This interview is brought to you by the SAVEUR Cookbook Club, our passionate community of food-loving readers from around the globe, celebrating our favorite authors and recipes. Join us as we cook through a new book every month, and share your food pics and vids on social media with the hashtags #SAVEURCookbookClub and #EatTheWorld.

The author Su Scott describes the pocha marketplaces of Seoul as a kind of theater, and a glimpse into the pages of her new cookbook, Pocha: Simple Korean Food from the Streets of Seoul, immediately shows you why. Pocha stalls—short for pojangmacha, which translates to “covered wagon”—often debut at night along the city streets, illuminated by hanging tungsten lights that shine over open grills and sizzling skillets. Beneath the drape of red and orange tarpaulins, these stands turn out some of Korea’s most iconic street foods, be it spicy-sweet gireum tteokbokki (oil-seared rice cakes); bowls of pickled vegetables; or pastries stuffed with everything from red bean paste to Nutella. Set against the sound of clinking glasses of soju, it’s an altogether marvelous show for the senses, and a source of national pride. As I spoke with Scott from her home in London, I learned that her cookbook was an attempt to capture the magic and theater of the pocha as a means of preservation, both for herself and for all fans of Korean cooking.

What makes pocha food different from that offered in a Korean restaurant?

Markets are very good places for anyone to really feel the life of that particular country or culture. On a very basic environmental level, there’s a sound and smell, and it’s just sensory heaven. As you walk through the markets, you see how people move and talk and engage. There is a reasonable degree of trust as well, and you know you’re seeing the whole theater of it as it unfolds. What’s different is the way that the food is cooked: The pocha setup is very simple; there’s no set of six burners, just one hob. The dishes are very seasonal, based on what’s available and cheap, but done very well. But it happens in front of you, and there’s an immediate connection that you have with the vendor. For the cooks, while they have years of experience, their food doesn’t have ego. But there is a sense of pride—this is their life, and they want to feed you well, and for you to like it. And I think that’s quite special.

How did pocha go from a working-class experience to one beloved throughout Korea? How are they being sustained today?

In Korea, almost everyone can afford good food, and even the richest people will queue up for a restaurant’s special dish for two hours or more. Korea only came out of food poverty after the Korean War, so a lot of older generations understand what it means to be hungry, and there is a lot of love for preserving Korean food and its culture. As Korea has developed into a global powerhouse, Korean food companies are taking up space in the world market. Now, some of the neighborhoods that house pocha are being redeveloped; there are parts of Seoul I don’t even recognize anymore. Yet what I’m seeing now is that younger generations who are moving into these soon-to-be-demolished towns want to preserve these places. So I’m confident that pocha will continue to exist, though in what shape or form is another story. But I think the educated, younger generations bring savvy and eloquence to the fight to protect their culture.

How did you get into food writing?

Around 2011, food blogs were everywhere, and I remember reading food blogs such as Cannelle et Vanille and Orangette, and thinking, “Oh, I really want to do that.” So I wrote a really bad food blog, and then I somehow secured a job writing a column for a Korean food magazine, and it felt like a practice to find out what I want to write about. When my daughter was born in 2015, I realized that I’d lived in London long enough that I had distanced myself from Korean culture. So I started to explore where my Koreanness comes from, and the most tangible thing was food and the dishes that I grew up with. And in 2019, the Observer Food Monthly ran a competition for readers’ recipes, and I entered with a story about my mother’s kimchi jjigae, and to my surprise, I won. That moment crystallized what I wanted to do, and that became my first book, Rice Table, all about my mother’s and maternal grandmother’s tables and how what we feed ourselves builds the bigger picture of who we are.

Some people may be surprised to see ingredients such as cheese and hot dogs (or both, in the case of your recipe for corn dogs) in this book. How did these ingredients enter the pantheon of Korean cooking?

Going back to the era of the Three Kingdoms of Korea [18 BCE–660 CE], we were influenced by all these neighboring countries, and some of the similarities between Chinese and Korean cuisines stems from that period of trade. Then we had the Japanese occupation [1910–1945], and that brought the influence of Japan along with migrant workers from Japan and China. There are a lot of crossovers that we can’t, even as Koreans, quite pinpoint. Did a dish start with us, or did it come from Japan and was then reimagined in Korea as it is now? Then the Korean War brought American and European soldiers, and many Koreans relied on the generosity of American troops passing on rations that they didn’t want; one community’s waste became another’s treasure, and it sustained the nation in so many ways. Ingredients such as Spam or canned beans or American cheese were adapted to suit Korean palates. When you look at the very recent history of Korean food, you have to remember that free travel really only started in the early 1980s, and we welcomed an influx of tourists during the [1988 Seoul] Olympics, so it was a fundamental time of growth in all areas, but particularly in food. Now, Koreans aren’t just going to the U.S.; they’re going to Europe to study and to learn about food, and they bring a lot back with them. So what once seemed like a quite limited option—Korean people wanting to preserve Korean food—now looks different. 

How would you explain the many gradations of flavor and texture in Korean cuisine?

We have this idea of bapsang, a table that includes a number of dishes—banchan, a bowl of rice, and either soup or stew—something with a warm broth. The rest of the meal supports the rice; there is a saying that every Korean parent knows: “rice is life.” That idea comes from the generations who never had enough food. But we want to enjoy a variety of things, and we’re also very conscious of food as a form of medicine. There are also a lot of different colors, textures, and temperatures to satisfy and balance. I think the balance is the most important thing—the harmonious table. Korean people are really good with being conscious and conscientious toward nature because we had to learn to preserve food, and preserving brings a different texture. So when anyone asks me to pinpoint “What is Korean food?” I say, “harmony.” 

Pocha food is almost always enjoyed with a drink of soju, either by itself or in a cocktail such as a Soju Sour. Why is that so vital?

So in the 1960s to ’70s, there was a massive shift in Korea toward wanting to rebuild the country. Seoul became this place where everything was possible; people came with their dreams, and pocha offered a place of rest to these workers coming from all walks of life after a hard day’s work—and there was always soju. So both were booming at the same time, and they have this really lovely symbiotic relationship. It’s a bit like the pub culture in the UK—after work you have a drink with your colleagues or friends and you offload the weights of life. We work hard, so we play hard; we drink soju and drown our sorrows so we can face the world again tomorrow with rejuvenated energy and vitality. And then that comes with the culture of hangover cure; you need to sober up and start again, and there’s no time to waste. 

The book’s food and travel photographs are so vibrant. How did you determine the look and feel of the book?

I was very lucky—my husband is a food photographer, so he’s always worked in the industry. One hot summer night, we were in Busan at a pocha, and we were kind of tipsy, and we had this epiphany of the vibe we wanted in the book and doodled the cover together. It had to have neon lights and darkness and coziness and simplicity, but alongside the calm and serenity and mundanity of what Seoul can feel like if you’re not a tourist. If you live on these untrodden paths, you can capture a sense of workers breaking for lunch, people gathering in a park on a hot summer’s day, with tents and cans of beer, to watch the world go by. So we lived this idea of pocha at home in London, and when we went back to Korea to take photos, especially the location photos, I’d already made a list of 250 random things that I wanted to capture, and for about two weeks we walked everywhere to cover all the basics. I am beyond pleased with the photography in the book because it is exactly what I wanted—for people to feel like they’re walking with me.

Did you have any favorite recipes or elements in the book to develop?

Oh God, there are so many! I’m not precious about family recipes because I didn’t have family recipes as such. But the Northern-style dumpling, I remember how we made it at home, and my father was quite strong about keeping up with the tradition because he grew up eating those dishes. It’s also the first dish that my daughter asked me to cook with her, and she took such pride in making and shaping the dumplings. This is the power of food, that one recipe allowing her to engage with the culture and to embrace my family, who she doesn’t see very often. I took a video of when we made that dish for the first time together, and I sent it to my father. He cried and felt that sense of pride.

Recipes

Soju Sour

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Cheesy Korean Corn Dogs

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Tteokbokki with Chili Crisp and Honey

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The post “Pocha” Takes You on a Street Food Crawl Through Seoul appeared first on Saveur.

This interview is brought to you by the SAVEUR Cookbook Club, our passionate community of food-loving readers from around the globe celebrating our favorite authors and recipes. Join us as we cook through a new book every month, and share your food pics and vids on social media with the hashtags #SAVEURCookbookClub and #EatTheWorld.

When describing the food offered at their Los Angeles restaurants Kismet and Kismet Rotisserie, chefs Sara Kramer and Sarah Hymanson refuse to stay in one lane. Some patterns do emerge: Do many dishes showcase the flavors and ingredients of the Middle East and Mediterranean? Yes. Do they source most of their vegetarian dishes in the “farm-to-table” tradition? For sure. Do they make a killer roast chicken? Yes again.

Yet no single label can fully capture Kramer and Hymanson’s gastronomic flair, either at their restaurants or in the dishes in their debut cookbook, Kismet: Bright, Fresh, and Vegetable-Loving Recipes. After building their respective careers in some of the best restaurants of New York—Marlow and Sons, Blue Hill at Stone Barns, and Glasserie, to name a few—the duo decamped to the West Coast and established their dream of a neighborhood spot. Kismet still blends their many culinary influences, celebrates California’s diverse and wide-ranging produce, and engages their local community in the way only great cooking can. In speaking with Kramer and Hymanson from their homes in California, I learned how they brought their playful, generous ethos to the pages of Kismet, and how they developed more than 100 recipes that defy easy categorization, while still inviting everybody to the table.

Jessica Carbone: You say that this isn’t a “restaurant book,” but one that you actually want people to cook from. Why?

Sara Kramer: It was important to us that this book could be cooked from—why else make a cookbook? There are books that are beautiful art objects, but that’s not quite our identity, and it made a lot more sense for us to make it super approachable. We also wanted to be clear about who we were. People have tried to pigeonhole us as a Middle Eastern or Mediterranean-inspired restaurant, but we wanted to show the breadth of what we could do. So that’s where my brain initially went: “How do we simplify the recipes without losing what makes our food ours?” 

Sarah Hymanson: We had to take stock of our own ideas of what a good cookbook is, what makes something user-friendly, what makes it intimidating. We wanted to make sure that people who knew and loved us in L.A. could find what they wanted in the book. But for people who have no idea who we are, we want them to be able to pick it up, flip through it, and be intrigued. 

SK: The whole project, from recipes to visuals, gave us an opportunity to look at the last 10+ years of working together; there’s a lot to celebrate.

SH: As restaurant chefs, our work disappears, and it’s amazing to have an object that will live on.

What did California food culture mean to you before moving to Los Angeles?

