Salon.com > Immigrant cuisine

What grad school taught me: The wonders of Lebanese-Mexican hummus

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 14:06:00 +0000

I dreaded every day of graduate school. I felt awkward and insecure around my brilliant and worldly classmates, and was terrified of my even more brilliant (and all incredibly famous) professors.

I shouldn't have been. And now, after a decade of teaching in other programs, I realize my years in the doctoral program in linguistics at UCLA should have been the best in my life (okay, maybe second-best after my two years of living on wine, cheese, and pain au chocolat while teaching English in Paris). UCLA's linguistics department, to put it in polite academic terms, kicked major ass – but I was too dim to realize it at the time.

Some of the things I dreaded about it back then were the very things that made it such a great place to learn. One of these was the Copy Room Ambush. The Copy Room Ambush worked like this: I'd be minding my own business, photocopying a journal article, when some Famous Faculty Member would suddenly pounce from behind the recycling bins:

FFM: You! You have to give a talk in the Syntax/Semantics Seminar!

ME: But what am I going to talk about?? I don't have anything ready to present!

FFM: That's your problem. You're going to give a talk!

Creating my own ethnic cuisine

Wed, 29 Sep 2010 18:47:00 +0000

I have no ethnic heritage. My parents grew up poor and white in the rural South, born into families with no discoverable history prior to the early 1920s. No one remembers a homeland. Being "American" and "Southern" should be enough, and it is enough, but I long for connection to an Old Country, to know traditions and recipes that have been kept alive, lovingly tended, across geography and time. Denied that connection, I console myself by visiting the ethnic markets that have sprouted up in our modest-size town.

Visitors to the Gulf Coast of Florida are often surprised by the diversity of our population. In the mid-1970s, thousands of Vietnamese refugees were relocated here. Military installations dot the coastline and the interior, and servicepeople returning home from foreign assignments often bring families from overseas. We have large Thai, Vietnamese, Korean and Filipino communities, and smaller groups from England, Turkey, Germany, Italy and Japan. Following the run of hurricanes a few years back, Mexican workers poured in to replace blue tarps with new roofs, and stayed for the construction boom. Once that passed, many moved on, but some have settled and opened restaurants and markets.

Fried-cheese epiphany at a street fair

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 13:01:00 +0000

Street food, fast, cheap and out of control, is the current darling of the food lover's world, but the culinary glories of the San Gennaro street fair in New York's Little Italy are faded at best. Deep-fried Oreos offer 10 seconds of pleasure and an evening of regret; once-promising sausages get burned to charcoal before being stuffed into cold rolls with peppers steamed limp. It's not for tasty things that I jostle my way through the perpetually mobbed festival, but to get a taste of a different sort of local flavor, mainly by overhearing things like this: "My pop got into a motorcycle accident and was in the hospital for weeks. My grandpa came over and started cookin' all this Italian food. It was the best thing that ever happened to me!"

But, last weekend, while standing next to the man with the unfortunate father, I came upon three men frying mozzarella sticks in a wok who showed me some of the best qualities of American cuisine.

Hot dog jewel: Mexican-style with beans, bacon and avocado

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 15:01:00 +0000

This winning entry for the Salon Kitchen Challenge -- in which we asked readers to share their best hot dog recipes -- comes to us courtesy of Kolika Elle Kirk. We haven't had a chance to try this recipe out yet, but we'd love to hear about it if you do!

It may be hard to imagine that a hot dog could be called a jewel, as a jewel is a rarity found in the depths of the earth, and a hot dog is a collaboration of the mystery meats in the depths of a pig, but the cool thing about food is that you can find jewels of any sort. And in Tucson, one of our jewels is the Sonoran Dog. (Tucson itself is kind of a hidden culinary jewel, with special tastes like Indian Fry Bread at the San Xavier Mission and Prickly Pear Meringue Pie at the Bread and Butter Café.)

The first time I had a Sonoran dog was when I was working a campaign for a waterless wash-and-wax. I would stand outside in my black skinny jeans and high heels, looking cute as can be with the blue company polo and can of wax in my hand ... I was dirty and stroke-ready and stinking to high heaven.

Mississippi Vietnamese shrimp tacos

Sat, 22 May 2010 00:20:00 +0000

When I lived in Biloxi, Miss., after Hurricane Katrina, I cooked a lot of what I called "Utopian Biloxi food," a cuisine born of the place and the people I saw every day: white and black Southerners mingling -- some for the first time -- with their Vietnamese fisherman neighbors, all fighting to restore their home after the storm.

I wrote about it at the time:

East Biloxi, right now, is a place where you can think about Utopia. It's poor, neglected, and was ripped up by Hurricane Katrina, so that might seem like a strange thing to say. But if you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs --well, the eggs here are already broken.

As people and businesses return, sometimes with gusto, sometimes more haltingly, there is space to think about what kind of a community they want to re-create. Maybe all this thinking will turn out to be wishful, but as long as there are still people working to rebuild, wishful thinking is fuel.

Mom’s recipe for sticky soy sauce ribs

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 00:20:00 +0000

For the ultimate in panicky cat-herding experiences, try this: invite a bunch of friends over for a dinner party and teach them to make your mother's Taiwanese dumplings. And then wait, two-thirds starving, for even a handful of passable dumplings to emerge. Feel that slow, sinking feeling as you realize your guests have been there for three hours and dinner is looking a long, floury way away. For added effect, make sure that your mother's dumplings happen to be your absolute favorite thing in the world, less a favorite food than thousand-mile stand-in for a nuzzle in her bosom.

