dashi instead of water, “finding every little moment where an ingredient can slip its way in and add something,” he says. Nevertheless, his grandmother was skeptical when he showed her a photograph of his okonomiyaki, which he calls a sour cabbage pancake on his menu in homage to how she used to make it, with little more than shredded cabbage, soy sauce, and flour. A fried egg is laid over it, in a flop. “She gave me the most disapproving eyebrow,” he says.

  Yet in Japan, this would hardly be heretical. Freedom is built into the very name of the dish; broken down into okonomi and yaki, it means whatever you want, thrown on the grill. And although the okonomiyaki most commonly found throughout Japan originated in Osaka, there are a number of regional variations, including the Hiroshima style, in which the dish is built one strata at a time: first batter, followed by cabbage, bean sprouts, pork, and noodles and, finally, yes, a fried egg, with the rest of the pancake shoveled over it and then flipped so the egg lands on top.

  Sometimes Japanese visitors to Odo’s restaurant in Manhattan tell him that they miss the milder flavors of traditional kaiseki. But the chef remains firm in his mission. The strict etiquette and radical simplicity of the formal meal are “not very welcoming to Americans,” he says, which contradicts the Japanese principle of omotenashi, an elevated form of hospitality in which the guest’s happiness is the focus of all action and thought. Even in Japan, kaiseki can intimidate diners, particularly of the younger generation. To ameliorate this, Zaiyu Hasegawa, the chef of Den, a modern kaiseki spot that opened in 2008 in Tokyo, begins each meal with monaka, an everyday Japanese treat of adzuki bean paste smeared between mochi wafers. While his filling is elevated, studded with foie gras and persimmon, its appearance is not: the dish arrives at the table as the kind of sandwich cookie sold at convenience stores, complete with a paper wrapper. Later comes a salad with carrots cut into the emoji with hearts for eyes and a box evoking Kentucky Fried Chicken that contains wings shucked of bone and stuffed with sticky rice, nestled on a bed of straw.

  The food is thrillingly irreverent, so at first you don’t notice how fastidious it is, how close to perfection. You laugh, and then you fall silent, the quick visual delight giving way to depths of flavor and something more elusive—a consciousness of food as past and present, at once memory and daily recurrence. The old ways meet the new—not in combat but in continuance.

  An Assault on the Tongue

  “Crack seed” is less a name than an imperative. In its broadest definition, it is a category of snack, beloved in Hawaii, in which fruit—plum, peach, apricot, cherry, mango, lemon—is dried and shriveled beyond recognition, salted, and sugared, simmered in a broth of sweet medicinal herbs, then served wet or left to shrivel again. But crack seed also refers, more singularly, to preserved fruit in which the stone heart has been split and left embedded in the flesh, a touch of bitterness that makes the taste stronger, keener—a shock to the tongue.

  Note that it is never “cracked” seed but always present tense, like another island specialty: shave ice. This reflects the pidgin legacy of immigrants who came from Asia to work Hawaii’s sugar-cane plantations in the mid-nineteenth century and had no time for the niceties of conjugation in their new language. There’s an immediacy to it; spoken out loud, “crack seed” sounds like what it is, the hard nut breaking under the teeth. In poetic terms, the name is a spondee, two syllables in a row that claim equal force, disrupting the lilt of ordinary speech, like a command or a shout: Shut up, no way, get out.

  The custom of eating preserved fruit was passed down by plantation workers from Zhongshan in the Pearl Delta of southern China, who started arriving in Hawaii—then a kingdom—as contract laborers in the mid-nineteenth century. As of the 2010 census, the majority of the state’s population was of Asian ancestry; around 15 percent was at least part Chinese, three-quarters of whom can trace their family history back to those early émigrés. Transliterations and adaptations of Chinese words—some Cantonese, some from a Zhongshan dialect—are still used to describe crack seed: “Kam cho” signals an infusion of licorice; “see mui” is a catchall for dried fruit in general, although the original term refers specifically to the fruit of the Prunus mume tree, the drupe of which is commonly called a plum even though it’s closer botanically to an apricot, plucked before it’s ripe and bracingly sour. (In Japan, the same fruit is fermented to make umeboshi.)