SH: I had very little experience of California before moving here. I went to San Francisco for spring break, and at the time I was a strict vegetarian, so I went to all these vegetarian restaurants, which was much easier to do there than in Chicago, where I grew up. So for me, I thought of Northern California as rooted in Alice Waters and hippie food. Southern California cuisine wasn’t in my lexicon when we moved to Los Angeles, but when we went to the farmers market, my mind was pretty blown. It was in the early spring, which is bleak in New York—just holding on until you compete with everyone else to get the first asparagus. But you come to California and there’s tons of asparagus and artichokes and lettuces…

SK: And kiwis.

SH: Yeah! We made a goat cheese and kiwi salad for dinner, and I just said, “What is this heaven?”

SK: Our number one food influence is rooted in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and the climate here makes a lot of sense in relation to those influences. But there’s also a freedom in the cuisine here, and a lot of fusion that happens because of the availability of produce, and because of how diverse a place it is.

SH: Even going to the farmers market, there are so many growers from different backgrounds. There’s a huge Hmong farming population, and lots of Asian vegetables that make their way into cuisines that are not Asian, and many Latino growers as well. There’s Middle Eastern farmers growing melons and Armenians growing cucumbers, not to mention all the dates and pomegranates and olives.

One of your guiding principles is “untraditional food that understands tradition.” How do you bring that into practice?

SK: Our version of a Persian tahdig is a good example: We note where its inspiration came from, but we also acknowledge that we’re not trying to make that exact dish. We’re making a dish in a way that honors its roots, but makes sense in the context of our restaurant, our collaboration, and where we are in the world. 

SH: When we’re working on a traditional dish, we’ll often talk about what it is that we like about it, then we think about how we can make it our own. We’re grateful to have the opportunity to learn from so many different cuisines, and we want to make sure that we’re always doing justice to a dish, even if we’re not doing it exactly how it’s supposed to be.

You use ingredients that do a lot of work, like grape leaf powder on a salad, or the pepperoncini in your grilled corn. Do you have other “secret weapon” ingredients?

SH: Fish sauce is amazing at delivering that umami.

SK: Yeah, you’re really good at getting umami from lots of different places, like the fermented tofu in the schnitzel sauce; it’s such a smart ingredient. It’s a funny thing to call raw garlic a “secret weapon,” but a lot of people shy away from it, especially in fine dining, where garlic is often blanched to oblivion, and then turned into a very gentle puree. Our flavors are very punchy and bold, and raw garlic is an essential ingredient in a lot of our food.

SH: When we use things like flower waters, or raw garlic, or even fish sauce, we don’t necessarily want people to be able to pick out what it is—what makes it exciting or extra peppery or a little bit floral.

SK: But you’ll be wondering, “Why does this taste good?”

SH: “Why does it have a fresh spice to it? That’s not chile.” Or “Why does this taste more like honey than normal honey?” Because it has a tiny bit of orange blossom water in it.

Do you think of yourselves as a “farm-to-table” restaurant?

SH: At a certain point, we felt that being in Los Angeles, when we have such access to local produce, “farm to table” was a given, but not necessarily a thing that we would splatter all over our menu.

SK: Sourcing locally is so much better, but it does take a lot of effort—and effort is a resource as well. When we talk about what Kismet is, we do say that it’s produce-driven, seasonal, and local. But those are just a few of the things that it is. It is a joy to work at restaurants that have only the most beautiful produce, but sometimes that can be more of an ideal than a reality.

You talk about the challenges of ethical eating, both with produce and with meat. Sometimes that shows up in dishes where meat takes a back seat, like in the Chicken and Tomato Salad, or in sourcing as locally and seasonally as possible. How do you navigate this for the book’s readers?

SH: It’s one thing to say that everyone should be eating locally, because ideally they should. But we also want people to eat whatever they can afford, whatever makes them feel nourished from a cultural and a health perspective. People live in all different realities, and it’s important to take that into account.

SK: We try to offer substitutions and thoughts on how to source something if you don’t have access. But we also want to take the guilt out of it, to encourage people to do their best and to have minimal shame. We’re not high and mighty about only needing to eat perfect Frog Hollow apricots…

SH: If you can afford to do that, you know, congratulations…

SK: …Right, love you for that. But if you can’t, there are plenty of other options. With our book, we want to encourage the celebration of food in whatever form we can.

Recipes

Whipped Tahini Dip with Honeyed Kumquats

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Chicken and Tomato Salad with Spicy Vinaigrette

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Grilled Corn with Pepperoncini Butter

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The post This New Cookbook Proves California Cuisine Is Impossible to Pin Down appeared first on Saveur.

This interview is brought to you by the SAVEUR Cookbook Club, our passionate community of food-loving readers from around the globe celebrating our favorite authors and recipes. Join us as we cook through a new book every month, and share your food pics and vids on social media with the hashtags #SAVEURCookbookClub and #EatTheWorld.

Through her work in radio, print, and video journalism, Von Diaz uncovers stories that span great swaths of cultural and culinary history. In her first book, Coconuts and Collards, which honored her roots in Puerto Rico and the American South, she found connections through cuisine and compelling personal narrative. In her latest book, Islas: A Celebration of Tropical Cooking, she widens her lens to explore the fundamentals of island cooking. Organized by the techniques that ensure survival and preserve tradition across six island nations across the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans, Islas offers lessons on what it means to cook on the brink of climate collapse, and how to maintain and celebrate community in every meal.

During our conversation from her home in Durham, North Carolina, I learned about how Diaz sees her work in food as part of a broader life in service, how she uses methodologies from across her career to find recipes and stories, and the responsibility she feels to honor the history and culture of every single dish.

Jessica Carbone: How did you structure your research process, especially when you couldn’t be on location?

Von Diaz: In my original proposal, I wanted to go everywhere. But because of the pandemic, I shifted to research half of the places in person—Curaçao, Puerto Rico, and the Seychelles—and half remotely. But I found amazing people to collaborate with who were of the places in the book. During my remote research on Guam, I found Cami Egurrola, who became our travel photographer, in dialogue with Lauren Vied Allen, one of the best food photographers working today. Then I had two recipe developers who acted as palate experts: Brigid Washington on the Caribbean and Jenn de la Vega on Southeast Asia, and many more. I knew if I had a team of talented people that I could trust, it was going to turn out well. The research itself was hugely influenced by my work in radio and as an oral historian, a methodology that is slow by design. The very first phone call I made for Islas was to Juanita Blaz in Guam, and we ended up talking for almost two hours about her community garden. The importance that she placed on ancestry and tradition was exactly what I was looking for, stories from folks who are keeping the cuisine alive. Calls like that are how I found people like Josefine Martina in Curaçao, who runs her business off Facebook, and Perline Ernestine in Madagascar, paving the way for women of her tribe in politics. They’re such remarkable people.

You capture so many global traditions in this book. How did you decide what recipes to include?

Ultimately I filled the book with things I wanted to eat. But even the dishes I didn’t include challenged me to think about how to describe things, not so easy when you’re working with ancestral recipes. The original makers of a dish from Madagascar might have spoken a dialect that was later translated into French and then into English, and then eventually spoken aloud to me. So how do I then describe that to readers? Other dishes are all about place. To make laplap, the national dish of Vanuatu, you need hot volcanic rocks, banana leaves, and coconuts, and it’s traditionally eaten sitting on the ground with your hands. You can’t make that dish without seeing its connection to the island’s Indigenous ancestry; the community literally gathers on the ground. Each dish presented its own challenges and history.

You note that “rarely does the reality of the island match the postcard.” Can food be an entry point to that reality?

When I talk about Islas, most people start by telling me where they’ve been, which reinforces the difference between the reality and the postcard. Tourism is an incredibly meaningful industry for the tropics, but it’s a double-edged sword, because when tourists arrive, they don’t act the way they do at home. But without tourism, these places would really struggle. I personally have a tremendous wanderlust, and I know people will continue going to islands. So if people start talking about vacations, I usually ask them: “What did you eat there? What did you see? What do you remember?” And I’ve found that once you start talking about what people have eaten, you can make inroads on other topics.

Were there any standout dishes or ingredients that you found especially joyful?

First, acids, vinegars, citruses. After this book, I have 10 different vinegars in my house: palm, coconut, you name it. Even just a splash of an acid, or a squeeze of lemon or clementine, will bring your food into balance, and take it in a cool new direction. Second is chiles: I played with a lot of hot peppers for this book, and I found them delightful. In terms of dishes I loved, the Filipino barbecue skewers are just amazing. Made with pork belly marinated in pineapple, chiles, and 7Up, it reminds me of so many Puerto Rican meat skewers, with spicy elements and a beautiful crispy finish.

How do islanders deal with sourcing, especially of ingredients that are not locally grown?

On every island on this planet, the majority of people’s nourishment comes from imported shelf-stable foods. But it underscores that islanders are creative and resilient, and tremendous survivors. The storms are coming—it’s not if, but when—and preparing what you have and finding a way to make it delicious is critical to survival. Marinating proteins with aromatics, or pickling to preserve a harvest, or grilling and smoking over open fire… these techniques enable all of us, not just islanders, to survive. For islanders, too, keeping ancestors alive through their food also ensures that the wisdom and the lessons aren’t lost along the way.

You say that for islanders, grilling and cooking with open fire and smoke requires “respect.” What does that mean?

When you start thinking like a person with limited resources, every stick and log becomes precious. It’s not like when you light your gas or charcoal grill; when you’re working with open fire, if you let it burn too quickly, you’ll waste it. The experience of cooking this way is so vibrant—just as you turn your stove up and down to change the heat, you can do the same thing with fire or coals, and play with smoke as a flavor element. The whole process connects me to my most human self: I have food to prepare, these are my tools, these are my resources. I came away from this project with a profound respect for what it takes to make food delicious when you don’t have much to work with.

In dishes like giambo from Curaçao and fried yams from the Maldives, did you see any parallels to your childhood in the American South?

I’m only starting to fully appreciate the power of migration, how ingredients and techniques, both for cooking and cultivation, travel the world, in people’s hands. Living in the South, I felt like I understood the region’s relationship to West Africa and the Caribbean, but I didn’t know how many stories there were like this across the globe. Rice and coconuts have crossed the globe because they grow in tropical environments and travel well. But the culture travels too: you see West African akra (black-eyed pea fritters) all over Brazil. Thyme is a key ingredient in Jamaican jerk, because anywhere the British colonized, you’ll find thyme. It’s exciting to discover all the ways you can see the same idea for a dish in multiple places, and it suggests that no matter where we live, what sustains and nourishes us is at the core of what we eat.  

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Recipes

Mofongo with Shrimp and Lemongrass

Get the recipe >

Ensaladang Talong (Grilled Eggplant Salad)

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The post What Makes Island Cooking So Unique? Author Von Diaz Explains appeared first on Saveur.

This interview is brought to you by the SAVEUR Cookbook Club, our passionate community of food-loving readers from around the globe celebrating our favorite authors and recipes. Join us as we cook through a new book every month, and share your food pics and vids on social media with the hashtags #SAVEURCookbookClub and #EatTheWorld.

