Best Food Writing 2012

by Holly Hughes (ed) (epub)

  Was there a correlation between trying so many kinds of foods at such a tender age and becoming a richer, more broad-minded person? I liked to think so. Jesse wasn’t being dragged out to dinner night after night at Daddy’s whim, I told my wife; he was getting an education. And what an education it was. You couldn’t buy an education like this.

  As I made this point one night in the car after restaurant visit number 872—the third night in a row I had kept him out two hours past bedtime as I worked feverishly to finish my work for a dining guide—Jesse, giddy with tiredness, was belting out songs in the back as if he’d just discovered Ethel Merman on YouTube.

  “Daddy? Sing?”

  “You like to think you’re the guide, in control,” a friend with two kids in their twenties told me. “But you’re not. All you can do is direct them a little. You’re not the bike. You’re more like the training wheels. And what you have to remember is eventually the training wheels come off.”

  We were on our way to restaurant visit 924 when my son pointed out the pair of golden arches looming ahead. This is what’s commonly referred to as a teachable moment, a chance to put forward a philosophy of food and, in this way, install a belief system that will last a lifetime. “McDonald’s,” I said, “is yucky.”

  “It’s not yucky,” my son replied.

  “Ick,” I said. “Ugh.” I shuddered.

  Jesse became agitated, thrashing against the constraints of his car seat. He was crying. “It’s not yucky,” he said and then, gathering himself, uttered the words with an almost sinister deliberation, driving the dagger in more deeply: “McDonald’s is delicious.”

  It required every ounce of concentration on my part not to hit the car in front of me.

  It required every ounce of concentration on my wife’s part not to burst out laughing.

  “How’d this happen?” I demanded. “Did someone take him to a McDonald’s? One of the babysitters?”

  Silence. A guilty silence.

  “I mean,” my wife said cautiously, “he’s had fries a couple of times.”

  “You’ve taken him for fries?”

  “A couple times.”

  “A couple—”

  “Okay, a few. Maybe a burger once or twice.” She winced, cutely.

  “How could you?”

  Number 1,000 loomed, a figure I’d been pointing to for nearly a year. But it seemed ridiculous now, all that number-keeping. All that striving.

  “He’s three, you know,” my wife said.

  “I know.”

  “Do you?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “He just enjoys being with you.”

  My son had had a rough week: two doctors’ visits, an upset stomach, and—either because he’d just turned three or because the gods had decided to complicate our life even more—a growth spurt that made him cranky. I hadn’t been around much, having been cramming in final visits to several restaurants before an upcoming family trip. That Saturday, I decided, would be Daddy-and-Jesse day.

  “Aww,” my wife said. “He really could use some Daddy time. What’s the plan?”

  I told her.

  “You mean,” she said, “you plan to take him to work with you.”

  “No. To dim sum.”

  “You’re sure about that.”

  “He loves dim sum.”

  “I meant you’re sure this isn’t work? This isn’t a place you’re reviewing, or checking up on? What’s the restaurant?”

  I told her.

  “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “It’s new.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. That tone again. “Just try to have a good time, okay?”

  It was noon when we arrived for restaurant visit 1,027. The place was a scene of happy chaos. Extended families huddled around big circular tables with lazy Susans, servers dashed through the room like rush-hour commuters in pursuit of a departing subway train, the hawkers with their metal carts circled in search of a sale, lifting lids and sending up little clouds of steam.

  Our table was a scene of happy chaos, too. Steamed pork buns and roast pork buns. Shrimp dumplings and shrimp balls. Rice-noodle crepes stuffed with shrimp and stuffed with ground pork. Tiny custard pies and pineapple buns for dessert. I don’t think I had ever seen Jesse eat so much at any one meal. For a feeder descended from a long line of feeders, there’s nothing quite as gratifying as seeing someone you love eat with gusto.

  Somewhere between the shrimp balls and the shrimp noodle crepes, my wife texted me: “How’s it going?”

  “He’s loving it,” I wrote back. “He looks relaxed and happy, and he’s eating like someone who hasn’t seen food in a week.”