  But the epitome of crack seed, its quintessential preparation, is li hing mui, for which dried plums are plunged in a licorice-laced brew until they take on the root’s resinous sweetness. Many calibrations are sold today across the islands, presealed in packets hanging by the checkout at chain pharmacies and grocery stores or, better, fished out of giant glass apothecary jars at one of the few remaining dedicated crack-seed shops. The plums might be sticky or desiccated; armed with seed or pitted; dyed a virulent char siu red that stains the fingers or left “white,” really a pale rust, like the silt of a river run dry.

  These are minor details, a quibble of personal preference. All formulas share the same goal: brazen, maddening flavor, with sweet, sour, and salty in anarchic revel, each taken to the extreme—or “to da max,” as kama’aina (locals or, literally, “children of the land”) might say. This is not so much taste as full-body sensation.

  The texture, verging on jerky, can also be a challenge to outsiders. How to maneuver through the fruit’s collapsed drapery of flesh? The seed is another complication; you’re not supposed to eat it but suck on it as your teeth simultaneously tear at the meat, which resists like leather. The proper technique requires dexterity: it is work, and worth it, and afterward, you spit the seed into the palm of your hand—and then maybe lick the inside of the li hing mui bag, for one last hit of salty-sour-sweet.

  Almost anything can become li hing, from ginger and lemon peel, which are actually whole lemons smashed flat, to “baby seed,” a mulberry, to “footballs,” a nickname for the so-called Chinese olives (from the Canarium album tree) that evoke their Mediterranean counterparts only in shape and sheen, tasting sweet and tart. And li hing is no longer confined to preserves: These days, the plums are sometimes ground to powder, which may be strewn over slices of pineapple and rubbed on baby-back ribs, infiltrating gummy bears and vinaigrettes, dusting the rims of margaritas and neon-bright domes of shave ice.

  The people of Hawaii are not alone in the West in their devotion to this riotous confluence of flavors. Some 6,000 miles away—almost the distance from Zhongshan to Honolulu—Mexicans likewise anoint mangos and raspados (their shave ice) with a salsa known as chamoy, whose base is salted plum, amplified by chile. The Chinese voyaged there, too, migrating in the nineteenth century, although it took longer for their culinary notions to enter the culture; only in the past few decades did chamoy—the food historian Rachel Laudan has noted the name’s etymological kinship to “see mui”—become common, first in the form of dried and salted fruit (saladito), and then as a ubiquitous condiment, salty-sour-sweet with a quaver of heat, wielded by street vendors and high-end chefs alike.

  * * *

  In Hawaii, crack seed remains a daily pleasure, but the number of shops dedicated to it have dwindled. One of the loveliest, simply named Crack Seed Store, lies just off the main strip of Kaimuki, a low-slung, unhurried Honolulu neighborhood. Kon Ping Young, sixty-nine, who’s run the shop since 1979 with his wife, Fung Tang, is famous for skimming liquid from a jar of li hing mui and pouring it into an Icee, a kind of volcanic eruption in reverse and a triumph of salty and sour over sweet. He stocks the shelves with dozens of varieties of preserved fruit, from engorged or
bs to near fossils. Some jars, pillaged by previous customers, stand empty save for the inky pickling dregs or with their walls like frosted panes in winter, etched in salt and sugar.

  On a recent visit, I pointed to a jar of what looked like ossified plums, tucked away on a back shelf. “That’s old-school,” Young said. “Not so popular anymore.” To be contrary, I bought a quarter-pound, and out on the sidewalk, I put one of the hard dark plums in my mouth. It was pure salt. No: it was salt as if I’d never properly understood the word, ageless and engulfing, the world’s last gift to a drowning man. I kept chewing it, thrilled and horrified, until I came out the other side and the salt turned to cooling menthol. My mind felt clean and blank, as if my memory had been wiped; as if I had exhausted the possibilities of taste and was left with nothing but the longing for another bite.