Writing the first major cookbook on the cuisine of your home country is no small undertaking. Karla Tatiana Vasquez knew this from the very start of her journey towards what would become The SalviSoul Cookbook: Salvadoran Recipes and the Women Who Preserve Them. Yet Vasquez, a first-generation Salvadoran American, saw her job as sharing the food knowledge of Salvi women with the world. When she began her project to collect and share Salvi cuisine in 2015, Vasquez offered a series of workshops, cooking classes, and community engagement initiatives from her home base in Los Angeles, rooting her work in the vibrant local Salvadoran community around her. The project took on new life when she put out a call to the broader Salvadoran diasporic community, receiving messages from Salvi women in Paris, in Abu Dhabi, in Michigan, in Georgia asking, “How far are you traveling?” Her response was that if she could drive there, she would find a way to get there.

“The whole premise of this book,” Vasquez told me, “is that Salvi women, the moms and abuelas, are the experts, but that they are not included in the conversation.” Vasquez’s book is the antidote, featuring 33 women and the recipes they shared, telling their stories in portrait-like essays that look far beyond the kitchen. A blend of ethnography, food writing, and community-based journalism, The SalviSoul Cookbook is not just the first major cookbook on Salvadoran cuisine; it is an invitation to the next hundred cookbooks on El Salvador, and to a much broader appreciation of the passion, craft, and heart of Salvi women everywhere.

Jessica Carbone: In your introduction, you mention this word “anhelo,” the yearning or longing to know something. The project of SalviSoul started with your own quest for knowledge. What has anhelo meant to you in your culinary journey?

Karla Tatiana Vasquez: I really believe that where you sit is where you stand. For a long time, I was sitting at the table, listening to my family’s stories of what life was like in El Salvador. I’d get excited to learn more, and I’d go to the library to visit the encyclopedia and turn to the “S” section to see if there was anything about El Salvador, and then it would send me to the “E” section, and then there would just be a redirect to “Latin America.” The books themselves gave me very little, and I didn’t have a lot of access other than the stories my parents gave me. But the food that they made for me, and the stories that they gave me, depicted a place so vibrant, so real, so colorful, so loud, that I felt like I could hear the traffic. And so longing for more knowledge really became a compass.

But what was I longing for? When my parents would talk about El Salvador, the first thing they would mention would be the food. They’d say, “Quiero annona,” this seasonal tropical fruit with a tangy, almost vanilla-like flavor that was bright pink on the inside. So I go to the grocery store, and see what we had: bananas, apples, grapes, nothing like this annona, the fruit my mom says tastes better than ice cream. Then as I grew older, it wasn’t just like the foods that I wanted to understand, but also their purpose. I wanted to know what foods we should eat for Easter or Christmas. Then I’d hear about some obscure dish and someone would tell me, “Oh, we’re making this sopa for somebody who just had a baby.” So through the kitchen I learned about culture, and how a culture functions is how a community is taken care of.

As you were building out this project, from blog to book, how did you draw a line between what was important for you to know, versus what you needed to document for other people?

I needed to trust that my questions would lead me to the next thing I would learn. What really decided a lot of things, though, were when I sent a call-out to the broader Salvi community. I had the experiences of my family, but Latinos are not a monolith, and Salvis are definitely not a monolith, and I don’t know what I don’t know. So I posted online, saying, “Hey, if you love Salvadoran cooking, and you know a Salvi woman who loves cooking, please have them get in touch with me.” The interviews and cooking sessions that came from that call were the missing piece that I needed, and revealed the next part of the journey.

For instance, one woman, Irene, saw the call-out and wrote to me, saying, “You have to contact my friend Carolina. She’ll never tell you she’s a great cook, but she has great parties, and I love her food.” So I called Carolina, who’s a librarian, and she invited me to her home, to share her recipes for ceviche de pescado and for conchas rellenas, which I’d never heard of, and I’m so grateful we connected because her recipes tell us something about seafood. Oftentimes we think of Mesoamerican cultures as focused on corn or tamales or pupusas, and this was very different. From her I learned about the workers who harvest the mangroves, and their diets are mostly seafood diets, with yuca rather than corn. So there was a lot of kismet in this project, and I wanted it to be a group process to curate the recipes.

There were a few times where it wasn’t so easy—everyone wanted to do the Christmas turkey, because they all said that theirs was the best. That was honestly one of the scariest things in my life, saying no to many Salvadoran moms; I don’t wish that anxiety for anyone. And then after that, because we had the OG headliners of the cuisine taken care of, other dishes that they knew how to make that were important to them came to the surface. We all said, “Pupusas get a lot of airtime, so what other things can we bring up?” It was a very collaborative process.  

How did you give voice to these women’s knowledge in your book?

One of the stories in the book is about a woman named Maricela, which I very intentionally titled, “La Antropóloga,” because she is an anthropologist. Some don’t see her that way because she works as a street vendor in a part of Los Angeles known for Salvadoran culture. But she is an anthropologist, because her menu is a case study on what flavors sell the most, and that tells her how many different kinds of Salvadorans are in the city. For example, it’s easy for her to tell me that there are more Salvadorans from Oriente, the eastern side of El Salvador, here than there are from Occidente, the western part, because she’d had weeks of selling more of a certain kind of tamale or atole, and seeing what people preferred.

We have this language for folks that are on the margins as being voiceless, but what I’ve learned as a food activist and through meeting these Salvi women, is that they have the loudest voices ever. Going to the store with my mom and my tía, you cannot deny that they have a presence. But they’ve been so easily ignored, and their knowledge isn’t taken seriously. The authority I have in my work, I didn’t get it from an institution; I got it from the women who have brought me along with them in their knowledge. It may not be grounded in a degree or anything like that, but it is true knowledge, it is true science. And that’s what I am trying to do, to give a voice to women’s labor that shows that they are the experts in the kitchen. They are historians and oral storytellers, and they’re here doing work that causes them to rise to the occasion.

You talk about asking your mother for recipes, and how she found your questions somewhat frustrating, like you were looking for an easy answer. When you were offered a chance to turn your blog into a book, what did you see as the limitations of the cookbook?

I was talking to a friend about how overwhelmed I felt by the work of this book, and they said, “Well, Karla, usually in our lifetime we only try to understand our own trauma, not our mother’s, not our grandmother’s, and you went and asked them, plus more than 20 other women. So have a little grace.” This is the only cookbook that’s been traditionally published on Salvi cooking, and while that’s amazing, that also means that there is such a big need for different kinds of things. People want the recipes, and they want the food history, and they have their own preferred styles of learning. So in some ways I didn’t feel like sharing a written recipe was an easy way out. Because there’s still a lot of work to do.

I also know how important it is to be the first, or one of the first, to get something written down. When I was in cooking school, one of the students asked the teacher, “Why do we call it an omelet?” The student was Middle Eastern, the teacher was Korean American, and here I was as a Salvadoreña, and we’re all realizing that it’s so seared into what we know as food culture that we hadn’t thought twice about it. So the instructor thought for a second, then said, “It must be because the French were the first to document it.” And so that set me off.

How did you work with your publisher to organize this book?

Before I got my book deal, there was a lot of pushback on how I was presenting this work, because I was including a lot of points of view. But what’s exciting for me is that there is always more to learn, and I’ve always felt more comfortable as a student; I didn’t want it to be just my voice. I was also told by several people, “Oh, there’s nothing much on El Salvador, nothing much from Salvis or Latinos or even non-Latinos.” Then I started to worry, “What if they’re right? What if I run out of things to say?” But when I turned in the manuscript 14,000 words over my limit, I realized that we’re only beginning to scratch the surface on what Salvadoran cuisine is.

I’ve gained all this strength from all the women I met, who are always clear on what they’re here to do, so I’m taking a page out of their rulebook and showing up for myself. I wrote the recipe titles as they were told to me, and didn’t bother translating because it created too much inconsistency, and it never became an issue. It would be silly to translate pupusas, but then do we translate nuegados de yuca, which are a kind of yuca fritter, but also not really a fritter? Look, we already know so many foods by their non-English names, like beef bourguignon or gnocchi. Can you imagine calling gnocchi a potato dumpling? This is my default—I call them rellenos de papa, so that’s what they are. And by calling them by name, the reader is invited to come into this universe with me, and we’ll teach you what it is. I promise, it’ll all taste great.

There are some ingredients that are essential to Salvadoran cooking, like chicken bouillon, that are shamed in some gourmet kitchens. When you were collecting the recipes from the Salvi women you met, how did you decide what to adjust and what to keep?

I left a lot of things as the women explained them to me. We tend to think of the kitchen, as we see it in entertainment at least, as a kind of romantic place, a fantasy space for the cook to become a wonderful, cultured person. But when you are an immigrant woman and you have three hungry kids, it’s a space of efficiency and industry. I learned a lot about the cost that you pay as someone responsible for feeding people, the cost of ingredients and time and the things you do after you’ve done the cooking. So when I was told that a recipe had those costs accounted for, it didn’t feel right to add more time or to fancy it up. So if the cook used chicken bouillon, that’s what I used. That’s the flavor she designed for her family, and she’s proud to mention that. There’s a recipe in the book for pollo con papas, chicken and potatoes, that one of the women, Wendy, gave me, and I love that she used canned tomatoes. Wendy is a single mom with three businesses and is an ultra-marathoner, and these are the shortcuts she has. But Wendy is also the same cook who uses two kinds of oil to make her plátanos fritos con frijoles licuados, and will only fry her plantains in coconut oil. So I love learning the decision-making process of others, the details of what we fuss about and what we don’t.

Were there any recipes or ingredients that you especially loved collecting or testing?

There are two that come to mind in this moment. One of them is flor de izote con huevos, which is made with the national flower of El Salvador. I’ve always been obsessed with how many flowers are in Salvadoran cuisine; there are three flowers on the book cover, though you can’t tell that they’re flowers, but I can tell. A lot of Salvis might say, “Oh, this is just farmer’s food,” but it just makes me so happy, and anytime you can eat flowers, I think it’s great. The other one I’ll mention is the rooster dish, the gallo en chicha, which reminds me a little bit of coq au vin.

There are some recipes, like the fresco de ensalada salvadoreña, where so many of the ingredients are seasonal. How do you feel about recipe improvisation?

I’m fine with it, because home cooks may be in the same position as many in the diaspora. We come to this country hungry to find good substitutions, and when we’re fortunate to find the real thing, it’s a gift. The Salvadoran quesadilla, a kind of pan dulce, is a good example of the diaspora. I’ve worked on my version of a quesadilla for many years, while asking folks why the quesadilla from the store or bakery tasted different from what I got from neighbors or abroad. The reason is because in El Salvador the quesadilla is made with local cheese. Here across Los Angeles, a lot of what bakeries use is Italian cheese like parmesan, because it’s more affordable when bought wholesale. Quesadilla is a working-class food, and if a bakery needs pounds and pounds of an imported ingredient, they may not be able to keep it a working-class food. So when people ask me, “Where can I get the most authentic Salvadoran quesadilla?” my answer is that the most authentic one is the one you make at home. When I was doing online cooking classes, there was a student calling in from France, and she asked if she could use an aged cheese from the farmers market in Paris. And I said “Yes, that’s ok, because that is you as a Salvadoran, doing what you need to do to make it happen.”

