As many of you have heard by now, King Donald Trump was recently seen eating pizza with Sarah Palin in New York City. Nothing wrong with that, right? Just a couple of buddies hanging out, probably have loads in common for conversation fodder, like how great it is to be very American. But the story turned sour when Trump and Palin began to masticate their delicious NYC-style slices ... with forks and knives!

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I arrived early, to catch a dumpling-making lesson (which I'll share with you tomorrow), but it wasn't long before I saw what was really going on: a full-scale onslaught of weapons-grade motherly overdoing-it-ness, Asian Momma style. Winnie's mom, Mei, had filled not one but two entire grocery carts with food, and piles of vegetables were lying all around the kitchen, as if houseplants. I saw dried noodles soaking in water, ready for cooking. I saw racks of ribs marinating. I saw a school of fish waiting to be fried. I saw a massive pot that had become the final resting place for two whole ducks. I saw a mound of ground meat roughly the size of a beach ball.

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And so it was no surprise when my friend Emily told me about the Wiener's Circle, a classic dog dive famous for its hot-tempered service. "It's just people screamin' and cussin'," she said. "And women taking their shirts off. I grew up going there, but then I had to stop."

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Let me explain: The gastronomic offerings in my husband's hometown of New Delhi had been sorely disappointing. Going out involved eating heavy, unimaginative curries — the kind of generic "Indian" food that's served at restaurants called Bombay Palace and Taj Mahal the world over. Staying in and eating at his parents' home seemed to mean simple, almost ascetic meals of roti and subzi (bread and vegetables).

During my initial pre-engagement trips there, I didn’t complain. I figured we’d be visiting Delhi only occasionally once we got married. But then it turned out that Sid had plans for us to live there for at least a year and perhaps even longer.

I panicked. I live to eat. Moving to Delhi was going to be a slow, flavorless death.

After marriage, my new-bride status dictated that I eat with my husband's family every night. I'd go to bed mildly hungry and distinctly homesick, missing the eclectic foods I'd eaten in my cosmopolitan hometown of Bombay. My family had a tight dinner schedule that traveled several time zones: tacos on Tuesdays, falafels on Fridays, Thai on Thursdays, etc. — and I desperately missed all the culinary continent-hopping we did from our kitchen.

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She was a great cook, but this wasn't going to be one of those "her food saved our relationship" stories. She once accidentally dropped sugar into a wok of fried rice. When I asked her why it was sweet, she snapped at me for being too stupid to understand anything. No, it was going to be a bitter story of salvaging the one true good memory I have of her cooking: the velvety coffee banana pudding she would make for parties.

But it's not going to be that story, because it turned into something else when I asked my mother if she knew how to make it.

"I thought she just bought coffee Jello and put bananas in it! But I'll call her up and ask her!" she replied perkily in an e-mail. (Mom is the world's perkiest replier of e-mails, averaging more exclamation points than sentences.)

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"When I think of Boston, I think of angry drivers and angrier sports fans," I said. I'm from New York. I can't help it.

"OK, well, I've got my work cut out for me," Chuck said.

But who knew the spuckie's biggest challenge to iconic status would not be coming from provincial rubes like myself, but from his own kitchen? Because despite the excellence of the spuckie, its path to dominance is thwarted by the utter amazingness of Chuck's roast beef sandwich.

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Waffle House is the unofficial flower of the Southern Interstate. Driving back north from the Gulf Coast on I-65, their yellow signs blossom in hamlets from Alabama to Kentucky. I've taken this route for years now, but my mother has thwarted every one of my romantic urges to pull in for a waffle, to meet locals and chitchat with a folksy waitress holding a coffeepot. Finally, this year, somewhere near Franklin, Tenn., I convinced her to give it a try.

On the way in, we were stopped by a gravel-voiced, sun-damaged woman in a Gatlinburg sweat shirt with silk-screened horses. "Where are y'all headed?" she asked, taking a drag off her cigarette. I told her we were on our way home to Michigan. "Must be snow there," she said, "we're out looking for snow." We live with shovels and kitty litter in our trunks from October to April, so the idea of "looking for snow" was highly amusing, but there had been a rare blizzard across the deep South the day before, and apparently Ms. Gaitlinburg and her crew were really driving around looking for snow. We wished her safe travels, and found ourselves a booth.