  “I’m glad he’s getting his fill. He loves being with his daddy.”

  A triumph.

  Back home, I couldn’t help myself. Before I had unstrapped the diaper bag from my shoulder, before I had helped him out of his shoes, before I had even stepped ten feet into the house, I began exulting. I was dangerously skirting the line of gloating. There were, I said, all sorts of ways to have a good time and all sorts of venues. It didn’t always have to be a zoo, a park, a playground. He could come into our world, I said; we didn’t have to go into his.

  “I’m glad it went so well,” my wife said, walking into the living room only to be crushed by my son’s running, lunging hug.

  “Amazingly well,” I corrected.

  “Jesse, did you have a good time with Daddy?”

  For the next ten minutes, as my wife helped him into a new set of clothes and then all three of us went into the playroom, I listened to my son tell the story of the day. It came in bursts, a little at a time, and what he said wasn’t as interesting as what he didn’t say.

  The afternoon, according to Jesse, amounted to the following: Sitting next to Daddy. Eating with Daddy. Blowing bubbles in the water glass with Daddy. Laughing at the waiter with the funny glasses with Daddy. Making the bunched-up straw wrapper into a snake with Daddy.

  He didn’t mention a single dish. He didn’t mention any food at all.

  My son is up to something like 1,300 visits by now.

  I don’t know how many exactly.

  My wife and I just had another child, a son, and life is busier than ever.

  In any case, I’ve stopped counting.

  THE LEGACY THAT WASN’T:

  WONTON SOUP

  By T. Susan Chang

  From A Spoonful of Promises

  Cookbook reviewer, blogger, and essayist T. Susan Chang looks through a prism of food memories to meditate on her many families—the emigrated Chinese clan she grew up with, the young singles tribe of her 20s, and the nuclear family she and her husband have begun.

  The secret of the wontons, I think, was always in the smell. It was only ground pork, with maybe some shrimp, and it was seasoned with all the usual suspects—dry sherry, soy sauce, scallions, a little ginger, a little sesame oil. But when you finally had it just right, you’d know it instantly, because it didn’t smell like raw meat any more. It smelled different—fresh, sweet, and good.

  My mother learned to make wontons from her mother. It’s possible her mother learned it from hers. It’s possible that there, beneath the misted camel-hump caves of Guizhou, generations of women related to me made wontons just like my mom’s. I really can’t say. What I do know is that nobody has to learn to eat a wonton. That just sort of takes care of itself.

  The wonton wrappers came from the Chinese grocery store, and since this was the ’70s, that meant an excursion to Chinatown, in the city. My mom would park our ugly-yet-iconic beige Plymouth Volaré station wagon and stroll from store to store, returning only to check in on me and feed the meter. I would lie in back, trying to make sense of David Copperfield while slowly being imprinted with the vinyl pattern of the seat. It never struck me as odd that I could better comprehend the idiom spoken in a nineteenth-century London factory than the sidewalk Cantonese being shouted just outside the window. My sister, incidentally, had
named the station wagon Ouagoudougou, after the capital of then–Upper Volta (Burkina Faso now), and that seemed pretty normal too.

  My mom made the filling at home. How, I couldn’t tell you. I was probably busy reading the essay on Indo-European roots in the back of the dictionary, another favorite pastime. In any case, as I lolled bookishly under the bed, the smell of wontons would travel down the hallway to my room, followed with momlike efficacy by an exhortation to come to the kitchen, where the bowl of filling waited.

  Then, as in Chinese families everywhere, everyone would sit around the table and wrap wontons. Even my dad sometimes helped. We’d talk about violin and piano practice, about the books my dad’s company was publishing, about who was doing well in school. It was sort of like a shareholders’ meeting, but with better food.

  What we didn’t talk about so much was the past that brought us here. Or rather, that brought our grandparents here—in a hurry, and for good.