You talk about the many different sopas, or soups, as being events in Salvi households. Why are they events?

I think honestly they have to be events because they have proteins. A lot of the chapters in Salvadoran history include those where people have suffered hunger, where having tortillas at home was a comfort because corn was cheap. So there have been a lot of episodes of hunger, poverty, war, political strife. Now we may see it as just the soup, but it’s a whole pot of expenses, resources, vegetables that could go bad if you don’t use them up. These are all things that tell us something about position and privilege, and how a family navigates their social conditions. So I think that we see soups as an event because of our history with food, which tells us, “Hey, you got fresh corn, some yuca, carrots, all in one bowl of soup? Life must be good for you.” So what do you do with those blessings? You call up your friends and family, and you share it, because there’s an abundance. We don’t make that jump so quickly here in 2024, especially in the United States; these are things that we always have, so we don’t see why they would be an event. We’ve forgotten what it’s like to have an absence of food, but I can’t forget, because I know the cost that my great-grandma paid to get my family to the next day.

You talk a lot about the privilege you have as a food writer, and your ability to move freely between countries and spaces. How has your journey to understand your Salvi identity while becoming an American citizen shaped your relationship to food writing?

A lot of the places where I find myself, I’m maybe the only Latina or Salvadoreña, and I always feel othered, like I’m not supposed to be here. But I’ve realized that so many of the institutions operate this way because they’re focused on making a profit. This publishing experience was one of the most radical forms of care that I ever received, of the vision I had of something so personal and so visceral for me. But in some ways this book journey has been very bittersweet, because I had such a hard time pitching Salvadoran stories to newspapers. I’d gotten my degree in journalism, I’d been to cooking school, and I thought “I should be able to pitch a story and have people say yes.” But when I’ve pitched stories, it’s been so hard to see people not grasp the value of this, to hear people say, “Oh, we don’t think there’s a story here.” When you hear editors say no to you, you end up believing that if there isn’t any interest in the story, that the story isn’t something. And it pains me to see the stories that are published, exploitative stories that showcase the suffering of Black and brown communities, sticking to that line, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Because we’re here to sell.

I’ve had to be an adult about it, and fight for how I want these stories to be told, even while operating in that system. And even though I have privilege as a resident citizen, I am also a Salvadoran immigrant. It means understanding the nuances of working within that, but it also means that there are people who will be allies, and who will want to do the work, so that it honors and carves out space for stories to be told. This book is at a ton of intersections, because I am at a ton of intersections. And I think that if you experience some kind of tension surviving in any industry, it’s because you’re doing something great.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Recipes

Sopa de Gallina

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Fresco de Ensalada

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Pastelitos de Hongos

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The post This Salvadoran Cookbook Is Making History appeared first on Saveur.

This interview is brought to you by the SAVEUR Cookbook Club, our passionate community of food-loving readers from around the globe celebrating our favorite authors and recipes. Join us as we cook through a new book every month, and share your food pics and vids on social media with the hashtags #SAVEURCookbookClub and #EatTheWorld.

As anyone eagerly anticipating season 3 of HBO’s “The White Lotus” knows, Southern Thailand is home to some of the most beautiful white-sand and blue-water beaches, lush rainforests, and breathtaking coral reefs in the world. Its history is just as much a draw for visitors, an opportunity to learn about the collision of several different ethnic and religious groups that shaped the region’s distinct architecture, culture, and cuisine. Yet the foods most tourists encounter in Southern Thailand rarely display the breadth and complexity of the region. To truly understand the beauty and diversity of Southern Thailand, one needs the guidance of a true documentarian. And you couldn’t ask for a better guide than Austin Bush.

After receiving his degree in linguistics from the University of Oregon, Bush moved to Thailand and began a 20-year love affair with the country, researching, photographing, and writing about its multifaceted history, communities, and food for numerous publications. In his latest book, The Food of Southern Thailand, his photographs capture the beauty of Southern Thailand, and his prose offers up a tribute to the brilliance of Southern Thai home cooks, proprietors, and restaurateurs. As Bush says in his introduction, “The recipes that stem from this process are not mine; rather, they are my effort to capture and share what the people of Southern Thailand cook and eat.” Yet via Bush’s explanations, the stories behind the dishes come fully to life via their locales: the sweet factories of Phuket, the indulgent breakfast menus of Trang, the urban eateries of Hat Yai, Nakhon Si Thammarat, and beyond all get their time in the spotlight, as do the skilled farmers and fishermen that secure the signature ingredients of the region.

When I spoke with Bush from his current home in Lisbon, Portugal, it was clear that though his research in Thailand has momentarily concluded, he remains passionate about the chance to tell more stories about the people and dishes he encountered in his travels. Even for those who might only read his book as a travelog, he hopes that it might serve as an invitation to push past the beaches and what he calls the “well-worn ruts of the tourist trail,” and towards a full appreciation of the vibrancy of Southern Thai cuisine and culture.

When you released your first book, The Food of Northern Thailand, in 2018, you were just ahead of the popular interest in regional Thai dishes. What motivated you to turn your attention to the food of Southern Thailand?

As I started the project of the first book, I was already seeing Andy Ricker and his former Pok Pok restaurants helping to make Americans aware of Northern Thai food, and of the regionality of Thai food in general, which was great. And after I did the book on Northern Thailand, I saw that more places were exploring that regionality, both in Thailand and even a bit in the United States, especially Southern Thai. Certainly there is Jitlada in Los Angeles, and in Brooklyn there’s Ugly Baby. In Bangkok, there’s even a restaurant called Sorn that does some Southern Thai food and is one of the hardest places to get into. So it just seemed like it was on the radar. But I knew very little about it—whenever I have free time, I tend to go up north. I’m not really a beach guy, and I’d only gone to a few of the islands. So there was a bit of a blank space in my knowledge of Thai food, and I was compelled to learn more about it.

Talk a bit about your research process as you move from region to region in Thailand.

I wouldn’t really call myself a journalist; I’ve never worked in a newsroom or anything like that. But I use a lot of the same techniques as my journalist friends, and being accurate and asking questions and researching facts is really important to me. I always start by doing research, which sometimes can be as simple as looking stuff up online. There’s a lot of resources, and Thai people are pretty online, especially on Facebook, so that’s where I learn about little regional restaurants and niche recipes, and I use that to get a broad framework of what I’m doing. Then when I travel, I seek out local sources. For example, I might go to a tiny town in Southern Thailand with the idea of one dish, then I’ll start talking to people, and I’ll learn about another dish or ingredient or method of cooking. Sometimes the people I connect with are educators: people who teach at universities or people involved with the cultural side of things, promoting the culture of their community or their province. On a couple occasions I met with people who taught culinary science at local colleges and high schools, and they’re sort of vanguards and protectors of local recipes alongside the local government. Talking to people and asking questions, and always being curious, leads to more things opening up.

If I connect with someone, if someone is willing to show me how to make a dish, I do some research ahead of time. There is a pretty solid selection of cookbooks in Thailand; people do tend to record recipes, and in particular provinces or communities will self-publish cookbooks. These are my favorite souvenirs to buy anywhere in the world—weird, obscure, independently published cookbooks. I have a bunch of regional cookbooks, I go to libraries—I do my homework. I ask a lot of questions, and I’m meticulous about taking notes, video, photographs. And I always hope that the photographs will go into the book, which is another journalistic aspect of it. For many cookbooks, even if people do research in one place, the food photographs are often taken in a studio in London or Los Angeles or New York. But every photo you see in this book was taken in situ, of the actual dishes and places and people; they’re more like food photojournalism. The most manipulation I’ll do is maybe turn a plate or clean up a smear of something, but I wouldn’t even call it food styling. It was a little bit harder in Northern Thailand, where dishes are kind of brown and grilled, and don’t really pop that much, but in Southern Thailand, the dishes are so vibrant and colorful; they just pop.

What do you think the key differences are between the tourist experience of food in Southern Thailand and the person who encounters this region through your book?

The vast majority of foreign tourists who go to Thailand, maybe 75% or more, go to an island or to a beach at some point. The places that they stay tend to be a bit isolated, and they end up eating at the backpacker café or at the resort. Rarely do they get out and eat at an “authentic” local place. It’s a sort of paradox: so many foreigners have been to the south, but I think very few of them have actually eaten food from the south. For example, people who go to a seafood restaurant in the south—both tourists and Thai people—may find that what they’re eating is more Chinese-influenced than anything, where the menu is sort of the same on the island Ko Samui as it would be in Bangkok. Especially in the south, where you have so many options that pull you in different directions, you need a bit of handholding and direction to the local dishes.

You give an exhaustive overview about the history of Southern Thailand, the different kingdoms and moments of conflict emerging over sea trade. What role does that history play in appreciating the cuisine?

To talk about any cuisine, you need to talk about its historical influences and background, even sometimes going back 1,000 years. But in the case of Southern Thailand, I just thought that those foreign influences are so apparent. In my previous book on Northern Thailand, I wrote about how the Thai People likely came from Southern China thousands of years ago, and so they were in Northern Thailand before they moved south. As a result, Northern Thai food is more like the original Thai food, meaning they use more indigenous ingredients and the cooking methods are really simple: soups, grilling, and even raw dishes. You go south, and things become more sophisticated, and you have all these influences. Indian traders brought things 1,000 years ago; ethnic Malay people were there and introduced a ton of things. Then you have influences from the Muslim world, from places like Saudi Arabia or Persia. Most recently, Chinese people came, and they had a huge influence by introducing the wok and ingredients like pork and duck and salted eggs. So you have to touch on those influences.

You also talk about this idea of the borders as being less rigid and much more ephemeral than they would be in other countries. How do you see these culinary exchanges happening across borders and along the coasts as a porous exchange?

It’s really apparent in Southern Thailand, and there are two examples of that that come to mind. One is the deep south, which borders Malaysia. There are provinces that are today part of Thailand that were previously part of British Malaysia, and there’s a conflict that results from that—a lot of people today don’t want to be part of Thailand. In many ways these people live Malay lives in Thailand: they’re Muslim; they speak Yawi, a dialect of Malay; they have a different cuisine that is essentially Malay food. But at one point, they were all a colony of England, and then they became part of Thailand only in the 1930s or something like that.

