Best Food Writing 2013 (55 page)

“It's the meat, did they not put enough ginger?
Mei you xiang wei dao.”

“Eh, there's ginger, it's just heavy-handed. Who cares, just eat them! The rest of the food is on the way.”

Xiang wei
is the character a good dish has when it's robust, flavorful, and balanced but still maintains a certain light quality. That flavor comes, lingers on your tongue, stays long enough to make you crave it, but just when you think you have it figured out, it's gone. Timing is everything. Soup dumplings, sitcoms, one-night stands—good ones leave you wanting more.

The perfect soup dumpling has eighteen folds. Taipei's Din Tai Fung restaurant figured this out in the mid-eighties. While Americans had Pyrex visions, Taiwan was focused on soup dumplings. My grandparents on my father's side lived right on Yong Kang Jie, where Din Tai Fung was founded. To this day, it is the single most famous restaurant in Taipei, the crown jewel of the pound-for-pound greatest eating island in the world. Din Tai Fung started off as an oil retailer, but business took a dive in the early eighties and they did what any Taiwanese-Chinese person does when they need to get buckets. You break out the family recipe and go hammer. Din Tai Fung was like the Genco Olive Oil of Taipei. Undefeated.

The dough is where Din Tai Fung stays the hood champ. It's just strong enough to hold the soup once the gelatin melts, but if you pick it up by the knob and look closely at the skin, it's almost translucent. They create a light, airy texture for the skin that no one else has been able to duplicate. I remember going back to Din Tai Fung when I was twenty-seven and saying to myself, They're off! It's just not as satisfying as I remember it to be! But two hours later, walking around Taipei, all I could think about was their fucking soup dumplings. Across the street from Din Tai Fung was another restaurant that served soup dumplings and made a business of catching the spillover when people didn't want to wait an hour for a table. They were really close to the real deal. Like the first year Reebok had AI and you thought that maybe, just maybe, the Questions with the honeycomb would outsell Jordans. A false alarm.

Grandpa Huang put on for Yong Kang Jie and never cheated on the original. On the other hand, Grandpa Chiao, my mother's father, had money on his mind and really didn't have time for things like soup dumplings. He was the type of guy who would go across the street without thinking twice. He would be fully aware Din Tai Fung was better, but he was a businessman. He had things to do and never lost sight of them. Everything was calculated with my grandfather. On his desk, there was always this gold-plated abacus. Whenever something needed to be calculated, the other employees would use calculators, but Grandpa beat them to the punch every time. With his fingers on the abacus, he looked as slick as a three-card monte hustler. I loved hearing the sound:
tat, tat, tat, rap, tat, tat, tat.
After tapping the beads, he'd always reset them all with one downward stroke,
whap,
and out came the answer. He'd much rather save an hour, eat some perfectly fine soup dumplings, and go on his way.

Mom had other plans. She was my grandpa's youngest and loudest child. Mom claims she was his favorite, and I can't say I don't believe her. Grandpa loved her because she was entertaining and full of energy. As a kid, she took the Taiwanese national academic exam and got into all the best schools in Taipei. After she came to America as a seventeen-year-old, she managed to graduate as the salutatorian of her high school, even though she barely spoke English. On top of that, she's still the best cook in the family. My cousins love talking about things they don't know about and everyone claims their parents are the best, but even the aunts admit my mom goes hard in the paint.

That day, my uncle Joe from my dad's side was with us at Yi Ping Xiao Guan. I think he actually discovered the spot, because it was in Maryland, where he lived. Earlier that day, Grandpa had asked me where I wanted to go for my sixth birthday. He figured I'd say Chuck E. Cheese or McDonald's, but Momma didn't raise no fool. Chuck E. Cheese was for mouth breathers and kids with Velcro shoes. “I want to go where they have the best soup dumplings!”

“Where's that?”

“Even Uncle Joe knows! Yi Ping Xiao Guan.”

I really liked Uncle Joe. He built three of the major bridges in DC and wore these big, thick black-rimmed glasses. I was into glasses, especially goggles, because Kareem wore them and he had the ill sky hook.

After we ate, I was kinda pissed with the shitty soup dumplings. It was my birthday! Yi Ping Xiao Guan, you can't come harder than this for the kid? Chuck E. Cheese can serve shitty food ‘cause you get to smash moles and play Skee-Ball after lunch. But all you have are soup dumplings! How could you fuck this up? Yi Ping Xiao Guan was like Adam Morrison: your job is to slap Kobe's ass when the Lakers call time out. If you can't do that, shoot yourself. As I sat there, pissed off, I saw a waiter pouring off-brand soy sauce into the Wanjashan Soy Sauce bottles. Corner cutting, bootleg, off-brand-soy-pouring Chinamen!

“Mom! Mom!”

“Eddie, stop it, I'm talking to Grandpa. Talk to Uncle Joe!”

If someone was talking to Grandpa, you couldn't interrupt, but apples don't fall far from the tree. My mom was the youngest and never followed rules in the family. She enforced them on everyone else, but she never followed them herself.

“MOOOMMM! Listen!”

“Huang Xiao Wen!”

That was the signal. Black people use the government name when shit hits the fan, and my family would bust out the Chinese. It hurt my ears to hear the Chinese name. Not only did it seem louder and extra crunchy, but it usually meant you were about to get smacked the fuck up. Luckily, Uncle Joe was a nice guy who actually thought it was possible that a child might have something important to say.

“Uncle Joe, I know why the soup dumplings are bad.”

“Really? Tell me!”

“Look over there: the waiter is putting the cheap soy sauce in the bottles. They must be using it in the dumplings, too.”

“Genius! Genius!
Aya, Rei Hua, Rei Hua, zhu ge Xiao Wen tai cong ming le!”