  Between 1938 and 1949, the Chang family and the Pu family, like so many other families, were on the move. My dad’s dad was a financier, antiques dealer, millionaire, governor, mobster (probably), and, for less than a year, the Chinese premier. He even had a mobster nickname—the “Reclining Cicada.” My mom’s dad came to study English literature in Michigan, where he came by his own nickname: “Mr. Pu from Kalamazoo.” My dad’s family brought precious antiques, and a brilliant, perilous political past. My mom’s family came with hardly anything but its resilience, and its considerable wits.

  I wish I could say that the wonton soup recipe was a tangible inheritance, that it arrived on the plane in New York in the suitcases of my fleeing family (for the Reclining Cicada, it wasn’t so much flight as “strategic relocation,” I like to think). Maybe in my grandfather’s steamer trunk, which was stamped “CKC” in gold.

  But no, there was no physical recipe to puzzle over, divine, and interpret, and in any case, the wonton soup didn’t come from my dad’s family at all. It came from my mom’s, and somehow or other, it got here safely, as did my mom’s mom, my Po Po. She made wonton soup for her children, and she made it for an increasing array of grandchildren—two, five, eight, ten, finally thirteen in all. Then she started in on her great-grandchildren. Their hair might have been a little lighter colored, the eyes a little more Caucasian, but for fifty years the scene remained pretty much the same: a little head bent over a steaming bowl, focused on a small regiment of wontons staring back up from the spoon with wrinkly, Shar-Pei-like faces. An indelicate slurping provided the soundtrack. Unlike my grandfather’s antiques, Po Po’s wonton soup was typically gone within ten minutes of being served. But it was not hard to interpret.

  It’s the nature of inheritance to stick close in some places and fall free in others. As our family propagated and throve in its new home, bits of our cultural heritage dropped away. Gradually, we lost our panic, our notoriety, our accent. Our names commingled with a United Nations of new names: Yudkovsky, Fasquelle, Eramian, Barnum, McLean, te Velde. Two generations after Ellis Island, our family’s China stories are evolving into myths—the last stop of a memory before it vanishes for good.

  For me, the greatest loss was language. My parents spoke different dialects, and when they spoke Chinese, it was a secret language, for keeping things from the kids. By the time I tried to learn it at school, I couldn’t pick it up easily. What I learned, I was too shy to practice, and therefore quickly lost.

  Some of my cousins did better, becoming fluent in Chinese. To learn a language, you have to be willing to make mistakes—big, loud ones sometimes. Being a shy perfectionist with a taste for Dickens is a recipe for learning a lot of one language; it’s not a recipe for learning a second or a third. So Po Po and I sat at the table smiling at each other and eating wonton soup in more or less silence, divided by language. I could taste the plain fact of my grandmother’s affection, which didn’t require translation into English. But I could no more ask the questions that would help me learn how to make it—however much I might wish to—than I could question the affection itself. Even a simple question like “Should you use shrimp in the wontons?” was out of the question, especially the “should” part.

  Learning to make wontons didn’t seem to matter much when I was studying ancient Greek at eighteen, or learning the saxophone at twenty-two, or salsa dancing at twenty-six. But when my own children were born, I began to lecture myself: Surely, I thought, your family didn’t come all this way only for the wonton soup to be forgotten in two generations. And so, setting aside the problems of language for the time being, I began.

  I started with a Joyce Chen recipe (written in English), dutifully measuring a teaspoon of this, a teaspoon of that. But then, after a while, I ditched the teaspoons and just sniffed and splashed my way back to what I remembered.

  The smell of wonton filling evolves as you make it. First it just smells porky, with a high overtone of shrimp if you used it. When you add the rice wine, the smell staggers a bit and opens up. Then you add the soy, and it takes on salty, definite edges. You add in a bit of stinging scallion and a bit of bracing ginger, and the smell sits up at attention. You throw in a pinch of sugar, to mollify it a bit. You put in a bit of oil to spread the word, and a little chicken broth to loosen up the attitude. And then you have that final smell that I most remember: fresh, sweet, and good.