And then the other one is on the Andaman Coast, which is the West coast. A long time ago there were a few places on that—Singapore, Malacca, Penang, Phuket, Trang to name a few—which were called the “Straits Chinese” by the British. These were old trade routes maintained by Chinese traders, and in those cities, today you find Peranakan or Baba Nyonya culture, a mix of Chinese and Southeast Asian language and culture and cooking. The Chinese have had a huge influence on that region, but it’s only in those places that it evolved into this unique form that entails food and dress and all kinds of different things. And even these foreign influences are really diverse. Thailand in general has a huge Chinese influence, but in Bangkok, almost everybody who’s Chinese is from one ethnic group. But down south, you find Cantonese, Hakka, Teochew, Hokkien people, all these groups that basically don’t exist elsewhere in Thailand. And that manifests itself in food as well—you find obscure Chinese dishes, you know, in Hokkien Province, but also in this one town in Southern Thailand as well. So it’s really fascinating to me.

You give a lot of attention throughout the book to the people who work in agriculture in Southern Thailand, those who harvest the coconuts, who prepare the palm sugar, who ferment the shrimp paste, in a very embedded, almost ethnographic way. What role does an understanding of agricultural processes play in your research?

It’s really important to me. For a long time, food culture was obsessed with chefs, and I hope that maybe the next wave will be like people who produce the ingredients. In the case of Southern Thailand, some of the methods people use to produce these foods are so fascinating, especially visually. I’ve watched monkeys gathering coconuts a few times now, and it’s so fascinating to me, and so wacky and cool. And the old men who climb 40 to 50 feet up to pick or tap palm trees for sugar, too, it’s just amazing. Sometimes talking about agriculture producers can be a bit boring, but in cases like these, it looks very cool and it’s very unique.

What do readers need to know about the ingredients and cooking techniques of Southern Thailand to bring these dishes into their home kitchens?

It’s difficult to explain, because a lot of people may not have had these dishes before seeking out these ingredients. I think someone who buys this book probably isn’t expecting a phat thai recipe, even though both of my books have regional phat thai recipes. So I hope that people going into this book aren’t looking for what they know as standard Thai dishes, but maybe something a bit more adventurous, or more obscure in flavor. This is a niche cookbook about a very specific cuisine, and I know not everybody has access to these ingredients. So with this and even with my previous book, my intention was to create something that people could approach for different reasons. Of course there’s recipes, but someone could also sit down and just read this book for its cultural information, as a travelog, to gain perspective. I would also hope that someone who’s been to Southern Thailand might just like it, especially the pictures. But I didn’t want to make just a cookbook, because not everybody can get fresh turmeric or mango seeds, so it needs to have different functions.

What I would urge people to do is to try and cook a bit more like Thai people—not to cook by measurements so much, more by taste. Thai dishes have so many elements, and often require many different cooking processes, so Thai cooks are constantly tasting and adjusting seasonings, and are especially attentive to smell. So I try to teach people, via text, to smell things, to taste test as they’re cooking, and to keep adjusting. I may describe a dish as predominantly sour, but if you like sweetness, you can bump that up, or reduce the saltiness. So the instructions I include in this book are more like broad parameters for a dish, and very much subject to preferences. For example, I made one of the dishes from this book in the United States, and I was too rigid about following my own instructions—meaning, I put 10 grams of chiles in the dish as written, and I found it was way too spicy. But then I realized I was using some Mexican chiles, which are really different from Thai chiles, much spicier and not as fragrant, and I hadn’t tasted them first. So I urge people to use the book as a guideline, and to rely on their senses a bit more.

You describe the province of Nakhon Si Thammarat as the home of the quintessential Southern Thai dining experience: the curry stalls. What is your advice for someone tasting their way through the curry stalls?

It’s really fun where there’s no menus to guide you, and you just roll into the place. It’s basically a big counter which can have everything from eight to 28 different dishes. Even for me, who knows a lot about food, I always encounter new things at these places. But I just sort of look, and whatever looks sort of interesting, or whatever I haven’t had before, that’s what I go for. It’s an interesting exercise in Thai ordering, because Thai food is all about balance and contrast. If I ordered, for example, a rich coconut milk curry, I’d want something different to go with it, like a crispy deep-fried dish, or a relatively simple soup. I wouldn’t want three different coconut milk-based curries; no Thai person would order that, they’d want the contrast or difference from dish to dish.

How did you see the many different Muslim foodways of Thailand shaping Southern Thai cuisine?

So in Thailand, about five percent of the population is Muslim, but the community has a huge influence on food. There’s a handful of Muslim dishes, including biryani, roti, and a handful of others that you can get everywhere in the country. But as you go further south, the region becomes really diverse, and almost no one outside of Thailand knows about any of the other dishes. So for me, I felt like I was a culinary explorer. I knew a little bit about Malay food, but there was so much diversity and so many interesting dishes, it was just fascinating. It was my favorite part of the book to research.

I went to one or two iftar feasts, to break the Ramadan fast, and I was expecting a big feast with dishes specific to the iftar. But at the feasts with the family I stayed with in Pattani, the dishes were basically the same as what they often enjoyed. There was one woman who made a fascinating dish of beef cooked in sweet coconut milk—more like a soup than a curry—but otherwise it was just a slightly fancier version of what they ate throughout the year. The special feasts are usually for weddings or religious ceremonies, where someone might slaughter a goat or something else. But for the iftar it was just kind of slightly nicer, more indulgent versions of the stuff that they normally have.

It is challenging to talk about, because in this region, there has been essentially a civil war going on for decades now, and there are some dangerous things happening, with roadblocks and explosions everywhere. As a result, some Thai people in Bangkok and elsewhere have developed a really negative perception of Muslims in the south and associate them with violence, much as some Westerners have. But in my experience, the Muslim Thai I met were so kind and friendly, and by far the most hospitable people I met. To work on these books, I have to get access to people’s kitchens, and I have an advantage as a white guy who speaks Thai. People find that kind of charming or curious, or whatever. In the north, I found that people were quite shy and reserved, and so it was a little bit of a struggle to get into people’s homes. But in Southern Thailand, I was blown away by their hospitality and kindness of the Muslim families I met. I would love people to go down and meet them and visit the region, and not just go to the places that foreign tourists already go to.

The food in the countryside, meanwhile, is what you call “inland soul food,” where the ingredients really define the cuisine. What would you say defines Thai country cooking?

In the south, what comes to my mind first is rice, as rice is the most important food in the region, and it’s grown inland. But another example would be the “bitter beans” or “stink beans.” They’re not really farmed, they grow in these wild trees, but they’re the most emblematic Southern Thai ingredients, and certainly in Bangkok people associate them with Southern Thai food. But even in the south, you’re never very far from the ocean, so fish and seafood, whether fresh or preserved, tends to make its way into a lot of dishes.

There are so many different dining encounters in Southern Thailand. What is the range of formality from one dining experience to another?

In general, Thailand is a pretty informal place, especially given how people eat. But the most interesting example were the curry stalls. For example, a curry stall can literally be someone’s house, where they’ve converted the front to function as a “restaurant,” where there may be seats but the owner’s junk is still lying around and there are family portraits on the walls, and their kids are doing homework at a table. Another curry restaurant I went to, by contrast, was a more traditional restaurant kitchen, with people wearing hair nets and boots and a whole setup, so you have that whole spectrum. It’s all pretty informal, you know, and both were semi-open air establishments. The fanciest places would be the seafood restaurants I talked to, but honestly, they’re not even really that fancy in terms of their amenities. It’s just more expensive, and more Chinese, but they’re still relatively informal.

Do you have any specific recipes in the book that you especially loved working on?

There are so many that are great—I’m heading to the U.S. to promote the book, and I’m preparing the Hat Yai-fried chicken a lot; not just because Americans love fried chicken, but because it’s such a delicious recipe and so distinct from other types of fried chicken. And if you’re willing to use MSG as I suggest, it really is great. But one of the dishes that really stands out to me—maybe not my favorite, but certainly one of the most delicious—is called Plaa Khem Thawt Kathi, and it’s just a fascinating recipe. You chop up salted fish and boil it down in thick coconut milk, and what happens is that the water evaporates from the coconut milk to leave the proteins behind. Then the oil starts to separate and you get to the bottom of the pan, and the proteins in the coconut start to get crispy, and you’re left with these salty, crumbly, rich sort of breadcrumbs at the end. Then you pour off the oil, and then you eat it almost like a dip with herbal sides or spooned over rice. It can be really messy because you may be splattering oil—the woman who taught me how to make it put empty soda bottles up over her sleeves to protect her arms—but it was a perfect example of what makes Southern Thai cooking so special.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Recipes

Thai Fried Chicken

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Thai Sugar Cookies

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The post Decades of Travel Inform This Guide to Southern Thai Cooking appeared first on Saveur.

This interview is brought to you by the SAVEUR Cookbook Club, our passionate community of food-loving readers from around the globe celebrating our favorite authors and recipes. Join us as we cook through a new book every month, and share your food pics and vids on social media with the hashtags #SAVEURCookbookClub and #EatTheWorld.

The happiest marriage on earth is between food and drink, and a crafted selection of bar bites can foster many friendships, love affairs, and community gatherings around the world. Yet the Japanese izakaya transforms drinking and dining into a form of high art. Izakayas first emerged during Japan’s Edo period, as small shops to purchase sake and beer. Eventually, the proprietors began to offer drinks by the glass, and later still, to offer small bites such as otsumami, or finger food, to be paired with the drinks. Offered as a spread of many small plates of various colors, textures, and temperatures, these dishes both absorbed and also amplified the pleasures of the drinks, and showcased the exceptional culinary craft of the chefs who prepared them. Thus the izakaya, the sake shop turned showcase for culinary artistry, was born.

At his San Francisco restaurant, Rintaro, chef Sylvan Mishima Brackett brings the izakaya tradition home, adapting the dishes that he encountered during his travels in Japan to fit the rhythms of an American dining establishment. Born to an American father and a Japanese mother, Brackett had just completed six years as a chef at Alice Waters’ restaurant Chez Panisse when he bought a one-way ticket to Japan to “eat and cook as much as possible,” without much else in mind. He tasted his way through the country, visiting the kaiseki restaurants of Aoyama, the fish markets of Saitama, the oden (dashi-based soups with fish cakes, tofu, and vegetables) spots of Yokohama, and of course the many izakayas in Tokyo and beyond. When he returned to the Bay Area, he knew that he wanted to open a restaurant that would translate—rather than replicate—the izakaya experience, to offer “exciting but simple food that tasted both like Japan and California—not fusion food, but the kind of food you’d expect if the Bay Area were a region of Japan.” By not trying to replicate his experience in Japan, Brackett gave himself permission to innovate, and wrote his own tribute to the craft of Japanese cooking in his new cookbook, Rintaro: Japanese Food from an Izakaya in California. 