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In high school I worked as a busboy at an Elk's Lodge until a seriously drunken Elk offered to throw me through a large plate glass window. I graduated college a semester early in 1973 because the draft had ended, so to support myself I worked a stint at a restaurant called Lum's, where I cooked and pulled about a million pitchers of beer. I hated that job for two reasons: 1) While I was in the back slopping around, all of the college kids who were smart enough not to graduate early were out front eating and playing drinking games; and 2) every night I had to filter the boiling hot fryer oil, which left me one move away from third-degree burns and perpetually smelling of bad French fries. Naturally, I vowed to myself that no matter how desperate I may be, I would never work in food service again. Ever.

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A few days later I drove the hour and a half west to New Orleans for the first time. It was night; it was very dark. An acquaintance, the writer Sara Roahen, invited me to join some friends for dinner, and I was eager to, but when I got to the bridge that spanned miles over Lake Pontchartrain, I felt a sudden trepidation. I'd already spent weeks in the constant shock of living in Biloxi's disaster zone, but I still hadn't been to New Orleans. Outside, there was hardly anything but darkness, but driving over the water that broke this city, I felt the opposite of what Uyen was talking about. Not knowing what I was going to see, I could only imagine. It was nerve-wracking, suddenly not knowing what I would find when I crossed the bridge.

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Originally published in Gourmet, August 2009

Behind me came the clack of the oven latch, a rush of scorching air, and then the rolling grumble of metal track as Si-fu hauled out 80 sizzling pounds of hot pig swinging from a hook. He twirled it around like a dance partner, eyeing its skin carefully for bubbles threatening to form. I looked hard. I couldn't see what he was searching for, but I knew they had to be found: If they appear early in the roasting, they will puff, burst, and burn. He tapped the skin with carpenter's nails, piercing it just enough to release pressure but not enough to let the juices escape. He threw arcs of salt as if casting rice at newlyweds and sent the pig back into the oven.

As I broke down barbecued ducks, smelling richly of fat and five-spice, Si-fu concentrated on the nearly inaudible crackle coming from the oven, waiting for the pitch that would tell him it was time to take another look. I heard the clack of the latch again, the grumbling of the rail, the tack-tack-tack of nails, the scratch of steel wool scraping at too-dark skin, the rustle of a basting brush. Over and over I would hear these sounds when he worked the pig, for hours at a time, breathing in thick heat.

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I couldn't tell what the man was looking at since he was trying to peer into one of the upper floors, but he stood stock still in the harsh glare of the security spotlight, looking like he was about to get sucked into a UFO by a tractor beam.

"Excuse me," I said. He came out of his Close Encounters of the Third Kind stare and I realized I willed myself to say something before I knew what to say. So I went, "Uh ... can I help you?" sounding like someone trying not very hard to sell him a television.

"Oh, hi," he said. Then, realizing why I was approaching, he said, "Oh, I live here. I'm just waiting for my girlfriend to toss some takeout at me."

"Excuse me?" I asked. "Someone is going to throw dinner at you?"

Just then he looked back up, and out of the glare of the security lamp, I could see the silhouette of a woman's head poke out from a window. She waved. "Hi, Babe!" she called in a dulcet tone while dangling a package much larger than I am comfortable seeing seven stories above my head.

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In 1987, Poppy Tooker was running a cooking school in New Orleans when the Audubon Zoo asked her to cook for an exhibition, because, well, in New Orleans, there can be no event without food. She served calas, a sweet rice fritter she picked up from one of her teachers, the Creole chef Leon Soniat. "They were delicious and fun to make, so I liked them, but I didn't know they were special," she told me.

An older black gentleman picked one up, walking away. He came back a few moments later, weeping. "My momma used to make these when I was a boy," he said to her. "I forgot all about them until now."

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But today, at home, showing me some of the food he learned to cook while serving in the Peace Corps in Russia, his movements were looser, less precise. The stop, drop and spin was replaced by mashing potatoes in a bowl slightly too small and not worrying terribly much if he kept having to peek into the oven to check on the five-ingredient apple cake called sharlotka (six if you count the squeeze of lemon). He made "cutlets" by pressing mushroom stuffing into wads of mashed potatoes and rolling them in bread crumbs.