  Interlopers

  In the hilly Boaco region of central Nicaragua, the turmeric plants on Celia Dávila and Gonzalo González’s farm stand over four feet tall—thriving giants, although as natives of South and Southeast Asia, they’re actually newcomers to this land. Coffee once ruled these fields, but as its price has grown unstable, smallholder farmers like Dávila and González, fifty-two and sixty-five, respectively, have had to turn to alternative crops, among them this strange arrival that yields knobby rhizomes of shocking orange flesh, rarely eaten unadulterated; instead, the underground stems are dried and pulverized into a musky powder with a throb of bitterness, which is most widely recognized worldwide as the earthy base note and color in many Indian dishes. Nicaraguans have no particular use for the spice, which has yet to make inroads in the local diet. But Americans do, having suddenly and belatedly awakened to turmeric’s health benefits, some 3,000 years after they were first set down in the Atharva Veda, one of Hinduism’s foundational sacred texts.

  It’s a story at once old and new, a latter-day spice route making unexpected connections between the grandmother in India, stirring turmeric into warm milk for a sniffily child; the Goop acolyte in California, sipping an après-yoga prepackaged turmeric “elixir,” whose makers extol the “body harmonizing” powers of the spice’s key chemical compound, curcumin; and Dávila wielding a pickax in rural Nicaragua. She is not alone in her embrace of this new harvest: farmers in Costa Rica, Hawaii, and even Minnesota are planting turmeric with an eye on an expanding market. Nor is turmeric the only spice to flourish far from home. The food writer Max Falkowitz has documented the work of small-scale farmers in Guatemala, mostly poor and of indigenous descent, who now grow more than half the world’s cardamom, a crop that belonged for millenniums to India and was brought to the Central American cloud forests by a German immigrant in the early twentieth century. Cardamom is one of the most expensive spices—so valuable that all of it departs Guatemala for sale elsewhere. As with turmeric in Nicaragua, its absence is hardly registered by local cooks, to whom the spice is an interloper.

  Spices were among the first engines of globalization, not in the modern sense of a world engulfed by ever-larger corporations but in the ways that we began to become aware, desirous even, of cultures other than our own. Such desire, unchecked, once led to colonialism. After Dutch merchants nearly tripled the price of black pepper, the British countered in 1600 by founding the East India Company, a precursor to modern multinationals and the first step toward the Raj. In the following decades, the Dutch sought a monopoly on cloves, which once had grown nowhere but the tropical islands of Ternate and Tidore in what is today Indonesia, and then in 1652 introduced the scorched-earth policy known as extirpation, felling and burning tens of thousands of clove trees. This was both an ecological disaster and horribly effective: For more than a century, the Dutch kept supplies low and prices high, until a Frenchman (surnamed, in one of history’s inside jokes, Poivre, or “pepper”) arranged a commando operation to smuggle out a few clove-tree seedlings. Among their ultimate destinations were Zanzibar and Pemba, off the coast of East Africa, which until the mid-twentieth century dominated the world’s clove market.

  The craving for spices still brings the risk of exploitation, both economically, as farmers in the developing world see only a sliver of the profits, and in the form of cultural appropriation. In the West, we’re prone to taking what isn’t ours and acting as if we discovered it, conveniently forgetting its history and context. Or else we reduce it to caricature, cooing over turmeric-stained golden lattes while invoking the mystic wisdom of the East. At the same time, a world without borrowing and learning from our neighbors would be pallid and parochial—a world, in effect, without spice.

  * * *

  Spices are luxuries, ornamental to our lives. They provide little nutritional value and, beyond a few medicinal applications, are entirely unnecessary to survival. What they offer is an escape from tedium—a reason to take joy in food beyond the baseline requirements of existence. Where herbs are often chosen to complement and flatter the ingredients they adorn, spices call attention to themselves, transforming and sometimes even usurping a dish, so it becomes a mere vehicle and excuse for spice itself. Roast spices in a pan before cooking with them, as is done in India, and they seize the air, the fragrance like a liberated genie.