I looked up from the wrapper-rolling table, around my friend Winnie Yang's kitchen, hearing the wine glasses clinking and the teeniest sound of Winnie's teeth gnashing with every busted dumpling. I was horrified. I brought this upon her, cajoling her to teach me her mom's food, and inviting along some fat-fingered friends for the ride. Luckily, she prepared for this contingency. She had Mom's ribs in the oven. And eventually, when there were finally enough dumplings to anchor the table, we all sat around our proud, slightly lopsided handiwork ... and immediately devoured the ribs. Soy sauce black and sticky with honey, they were so good, so simple, so stridently home-style, they announced themselves as the kind of food you want to come home to every night.

St. Patrick’s Day controversy: Is corned beef and cabbage Irish?

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:20:00 +0000

In third grade, my teacher announced that we would be celebrating St. Patrick's Day by wearing green hats and giving ourselves fake Irish names. And so was born that great Celtic patriot Francis McLam, and next to me was the even-more-improbable sounding Mike O'Gotkowski. Our friend Michael O'Reilly was now -- in the face of all this Irishness -- no longer sufficiently Irish, and so he became Michael McO'Reilly. It was my first inkling of how strange Americans are about traditions on St. Patrick's Day, a feeling reinforced years later by watching people of all races and ethnicities pretend at Irishness by getting plowed on green beer and painting themselves like leprechauns. But despite all this, maybe the most straightforward of St. Patrick's Day celebrations, eating the corned beef and cabbage, is secretly one of the strangest.

"My Irish family never ate corned beef," the letter began. I'd just written a story about new immigrants in Queens, called "Where Curry Replaced Corned Beef and Cabbage," and a reader was gently protesting my mention of that stereotypical dish.

The last Chinese BBQ

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 01:20:00 +0000

The Last Chinese BBQ

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.

Winner: Peking duck cassoulet

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 01:20:00 +0000

This winning entry for the Salon Kitchen Challenge -- in which we asked readers to come up with their best bean dishes -- comes to us courtesy of Mamie Chen. Check out this week's Challenge here.

As a first-generation Chinese American, I guess I had a head start in getting exposed to more "interesting" foods. It's something I never realized and appreciated until I was interviewed for our high school French exchange program, when the teachers tried to gauge our cultural sensitivity and asked what I would do if my French host mother served fish one night, with its head still on.

I responded: "Personally, I don't really like the head. But my mom always says it's the best part. So I would make sure to offer the head to the eldest person at the table. Especially the eyes. But if they absolutely insisted, then of course I would eat it." I guess that satisfied them, and soon I boarded a plane with my friends, bound for Toulouse.

The incredible expanding noodle, and where to eat it

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 17:45:00 +0000

I suppose I'm easily entertained, but it's hard to deny that you get a bit of a show with your lunch at the Lanzhou-style hand-pulled noodle shops popping up all over New York's several Chinatowns: You order and a flour-covered cook will wrestle with a snake's-length of white dough, wrap it around his fingers, and, like some elaborate, wheaty cat's cradle, stretch, tug, and fold its way into a bundle of noodles. It's cooking as manual acrobatics: You can watch it over and over and still be surprised at how the dough strands multiply, at how the hands move with such surety.

Of course, these things aren't made for looking, and minutes after the cook casts your hank into boiling water, it comes to you in bowls of nearly boiling soup, deep-tasting and brown with beef to its core, scented with warming spices like star anise and slicks of red chili oil, sporting garnishes and meats of many textures.

Thai-ish steamed fish with curry custard

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 01:29:00 +0000

OK, so I left out a fun detail in yesterday's story about Ganda Suthivarakom's steamed salmon curry custard: The Thai recipe she was cooking from in the Swedish food magazine was actually her own.

Ported over to Stockholm for work, she grew tired of facing the 20 hours of darkness a day alone, so she geared up a charm offensive: She offered to go to people's houses and cook; all they had to do was invite enough of their friends to make it a proper dinner party. "Because who doesn't want someone to come cook for them?" she asks.

It turns out the Swedes have a real thing for Thai food. "Everyone in Stockholm's been to Thailand five times," Ganda says. "They have a lot of vacation time. And, you know, Thailand's politically stable, lots of sun, no landmines, pretty girls ... So anyway, Stockholm has lots of great Thai grocery stores. And I made lots of Thai-ish food." Which is what she called it when she spoke with a journalist who ended up writing about this funny little American's movable feast and her very personal repertoire of Thai-American-Swedish dishes.

Thai food is not a birthright

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 02:01:00 +0000

We'd eaten dinner, five friends in Ganda Suthivarakom's apartment, and as good guests of a better host, we pretended to start cleaning up while she insisted we stop. The food was lovely, a home-style spread of ground pork sparked with fish sauce and lime juice, mellow cucumber soup and shredded carrot salad: dishes she learned to cook growing up a family of Thai immigrants.

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.

Dal Chawal (Seema’s Indian lentils and rice)

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 01:11:00 +0000

"Dal chawal is the most traditional Indian food," my neighbor Seema said. I nodded, noting that rice-and-bean dishes are prevalent in many cultures because our bodies can only absorb their proteins when eaten together. "I thought it was just because it tastes good," she said.

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

A sweetly awkward lesson

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 01:05:00 +0000

Seema stops and starts, showing me a bowl of lentils soaking in water, apologizing for the humbleness of the food she was making -- dal chawal, rice with soupy lentils, her comfort food. She smiles nervously, letting out a half-breath laugh, and asks me if I’d like some tea after putting a pot of water on. I look at the wall and the crayon drawings that her 8-year-old made for her, intimate gestures between mother and daughter, and I have one of those flashes of recognition: What are you doing here, standing alone in the kitchen of a woman who barely knows you, in the middle of the day? I feel suddenly awkward and enormous, struggling to stand at a respectful distance with my notebook in hand, peering into her pots.

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.