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I cleared some ramekins off the table, which had until recently held the evening's greatest hit: tender salmon, its rich flesh heightened by aromatic red curry, steamed in a soft custard and covered with a thin cream of coconut and slivers of hot chilies. Trying to make room for them in the overfilled sink, I caught a glimpse of the curry recipe lying on the counter, in, of all things, a Swedish food magazine.

"Um, so…" I started, not knowing how to be delicate about this dish's provenance. I pointed at the ramekins. "Was that the food of your people?" Delicacy is not really my thing, I guess.

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It was our first Christmas together when I met Christine's extended New England Portuguese family, the kind often having to remind people that Portugal and Puerto Rico are two different places. They brought out the octopus, and whispered to one another: "Will he eat it? Will it scare him?"

"Octopus?" I replied. "I'm Chinese. My people will eat the thing that eats the octopus." They liked that.

But it wasn't the octopus Christine was after. "You know," she said to me, pointing to the snack table. "Cod cakes are like the most definitive Portuguese food. Everyone loves my mother's cod cakes. Whenever there's a party, they ask my mom to make her cod cakes."

I listened.

"I love my mom's cod cakes," she said.

I smiled.

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When a man talks to me about his banana pudding, I assume we will talk about many things. I was mid-meal at Charles Gabriel's restaurant, marveling at the juice from his chicken, when I leaned back from my table to ask Mr. Charles if the bowl he was cutting bananas into was otherwise filled with Nilla Wafers and custard. When he got to talking about how the texture of the pudding changes as it sits, I knew I was going to make him my teacher in the ways of the Southern kitchen.

Charles Gabriel is renowned as a fried-chicken master, deserving of his floppy white hat, the kind that usually sits on the heads of cartoon chefs. But masters are sometimes protective of their specialties, so I intended to start by asking him about collard greens and hoppin' john and whatever else he might make for a traditional African-American New Year's before seeing if he'd mind getting into it with fried chicken. Besides, I don't want to pigeonhole the man.

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And how could I disagree with that? Because Seema's dal chawal tastes really good -- her rice is fragrant and rich, her soupy lentils are warm and glowing with spices, a little too exciting to be soothing. She's not a chef or a master cook; she's just a working mom with a penchant for dishes like this, which she can make quickly before her daughter comes home from school. But a watchful eye and a megaton of garlic make this dish something I've been craving for weeks.

(To my dal-less friends: if you don't have a South Asian market near you, "Modern Spice" author Monica Bhide recommends Indian Foods Co. or just plain ol' Amazon.)

Seema's Dal Chawal (Indian lentils and rice)
Makes enough for a mother, a young daughter, and a guest
Active time: 20 minutes. Start to finish (including soaking): 1.5 hours 

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But I suppose I should have known what this was going to be like. I had asked one of my neighbors to show me what made the halls smell so good, to let me inside her home, and how could that help but get personal?

The tea boils over, milky froth sizzling under flickering flames. "I'm messy, right?" she says, grabbing paper towels. I apologize for distracting her, but she insists it's her fault. She serves me a cup, sweet and biting, and turns around to push the towel around the stove, avoiding the pot of orange lentils bubbling away.

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Back then, Queens was still the most native-born of the five boroughs of New York City, and my neighborhood was rich with generations of Irish and Italian families. I imagine cabbage and red gravy wafting down the halls into my apartment.

But now it smells like curries, like chicken adobo, like rice and beans, like dishes I have never heard of from parts of the world I barely know. In three decades, we’ve had a change in population that is almost unimaginable in peacetime -- now roughly half of the 2.5 million people here were foreign-born. Everyone rubs up against one another, all the time.

It’s amazing -- Indians and Pakistanis shop at the same markets, Thais and Mexicans and Chinese work in the same restaurants. But let's not be Pollyannas; not everyone always loves it. And I wonder who was here before, and why they’re not here anymore. For all the diversity in my building, I have to confess that I don’t often see, well, white people.

I walk around to smell what’s cooking. I take the stairs, and notice how the food smells different from floor to floor, but those aromas are the only things that connect me and my neighbors. The doors are always closed, heavy and black in our drab halls, and all the living goes on behind them.

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