  Like life, it’s a series of sequential approximations. If you trust the famous parable from Herodotus—and why wouldn’t you? the old liar—you never know if you’ve had a good life until it’s over. So it is with wontons, but thankfully, the wait’s a little shorter. It’s only an hour or two of sniffing and folding before you arrive at a steaming pot of certainty.

  It’s strange to produce something so concrete from so imprecise a sense. You can’t record a smell on a hard drive; you can’t upload it from a server. The exactness of the written word means nothing when you don’t speak the language. But smell, however vague, is indelible. It’s never turned off, and it’s not erasable.

  When it comes to culture, the lines of transmission are never continuous. Yet, from nothing more than a smell you can patch together broken bits and pieces of memory and common sense and find, to your shock, years later, that you have something your children recognize as their own, as if it were always whole and perfect. Like it or not, you’re not just a descendant—you’re a forebear too.

  Today, Po Po is ninety-seven, still alert and smiling, though very deaf and certainly too frail to cook. Having had my fill of Dickens—at least for the moment—I am finally learning Chinese the Information Age way: with Rosetta Stone, while walking a treadmill. I’ve still not going to ask about the shrimp, though. I would say something incomprehensible, and Po Po would laugh and shake her head at me, the mutest of her granddaughters. Knowing she loves me that much is enough. I know it for a wordless fact, just as I know that the wontons I eat from this point forward will all be my own.

  Best Guess Wonton Soup

  I try to double the wonton part of the recipe when I feel up to it. They’re so good, and you can freeze them in little quart-size ziplock bags for a later lunch. I freeze them raw, but it’s also possible to blanch them—cook them in boiling water for just a couple of minutes, till half-done—drain them, and then freeze them that way. If you do this, you also have the messy but outrageously good option of deep-frying them, which everyone should try at least once.

  Serves 4

  For the filling:

  1 pound ground pork, or pork butt/shoulder (if you have a grinder)

  ½ pound shrimp, peeled and deveined

  2 tablespoons Shaoxing cooking wine or dry sherry

  1 tablespoon soy sauce

  1 teaspoon minced fresh ginger

  1 teaspoon minced fresh garlic

  2 fat or 4 skinny scallions, whites only (reserve the greens for later use), minced

  1 ½ teaspoons cornstarch

  If you have a meat grinder or a meat grinder attachment for your mixer, run the pork and shrimp throu
gh it, using a disk with medium-sized holes. If you don’t, you are probably working with ground pork and whole peeled and deveined shrimp, and you’ll need to mince the shrimp as finely as you can; it’s easier if you freeze them for 10 minutes first. Cut the shrimp into 1/8-to 1/4-inch slices, then turn them crosswise and slice the other way. When you have minced all the shrimp in this manner, hash them a bit finer by holding the knife tip down with one hand and seesawing the blade through the shrimp mass against the cutting board. Precision isn’t as important as thoroughness here.

  1 tablespoon chicken broth or homemade chicken stock

  1 ½ teaspoons vegetable oil, canola oil, or corn oil

  ½ teaspoon sesame oil

  Pinch of sugar

  1 package wonton wrappers (about 45–50)

  For the soup:

  ½ head Chinese (napa) cabbage

  6 cups chicken broth or homemade stock

  Greens reserved from 4 scallions (see above)

  1-inch piece fresh ginger, unpeeled and crushed

  1. Place the pork and shrimp in a large mixing bowl and add the rest of the filling ingredients. Toss gently but thoroughly with a fork or chopsticks; the mixture should remain loose and smell fresh, briny, and gingery.

  2. To fill the wontons: Set the filling and a small bowl of water next to your work area. Take out a wonton wrapper and set 1 teaspoon (more if you dare, and as you get better at it) of filling in the center. Dip your finger in the water and trace along the top edge and halfway down the sides of the wrapper. Fold the wrapper in half so that the dry edges meet the wet edges. You should have a rectangle with a big lump of filling in the middle. Moisten one corner of the folded edge. Draw the other corner of the folded edge over it—not face to face as if you were closing a book, but front to back—and press them together firmly. Set your finished wonton aside and repeat until you’ve exhausted the filling.