During our conversation, it was clear to me that Brackett’s restaurant, and the book that captures its beauty, was the result of many years of careful research, tasting, and cooking. It also was an opportunity for Brackett to celebrate the intentionality of Japanese cooking, the precision in ingredients and techniques that made each dish so uniquely delicious, and why home cooks give as much love and attention to their meals as the most seasoned restaurant chefs. Whether I was recreating his mother’s famous gyoza recipe or preparing homemade katsuobushi dashi for the first time, I knew that I would savor my at-home izakaya experience as much as I would if I’d managed to score a table (or better yet, a counter seat) in Rintaro’s gorgeous dining room.

Tell us a bit about your first encounter with the izakaya tradition.

I didn’t grow up knowing about the history of the izakaya at all. My mother is Japanese, and I was born in Kyoto, but I grew up in California. But we’d go back to Japan every 2 or 3 years, sometimes for as long as 2 months at a time. Now when I was a kid traveling with family, we never went to the izakayas, because they were drinking spots. But I started going to Japan during college by myself, and I realized while visiting friends and people’s houses in Japan that they tended to be quite small, and so there was less entertaining at home than there was in the U.S. So where people typically hang out, especially younger people or co-workers at the end of the day, would be at an izakaya. During those years, I was routinely blown away by the experience of going to some super-duper simple places, tiny little izakayas underneath the train tracks—just one guy and a grubby little grill, with a very small selection of canned beers in a cooler—to much fancier places across the city. But the idea that you could sit and be there for two or three or four hours, and just order little by little, was so appealing to me, and I loved meeting people who were right next to me at the bar and having that shared experience. I didn’t see anything like that anywhere in the Bay Area (and only very rarely in Los Angeles). So when I came back as an adult and a chef, I had it in my mind that I wanted to someday open a Japanese restaurant, and create a niche experience.

When we were building the beautiful cedar counter in the restaurant, I was thinking about people who might come in on a rainy Tuesday night and sit together at the counter, ordering a few skewers and having some beers and lingering for four hours. But that is not a very effective way to run a business, so unfortunately we cannot exactly match my dream. But when we have Japanese customers visit, they want to order a beer and maybe sashimi and a few other things and then mull it over and add to the order as they go. That runs pretty counter to the American dining scene, where we have to ask people to order their entire meal in the beginning, to ensure we can move things along and pace it nicely. But it is interesting that we’ve had to kind of transition some of the key elements of the izakaya in order to make it work in a restaurant for a Californian audience. 

How would you compare the Japanese drinking-dining culture to those of other cultures around the world?

I’ve only been to Spain once, and went to maybe four tapas places total while I was there. When I first started, that was the only real reference we had, to describe the izakaya as “Japanese tapas.” And yes, it’s similar in some ways in that every dish is pretty simple, made from usually five to six ingredients at most. But there’s something else strategic going on, in that the contrast of flavor and texture and color, fat and lean, cold and hot, happens not all on the plate, but between multiple dishes. And that’s very Japanese.

There’s a general flow to the meal—usually sashimi and cold dishes in the beginning, fried and grilled things towards the middle, and then a rice or udon at the end, a bit of starch to fill you up and soak up the alcohol. There’s also a rule about not wanting to drink sake and eat rice together, because they’re made out of the same thing; the same is true for beer and udon because of their shared wheat base. A table where there’s some sashimi, some dashimaki tamago (a folded omelet), a little yakitori, a panko dish, maybe a really spicy pickled dish, where you’re nibbling between all of those as you’re drinking and talking is really exciting. Some of our regulars eat that way, while others like one thing after another, like a coursed meal. But for me that’s the charm of this kind of cooking, to have all the dishes on the table at the same time.

Several dishes, including the rice (don) dishes, often build on a homemade dashi. For home cooks who may have never made dashi from scratch, what would you recommend vis-a-vis ingredients?

Not all the recipes in this book need to be made completely from scratch; certainly, I’ve used store-bought wrappers to make the gyoza before. But dashi is different, because the pre-made stuff is just not that good, and it’s so easy to make once you get your hands on the ingredients, which are really just katsuobushi and konbu. The fragrance in our food is really due to dashi, and the katsuobushi is key. There is a freeze-dried powdered dashi, but I cannot in good conscience recommend it, because it’s the death of Japanese cuisine, like using a bouillon cube instead of using chicken stock. If you’re buying a bag of shaved katsuobushi or bonito flakes, look for ones that are as bright as possible, because otherwise it’s already started to oxidize. The brighter the packaged katsuobushi, the better the quality. Or you can buy it as a whole log and shave it to order, which is what we do in the restaurant. When you’re buying konbu, ideally you’re buying Hokkaido konbu, where most of the konbu in the world is produced, and you don’t need very much. If you live where there’s good water, don’t worry about tap water, but you can also filter it before you make your dashi. Other than that, it’s pretty simple. There are several online resources, including TheJapanesePantry.com, which carries all of these ingredients that we use throughout the book, and they support so many small, great producers in Japan.

How important is it to have contrast from dish to dish in an izakaya menu?

I think that’s pretty important. I really love fried foods, like croquettes and karaage chicken, but whenever I have something heavy and fried, I serve a big floof of shaved cabbage to go with it. Incidentally, I’ve been telling customers as I drop off the panko dishes that they should alternate between bites of the fried food and the cabbage, to help cut the oil. We love it and we spend all this time making it, but most people don’t eat it because they think it’s a garnish, so it ends up in the compost. In Japanese food, and especially at the izakaya, the contrast between dishes—their colors and textures and temperatures—is very important in a satisfying meal.

How did you decide what aspects of the Japanese izakaya experience would be replicated in your restaurant, and what did you decide to change?

Izakaya cooking can be very casual, even though at Rintaro we’re more at the formal end of things. But that’s also because our staff is stronger, and we have more people coming from and going to Japan to learn, so we’re a lot more technically adept and sophisticated than when we opened 10 years ago. But not everything that I loved in Japan can be replicated here, and I made a firm decision that I wouldn’t aim for a facsimile of my experiences in Japan—because we’re in San Francisco, and we should take advantage of the great vegetables and interesting fish and really well-produced meats in the area. When I first moved to San Francisco, there was an old-school kaiseki-style restaurant in Japantown, and technically it was flawless, but every single thing had been shipped frozen from Japan, from the pickled vegetables to the fish to the meat. I felt like it was a pale copy of Japan, because they weren’t taking advantage of the good things here. And I vowed never to do that. When we would have a dish like simmered sardines with ginger and umeboshi, I knew that we could source from the Japanese plum farm nearby. I knew that the sardines from Monterey would be really good. Of course we have ginger grown nearby, so we could make a really good local version of it. I didn’t want to be importing mountain vegetables to pretend like we were in Japan; what I was most excited about was the chance to make it here. 

I love the way that you talk about the Bay Area as a “region of Japan.” What have you learned about the diaspora of Japanese culture and cuisine in your area, and across the globe?
Many people forget that Japan has been historically extremely poor, and at the turn of the 20th century, a lot of Japanese “second sons” were emigrating all over the world. So there’s a diasporic Japanese community in Peru and Brazil, California and Mexico, and other places, and I’m fascinated to see how each cuisine has evolved in its own way. Though I’m half-Japanese, for a long time I had almost no connection to the Japanese American community. But now I have several cooks and servers who are like third-, fourth-, fifth-generation Californian, but full-blood Japanese, because their families have always been here. The family of one of my sous-chefs is very involved in the creation of Japantown in San Francisco, and that’s just amazing to me. I was talking to my friend Nancy Hachisu, the author of Japanese Farm Food, and she said that when she went on her book tour, a lot of the Japanese American grandmothers told her that the food that she made tasted a lot like the food that they grew up eating in California, because Nancy’s recipes spoke to the same tastes as the 70-year-old’s memories from childhood. So the Japanese roots here run very deep.

You’re very attentive to technique in this book—for example, you have multiple spreads on the preparation of yakitori, from the butchering to the skewering to the roasting. Why do you lay out the cooking process for so many dishes in such detail?

What makes it special is doing it right—and in Japan, doing it right is never easy. The culture is so old and the craft is so deep, that seven pages on yakitori is just barely scratching the surface. But it’s that depth which makes something really exciting, delicious, and special. Look at something as basic as slicing scallions: you want to slice them really fine, and to do that, you have to have very sharp knives, and then you want to rinse the scallions after slicing. If you do each of those things, you give the scallions a very particular texture and look, and when you’re piling them onto other dishes, they’ll hold together in a very particular way. There’s a reason for everything.

There’s also a level of specialization in Japan, which is quite different from how people train here. For instance, I went to a katsudon restaurant, and they served it in two sizes: with extra rice and pickles and soup, or without. That’s the whole menu. At each Japanese restaurant, somebody’s spent their life making one dish really, really, really well. I just met a chef from Japan who has an unagi restaurant out in the countryside, and I had him do a series of dinners at Rintaro with farmed eels from Maine. Each step of him cutting, skewering, and grilling the eels was so specific, and he had a reason why each thing he did added up to make a perfect grilled unagi don.

I’m not trying to be fussy, but I’m interested in specialization. There are so many great 30-minute Japanese meal cookbooks, and I didn’t feel like I had a lot to contribute to that. But I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to do things and refining processes, and I’ve seen how intentional the process is. And I want to challenge readers to make something that’s worth the effort of making it.

How does one set about making yakitori at home—from the butchering to the skewering to the cooking—to get the end result just right?

Yakitori is not easy—it takes time and focus, and perhaps no beginner reader will make excellent yakitori right from the start, but it’ll be really tasty, and super fun. It also really makes the most of your ingredients: some people think of chicken as just light meat or dark meat, but within a single chicken there are so many different textures and flavors, leanness and fattiness, that yakitori is an amazing way to use almost every little bit. It’s really worthwhile if you’re buying very expensive, high-quality pasture-raised chicken. 

Getting the yakitori grilling process right is hard at home; you really need a heavier, denser charcoal, and you have to expend a little effort. Traditionally, yakitori is made with binchotan, which is charcoal fired at a really, really high heat, made out of oak branches and cut into various links that are two to 10 inches long. When you clink the charcoal together, it sounds like glass—it’s just extremely hard. Ogatan is a bit less expensive, as it’s the bits and pieces that have been compressed into charcoal tubes. You set them about six inches apart in the grill set-up that I describe in the book, and it really concentrates the heat before you start grilling. It’s a very different kind of heat, because as the fats and juices come out and fall onto the charcoal, they vaporize and come back to coat the chicken, and give it a really special taste.

The gyoza in this book started as the recipe your mother Toshiko made throughout your childhood, which you later adapted for the restaurant. How did the gyoza recipe evolve from her hands to yours?

As a kid I helped my mother to make her gyoza; my job was to wet the wrappers after filling them. Then I graduated to folding them, and then after that to making the wrapper dough from scratch. My mother never wanted to bother, but we had a little pasta machine, so I used those to roll out the wrappers. Most Japanese gyoza tend to be quite small and with a more cabbage-to-meat ratio, and hers were bigger and meatier, more like a Chinese-style potsticker, but the seasoning was very Japanese. When I was a caterer, we would make gyoza for events, and one of my first big events was the Chez Panisse staff party, which was completely terrifying. We made them in the Chez Panisse kitchen, all of our ingredients and wrappers right there in the restaurant. Afterwards Alice Waters loved them so much, she told me “You just need to open a gyoza restaurant.” Eventually we started making and freezing gyoza for Samin Nosrat’s pop-up general store in Oakland, where various food people from around the Bay Area could sell their stuff.