Rei Hua was my mother's Chinese name, so Uncle Joe got her attention when he used it.

“Eddie figured it out. They're using that cheap heavy soy sauce now. Look over there, he's putting it in all the bottles!”

“Oh my God! Too smart, too smart, I told you, this one is so smart!”

“Whatever, Mom, you never listen!”

“Shhh, shhh, shhh, don't ruin it for yourself. You did a good thing, just eat your food now.”

I think my mom is manic, but Chinese people don't believe in psychologists. We just drink more tea when things go bad. Sometimes I agree; I think we're all overdiagnosed. Maybe that's just how we are, and people should leave us alone. My mom was entertaining! If you met my family, you'd prescribe Xanax for all of them, but then what? We'd be boring.

 

 

W
HEN THE
K
IDS
M
AKE
Y
OU
B
REAKFAST FOR
M
OTHER'S
D
AY

By Kim Foster

From
kim-foster.com

Author of
Sharp Knives, Boiling Oil: My Year of Dangerous Cooking With 4-Year-Olds,
NYC-based Kim Foster sends out SOS dispatches from the parenting front lines on her blog
Kim-Foster.com
. Ah, the idyllic soft-focus image of Mother's Day–prepare to see it shattered.

M
y kids made me breakfast last Mother's Day. There's a pretty good chance they'll do it again this year.

I'd be stupid to say they did it for me, really. Mother's Day was an excuse to get in the kitchen and go crazy without having me in there butting in with my rules and safety concerns, my constant nagging not to stick their fingers in their eyes after they chop the jalapenos, my desire to use one bowl and not five.

Lucy was seven, Edie was five and, having served as my sous-chefs since they could stand on the family “cooking stools,” they were hankering for some kitchen autonomy. Mother's Day meant they could force me to stay in bed under the guise of relaxing.

I'm not going to lie. I was freaking out.

I imagined what every mother/home-cook imagines from her bed/prison on Mother's Day—my kitchen being dismantled piece by piece, my progeny unloading cabinets, burrowing through spices, dishes breaking, boxes and bins clattering to the floor, a completely upended kitchen that would require a half-day of heavy cleaning and reorganization

I imagined how I would react when I heard Lucy say to Edie, “I
think your hair is on fire!” or “I think Mommy needs another spoonful of cumin in her coffee.”

I wondered if I'd be able to just lie there in my bed, silently not helping, all the while hearing them search the kitchen for the bowl I know is right there in the dishwasher, also the only place they won't think to look, ever. I prepared myself to enjoy whatever crazy concoction they served, no matter how awful it smelled, no matter how it turned my stomach, even if it was ice cream drowned in fish sauce. I practiced my smile, like I really meant it, and repeated the words, “mmm . . . yummy.”

Mother's Day, and all its required relaxing, is stressful.

The neighbors had sent us over a dozen eggs from their ever-productive backyard chickens, and this made Lucy and Edie focus on eggs. Eggs for Mother's Day.

Lucy decided that I would eat two eggs, fried sunny-side up, super-runny yolks, covered in chives and a little cheese, either cheddar or raclette. It was chef's choice, but I could get behind it. Lucy grabbed the egg carton and inspected: blueish, brownish, greenish, speckled. She picked out Puff Ball's eggs, the bluish ones—her favorite chicken and her favorite color. She set those aside for herself.

Then she chose eggs for me. The ones from the chicken named, “Gwen” because, as I heard Lucy tell it, “Gwen is older, like Mama.” Edie didn't care which eggs she got because she hates eggs and most breakfast foods in general. She would make eggs for Daddy. She thought Daddy would like the speckled ones.

From the bed/prison, I heard the clatter of pans hitting the stove.

David, my husband, was relegated to procurer of things from the unreachable top shelf of the fridge—butter, herbs, cheese. He took his orders, fetched what they asked for, and kept his head down. If he even got near the stove, or tried to suggest something about the cheese, or how high the gas was, Edie stopped him and reminded him that he didn't know how to cook (this is true) and so could not offer any advice.

He told me later she gave him the “the hand.”

I gamely pulled the
New Yorker
up on my Kindle and started “Shouts and Murmurs.” I was going to get into this. I embraced the bed/prison. I didn't think I'd have a realistic shot at finishing the
New Yorker
Fiction—too long, too much quiet time required—but “Shouts & Murmurs” seemed doable. I went with that.

I heard David reminding them not to let the butter burn. Edie told him to shush. It was harsh. But he took it well and next thing I know he was next to me, handing me a cup of coffee, flipping through magazines on his iPad.

“I've been kicked out of the kitchen,” he told me, nearly gleeful.

Mother's Day was looking up.

The girls cracked their eggs. Lucy is very particular about her yolks so, when Edie's yolk broke, they stood over the bowl, and held a summit about how to handle it. Should they throw away the egg and start over? That would be a waste. But they couldn't make a proper sunny-side up egg this way. Maybe Ju-Ju the cat would eat it. Ju-Ju likes people food. More discussion. More peering into the bowl trying to make the egg yolk come back together.

Finally, they decided Edie would make a frittata, or even better an omelette, depending on whether she felt she could flip it. They would decide on the fly.

Done. Summit over.

David had laid everything out on the cutting board. Lucy grabbed the big knife from the drawer and sampled the cheeses and, deciding on cheddar, cut slivers of it, and hacked away at a handful of chives.

About the big knife. Our kids use knives: steak knives when they were toddlers, our knives now. By six, kids who have been cooking alongside their parents are pretty adept at not chopping off their fingers. They understand that knife cut = bloody trip to the hospital in an ambulance, hours in the ER waiting room, possibly stitches and a long needle full of local anesthetic. Kids will do just about anything to avoid that. So we trust them to use real knives.