  There’s righteous bemusement in India over newly converted Americans proselytizing on behalf of turmeric. For centuries, the West ignored it. Other spices from the East were coveted and fetishized, launching a thousand ships, notably cinnamon, nutmeg, black pepper, and cloves. But turmeric languished, overshadowed by its cousin ginger, punchy and sweet, and coming off the worse in its superficial kinship to lofty saffron, the world’s most expensive spice, although the two share little beyond the ability to turn whatever they touch the color of gold. (This hasn’t stopped spice sellers and cooks throughout the ages from trying to pass off turmeric as a cheaper saffron; even its scientific name, curcuma, comes from an Arabic word that originally meant saffron, kurkum, a wistful reminder of its status, in Western eyes, as a dupe.) Meanwhile, haldi, “turmeric” in Hindi, manifests in over 95 percent of Indian dishes, according to the Delhi-based food writer Marryam H. Reshii, who writes in The Flavour of Spice (2017) that its absence in cooking “is often considered blasphemous or at least idiosyncratic.”

  Then again, the West has always been late to the party, sidelined geographically from the bounty of the East. Many of the spices used in Western cooking come from the seeds, bark, roots, rhizomes, flowers, and fruits of plants born in Asia. Traders brought cloves north from Southeast Asia to Han dynasty China, where courtiers were not allowed to speak to the emperor unless their breath had been purified by cloves (known as “chicken-tongue spice”), and to arid Arabia, where in the 1970s cloves were excavated, still intact, from a ceramic pot in a house dating back to 1750 BCE in the Babylonian city of Terqa in modern Syria.

  Not until Greek and Roman antiquity did the West learn of these treasures, as Arab traders became the intermediaries between the hemispheres. They tried to keep the origins of spices shrouded in mystery to prevent customers from finding or planting them on their own; in the fifth century BCE the Greek historian Herodotus reported tales of cassia gathered from a lake guarded by “winged animals, much resembling bats, which screech horribly, and are very valiant,” and of cinnamon sticks knocked out of the nests of enormous birds, both in unknown Arabian locales. To the ancient Greeks, spices were “the product of an exceptional union between the earth and the fire of the sun,” the Belgian historian Marcel Detienne writes in The Gardens of Adonis: Spices in Greek Mythology (1972)—a literal embodiment of their often tropical origins. They served as emblems of all that lay beyond the known world, be that defined in terms of geographic distance or the more nebulous passage between life and death; the Greeks, Detienne argues, used spices “to mediate between the near and the far-away and to link the above and the below,” notably in funeral rites and sacred devotions. In one version of the phoenix myth, when death finally looms after a thousand years, the bird readies a nest of cinnamon and frankincense to help ensure its resurrectio
n. During the Roman Empire, Nero burned a year’s supply of cinnamon at the funeral of his second wife, Poppaea, perhaps regretting that, as recorded by early historians, he himself had murdered her. (On a more earthly note, spices were also employed as tools of seduction—Caesar was reportedly beguiled by the cinnamon wafting from Cleopatra’s hair—and served practical purposes, mitigating the salt in preserved foods and masking bad breath and odors from poor sanitation.)

  The Romans eventually figured out how to bypass the middlemen to find the sources of those spices themselves. Their yearning for these potent scents and flavors drove them into the monsoon winds—an advancement in navigation skills—toward India and its cache of black pepper. In the first century CE, pepper was “bought by weight like gold or silver,” as recorded by the Roman historian Pliny the Elder, who worried that the empire would squander its wealth on such spices. At its height, a pound of pepper cost half a month’s wages; Alaric the Visigoth, on the verge of sacking Rome in 410 CE, exacted 3,000 pounds of black pepper as part of the city’s ransom.

  Pepper’s value was sustained in Europe throughout the Middle Ages, as landlords accepted peppercorns as rent and daughters were married off with peppercorn dowries. Only in the mid-seventeenth century did Europeans begin to turn away from spices, in part because they had become more readily accessible and lost their ability to confer status on those wealthy enough to afford them but also, as the historian T. Sarah Peterson has argued, because of advances in science and medicine and a new skepticism toward spices’ supposed occult capabilities. The historian W. E. Mead, writing in 1931 in The English Medieval Feast, dismissed Middle Age diners as “coarse eaters” with palates dulled from overexposure to spices “by which the most innocent meats and fruits were doctored and disguised until the cook himself could hardly distinguish from the taste what had entered into their composition.” In the meantime, in the regions of the world where spices were native, they simply continued to be part of the landscape and culture, subjects of neither idolatry nor condemnation—until Europeans brought their new, more minimalist culinary standards to the countries they colonized, suppressing indigenous cuisines and the very ingredients they once fought wars over.