As we kept making the gyoza, we also kept refining the recipe, thinking about how to make the skins a little thinner, the filling a little juicier. During this time I worked with one of my cooks, Tomoko Tokumaru, who became my gyoza “section chief” outside the restaurant. Now she works with a small team of Japanese women who are all friends and make the gyoza for us. She’s worked out very small refinements in the recipe, and the recipe in the book is the version that she honed to perfection.

Several years ago you showed SAVEUR a smattering of pieces of cookware and plates that you were collecting, perhaps just when you were opening the restaurant. How did you go about deciding what the visual aesthetic of the restaurant would be in relation to, especially the cookware and the serving wear that you chose?

I’m really drawn to antique or vintage Japanese tools, in part because a lot of the pots and baskets from 75 years ago were made so well that they still function perfectly today. I think it started with a wood-burning rice cooker stove, which I received from one of my early chefs in her old house in Japan. After she moved to the States, it was sitting in her brother’s backyard, so I paid to have it shipped over, and we used that rice cooker for catering gigs—we put it in the back of my Volvo, and drove it up to the venue, and built a fire, and it was very dramatic and cool. I like old things that function really well, and made by people who really know what they’re doing.

You talk about rice as the “real food” of the izakaya, why do you see rice as having this important role?

Japan has been a rice-growing country since the beginning of time, and for the most part Japanese people haven’t had enough to eat. So you have rice, and then you have the things that go with the rice. So that might be a little bit of fish if you’re lucky, a little meat, probably lots of vegetables, but rice is the thing that really fills you up.

But the process for cooking rice is also just as intentional as anything else we make. During one of the dinners we hosted for this book, which took place at Zuni Café, we had problems preparing our rice for the meal. So I sent my sous chef back to the restaurant to get our donabe clay pot, a clay pot made for cooking rice that has a super-thick bottom and a double lid, and really makes flawless rice. Basically you bring the rice and water up to a boil, you turn it off, and then the thick bottom continues cooking via the heat held within it. So we had that going alongside a cheap run-of-the-mill rice maker and a fancy Zojirushi rice maker—and for better or worse, it was the first time I could actually have a taste test between all 3 methods. I was very gratified to find that the donabe rice was by far superior, glossier, with the grains a bit more distinct, and no mushiness whatsoever. Second was the Zojirushi—still good, but not as shiny and the grains not as flavorful—and third was the conventional rice maker, which was just fine. Side by side, I had to report to everybody that we weren’t doing it the hard way for no reason—the difference really paid off.

Lastly, I want your take on the ideal izakaya-style meal to make at home. First off, are we having beer or sake?

Definitely both! You start with beer, and then you have some sake, and then when you feel like you’re drinking too much, you can go back to beer. Any good izakaya style would have a bit of a mix.

For food, I’d start with a single variety of sashimi—maybe a bit of tuna sashimi—and then a dressed dish, which should be anchored in whatever is seasonal. Since it’s still wintertime, I’d suggest the crab sunomono or the ika no nuta, squid with a mustardy miso dressing that can be made a little bit in advance. And then you might do either the dashimaki tamago omelet or chawanmushi. Once you get into the heavier foods, you might have a gyoza and one panko dish, maybe the kabocha croquettes—both can be made and frozen and cooked whenever, so it doesn’t have to be assembled at the last minute.

Then, if you’re feeling really ambitious, you could do yakitori, but given that you’re doing everything else, I’d focus on a chicken thigh yakitori, which can get you five to six different skewers from that. And again, it could be prepared the day of, or the day before and skewered. And then as a final dish, I’d likely recommend either some curry rice, mabodofu don (spicy tofu and pork over rice), or just simple bowls of rice or udon. This is a huge amount of work, though many of these items can be made ahead, even the udon. It all comes down to whether you want to join your dinner or cook for your guests. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The post This Cookbook Will Help You Create Your Own Japanese Izakaya Experience appeared first on Saveur.

This interview is brought to you by the SAVEUR Cookbook Club, our passionate community of food-loving readers from around the globe celebrating our favorite authors and recipes. Join us as we cook through a new book every month, and share your food pics and vids on social media with the hashtags #SAVEURCookbookClub and #EatTheWorld.

The opening images of the cookbook Code Noir: Afro-Caribbean Stories and Recipes tell an enticing food story of the island region: first, a fistful of Scotch bonnet chiles, the ubiquitous spicy and colorful peppers of the islands. A pineapple with velvety green leaves, its flesh so ripe you can almost smell it through the page. Light streaming through a palm tree, a beach of brilliant white sand against jade-colored waters. Yet the beauty of Code Noir cannot be fully appreciated until you understand the historical context of Caribbean cooking. The book takes its name from the Code Noir manuscript, a set of decrees passed by King Louis XIV of France in 1685 (which remained in place until 1848) that dictated the behaviors of enslaved people, particularly in the French colonies like the French Antilles and what is now Louisiana in the United States. Despite the horrors of the document, it was the catalyst for writer Lelani Lewis to begin her work to document and pay homage to Caribbean foodways.

Such a project was no easy task, especially when there is no singular entity known as “Caribbean cuisine,” as the region comprises more than 1,000 islands, represented by more than 13 ethnic groups and many languages. It also bears the traces of multiple global histories and foodways, intermingling the foods of the colonizers–the Spanish, English, French, and Dutch–with those of the colonized, the African, Asian, and Indigenous peoples. As Lewis acknowledges, “there is no island in the Caribbean that hasn’t been tossed back and forth like a marble on a schoolyard,” and yet the many intermingling ingredients and traditions of the region’s dishes suggest that food bears the traces of its history. For example, a recipe for the Caribbean favorite of escovitch fish, a celebratory platter of fried red snapper, bears a vinegary batch of pickled peppers and name that connects it to the Spanish term “escabeche,” yet features allspice, thyme, lime juice, and of course Scotch bonnets, all native ingredients to the region. Similarly, the Grenadian dish of saltfish souse, where flaked saltfish and crunchy peppers top fluffy baking powder biscuits, reminds us of the ubiquity of saltfish in the transatlantic slave trade.

For Lewis this project had tremendous personal as well as professional significance. Born to an Irish mother and Grenadian father, Lewis grew up in the Streatham district in South London, where a local Caribbean community had sprung up between the late 1940s and the 1970s in response to the United Kingdom’s labor crisis. Though she grew up cooking and eating Caribbean food, Lewis learned about her heritage through a diasporic lens, and only visited the Caribbean a few times in her childhood. As a result, her table was a pan-Caribbean feast: “I grew up eating Trinidadian and Guyanese roti, Jamaican saltfish and ackee, Haitian pikliz, flying fish from Barbados.” These foods sparked her insatiable curiosity for Caribbean food culture, and led her to start her research platform, Code Noir, in 2020. As Lewis told me, digging deep into the stories of Caribbean foodways was her way of reconciling the many parts of her identity. Though Lewis now lives in Amsterdam with her family, I spoke with her while she was on holiday in her father’s homeland of Grenada, where she continued to think about the dishes she encounters as a path to empathy and solidarity, and a long-overdue reckoning with culinary history, both terrible and delicious.

At the core of this project is this consideration of what you call a “monstrous document,” the “Black Code” of 1685. Can you summarize what those laws were?

The Code Noir manuscript was very dehumanizing; it basically laid out laws on how to manage and place enslaved Africans. It covered everything from how many grams of food could be given to an enslaved adult versus to a child, to the question of who owned a child if an enslaved person were to give birth. It also detailed some of the punishments that were given if they tried to escape, from branding to amputation to death. Reading that document and reading through the actual laws was a painful thing to put myself through, but it was a necessity to understand what came before me; what my culture was built on. And it’s also necessary for people to understand that, because so many different cuisines around the world–especially from colonized places–have been born from adversity and pain. We can’t bypass that history; we have to face up and acknowledge it. And then we have to invert it, to show that this food and this culture is a beautiful triumph over that adversity. It’s colorful. It’s diverse, it’s tasty.

Before I embarked on the project. I didn’t have much knowledge about Caribbean food and history. I was researching for about a year and a half before I even found the title for the project, in Jessica B. Harris’ book Sky Juice and Flying Fish. The name itself felt so provocative, especially once I fully understood what the code had done, and was such a perfect summary of the dark history that informs Caribbean food and culture. But I also really wanted to turn the darkness of that history on its head. Because while so much of Black history is tied up with suffering and sorrow, it’s also important to see the triumph and the beauty that emerged from such limited resources. So coming from an informed place, and being able to explain in clear terms the diversity of this cuisine and culture, was really important to me. And all of that had to come from a place of really deep research.

You have many standalone essays throughout the book that teach readers about specific ingredients and their relationship to Caribbean history. It’s a delicate balance to strike, between the horrors of history and the beauty of the recipes (and photographs) that follow. How did you navigate that tension as you were writing the book?

When you’re doing the research to write a book like this, and you’re finding out where these ingredients are coming from and how they were processed, you’re constantly being brought back to a place of sorrow. I went to a rum factory the other day in Grenada, and the whole story of slavery within the rum distilleries was kind of bypassed. I feel like it’s my duty to not bypass that painful history, and confront how these became interwoven into our lives. But I also don’t want Caribbean history or people to be remembered in a way that diminishes what they can do and have done—how resourceful and adaptive they have been throughout history. So, although we can reflect on the past and say, “Okay, this is how this ingredient came to be, and this is how it was processed,” and to show the pain that informs that history, we can also say, “Look at the beauty of in this ingredient, how it was processed, and how it was turned into this delicious dish or recipe.”

Especially in this moment we’re living through, I’ve come to understand the universality of food–how much it can be used as a tool for oppression, but also how much it can be used as a tool of liberation. And I think it’s really important for people to use food as a means to have these difficult conversations. That’s why Code Noir is so important; it’s way more than just a cookbook or dinners or talks. It’s about us finding congeniality with each other through food and points of connection rather than division.

Let’s talk about your childhood in London. Your father grew up in Grenada, and your mother is Irish. What did your kitchen table look like as a kid?

Well, when my mom met my dad when she was 19, she couldn’t boil an egg. So her cooking experience was very limited until my dad and his family stepped in and taught her how to cook Caribbean food. Growing up in London, and having a mixed heritage, I was exposed to so many different cultures. On different days of the week, we might be eating baked ziti or corned beef and rice (a cheap, quick eat for our family), and at family celebrations we’d have a huge banquet of traditional Caribbean foods like rice and peas, jerk chicken, salmon, and so on. But then my parents had a lot of friends from different backgrounds. I had a godmother from Mauritius, so we’d also have Mauritian influences. They had Pakistani friends, so there were Pakistani dishes. I was always exposed to a wealth of different ingredients and tastes and flavors which I think definitely informed my palate, and made me open to different tastes and flavors. It has really shaped the way I approach food research–this book is about Caribbean food and culture, yes, but it’s definitely written from a diasporic point of view. It was never intended to be a bible of traditional Caribbean food; it is about how I’ve come to understand it through my place in the diaspora, while also giving homage to the traditional recipes as well.

You start with this very expansive pantry section that dives deep into all the different ingredients of the Afro-Caribbean. How would you describe these flavors that are really incomparable, to people who are encountering Caribbean food for the first time?

It’s such a hard question, because it all depends on familiarity. I moved to Amsterdam eight years ago, and people there love to gulp down raw herring and raw onions for lunch. Now I look at that, and I just can’t… But when you grow up with some ingredients, there’s such familiar and nostalgic tastes, you become accustomed to the flavors of them. So for me the flavors of the Caribbean are delicious, but for someone else I think it might be a nice surprise. So for example, for something like ackee, I always describe the fruit as looking like scrambled eggs, and tasting like a really good creamy avocado, with an almost neutral flavor. But when you pair it with saltfish and Scotch bonnets, it’s just a perfect combination. So the only way I might describe it is that the flavors of the Caribbean are surprising, but so flavorful.

In the book’s recipes, you seek out not just the historical origins of each dish, but their place in Caribbean language and culture. (For example, rotis are often called “buss up shut” by Trinidadian street vendors, because they resemble torn T-shirts.) How did you identify the various origin points of each dish?

Many dishes in the book were foods that I was familiar with, or that I’d grown up with. And then others were uncovered through research. But some of the origins were surprising to me, the origins of the names, which I had to read back to myself with a Caribbean accent. Each bit of research offered a lightbulb moment to me, and it absolutely expanded my portfolio of recipes and ideas, and the history of the region. That’s partly why the pantry section of the book is so extensive, because I really want people to understand that ingredients are not necessarily where you think they come from. I’ll use an example from where I live in Amsterdam, stamppot is considered the national dish of the Netherlands. Yet it’s way more exotic than you think, when you consider that potatoes come from Peru. For people who don’t think often about food history, their minds are quite literally blown learning the provenance of some of these ingredients, and knowing that helps them connect the dots and helps them dispel these ideas of nationalities or borders.

Your chapter on snacks (“limin’,” pronounced “lime-in,”) suggests a specific regional attitude about gathering and hanging out. But you also have a whole chapter on the “low & slow” foods that anchor celebrations. What dishes do you think capture the Caribbean approach to pleasure and hospitality?

Limin’ is really the happy hour of Grenada–I just picked up a tourist magazine while I’m here, and it’s all about limin’ and how to do it right–how to relax when everything you’ve done has been done for the day. There are some great foods in that chapter, like aloo (potato) hand pies, and these delicious peppered shrimp sold all over the place in Jamaica. And of course pasteles, which can be snacks, but are also a celebratory food. So, for example, Caribbean food can be quite laborious, and I also have those in the book as well. Like curry goat—it takes hours to cook, and it’s a real labor of love. Because it’s quite a tough and fatty meat, and you have to cook it down for a really long time to make it tender, and to render the fats from it. But there’s something about it that makes it delicious. It’s making me salivate as I’m talking about it. So I think something like that is just like something you would find at a party or christening or a baptism, and is hugely pleasurable for me, because I can see just how much love and labor has gone into it.

As you were looking for the connective tissue between your heritage, and the history of this region, you occasionally come across recipes that crystalize the history, like the Guinness Punch. Can you tell us about the journey to taste that, learn about it, and then present it in the book?

Yeah, the Guinness Punch was one of the first connect-the-dots moments between Caribbean food and my identity. I was so homesick when I moved to Amsterdam, and I just needed something to anchor me, and the thing that I felt anchored to was more so my dad’s culture than my mum, because he has 11 brothers and sisters. And when I started doing the research into Caribbean food, and read up about Guinness Punch, I was stunned. I’d never understood why Guinness was even in the Caribbean, how this Irish beer ended up in this part of the world. But then I read about how Irish indentured servants were brought to the Caribbean in the seventeenth century, and Guinness exported their beer to follow (fortified with extra hops so it would survive the Atlantic crossing). And it was just really a mind-blowing moment for me, to see this connection solidified in a way that made sense. It proved the idea that if there’s anything that connects everyone, it’s the food that we eat. So that one drink became this beacon of hope, you know, this example that helped solidify my identity through the research I was doing.

When you look at the evolution of these dishes throughout history, what do you get excited about in contemporary Caribbean cooking?

My first thought when you ask about that is whether we’re talking about an elevation of cuisine. A lot of my work involves talking about decolonization, and how looking at the history and celebrating the diversity of food is a way of decolonizing, because so much of the value that we put into the culinary world is oftentimes put on European cuisine. But these recipes have been tested for hundreds of years and we don’t need to compare it to how European food is presented, or how European techniques are incorporated. So what drives me is to learn more about the background and the culture and dishes that I don’t know about. For example, here in Grenada, I’ve just tasted oil-down, which is their national dish, a slow-cooked stew with green bananas, yams or sweet potato, plantains, callaloo, chicken, sometimes pigtails, layered bit by bit then cooked down with fresh coconut milk, and it is just stunning. So if I do get the opportunity to cook another book, I will. I would love to put that in, and I would also just love to go to different islands and learn more about the diversity in Caribbean cuisine.

There are so many recipes I love in this book, and I want people to dig deeply into the things they don’t know much about. I really love the Trini Doubles, especially the seasoning that goes on them. Green seasoning is a very simple recipe; it can be blended up easily, and you add it to almost any dish you want—it’s a flavor bomb. I really enjoy baigan choka, the roasted eggplant over a coconut tun (a kind of polenta seasoned with a tadka topping of shallots, garlic, and ginger). But then also the curry goat, because curry goat is one of my favorite dishes, which you can tell from how I’m slobbering all over it. The peppered shrimp as well, which are so gorgeous and easy to make. Ultimately I want people to see how food is a universal tool for connection, and a means of surpassing our differences.

Recipes

Saltfish Souse and Bakes

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Escovitch Fish

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Guinness Punch

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The post A New Cookbook Celebrates Caribbean Cuisine—And Reckons with Its Complicated History appeared first on Saveur.

This interview is brought to you by the SAVEUR Cookbook Club, our passionate community of food-loving readers from around the globe celebrating our favorite authors and recipes. Join us as we cook through a new book every month, and share your food pics and vids on social media with the hashtags #SAVEURCookbookClub and #EatTheWorld.

You’ve probably had Bangladeshi food before…but you might not have known it. As author Dina Begum explains, much of the cuisine of Bangladesh “has become lost under the umbrella of ‘Indian food,’” and few staples of Bangladeshi cooking have been documented outside of Bengali-language cookbooks. It would also be easy to conflate Bangladeshi and Indian cuisine, especially in diasporic Southeast Asian communities. Bangladeshi immigrants were the majority owners and operators of the curry houses in the United Kingdom during their heyday from the 1960s to 1990s. 

Yet as Begum notes in her new and thoroughly captivating cookbook, Made in Bangladesh, though the country only gained its independence in 1971, the ancient cuisine and cultural traditions of the country deserve their own spotlight. Traces of the Mughal Empire and the many Persian, Turkish, and Arabic-influenced dishes flow through the recipes in Begum’s book, alongside a present-day emphasis on the specialities of preparing rice, fish, and vegetables that distinguish each of the country’s eight primary regions (divisions) and its 13 annual festivals. Begum’s book is divided into menus across the six growing seasons of the year, and demonstrates how Bangladesh has its own “natural order … a quiet thread that pulls everyone together in a giant embrace—with food at its center.”

Begum was born in the Sylhet division of Bangladesh, emigrating to England at four years old, along with her mother and brother. There, they reunited with her father in the Brick Lane region of London, widely considered the heart of the UK’s Bangladeshi community. Her grandmother’s table in Birmingham hosted many dawats (feasts) throughout her childhood, marked by the smells and flavors of sweet date molasses, pungent fermented fish, flaky coconut, and smoky mustard oil. But it was the tiny gestures of love made through food—snacks of doodh kola (rice with milk and banana) or coconut fudge and the tangible pleasure derived from hours of shaping pitha (rice-based dumplings, sweets, and savory dishes) side-by-side with family members—that laid the groundwork for Begum’s lifelong passion for storytelling through food.

Speaking with Begum from her home in London, I learned that her book was crafted not only as an act of historic and culinary preservation, but as a document of intensely personal and loving culinary memories, what she calls a “love letter to the country of my birth.” Whether she focuses her evocative prose on describing bites of crunchy bora (fritters), detailing the many ways to prepare rice, or the countless sweets that brought her family to the table, each of the dishes in Begum’s book shows her love and understanding of Bangladeshi culture, and offers a warm and delicious “shagotom” (welcome) to all home cooks.

How did you get your start as a food writer?

So food was always a big part of my life, though it was not part of my day job; I started writing fiction and poetry long before I wrote about food in any formal way. But about 10 years ago, I started a blog that eventually became my first book, The Brick Lane Cookbook, all about the neighborhood I grew up in in London. Brick Lane is a neighborhood of many people and cuisines, and the book is representative of that mixture. But I didn’t anticipate the overwhelming response the book would receive, especially about the Bangladeshi recipes. So many people messaged me asking for more, and that encouraged me to delve deeper into Bangladeshi cuisine. I was inspired by the books that were coming out that explored regional global cuisines, in particular Samarkand by Caroline Eden. I didn’t know anything about Central Asian cuisine, and it was such a revelation to me. And I thought, “Somebody else might come to see Bangladeshi food in this way, because they don’t know anything about that.” I wanted my book to be a revelation, for people who could find joy in learning about not just Bangladeshi food and recipes, but also its culture and the country as a whole.

You moved to London with your parents as a child, to join your grandparents who had emigrated earlier. How did they navigate the cooking process in their new country?

During my childhood, we lived in an apartment similar to that of our Bangladeshi neighbors, a flat with a very small balcony. So people would grow food on practically every balcony in the neighborhood, and all the aunties would share what they grew—mainly chiles and tomatoes, easy-to-grow small items. When I was growing up, my dad would take us to Brick Lane Market, and there were a few grocery shops that would get produce from Bangladesh, so we’d go when we knew deliveries were being made. But people also used a lot of dried ingredients, and whenever a relative would go home, they’d bring back dried versions of practically everything. My grandmother in particular wanted to make everything from scratch, so when she’d go home, she’d make cured beef, she’d get rice from her village, put it in her bag, and bring it all back to her pantry.

Some of our neighbors who had gardens grew more traditional British produce to balance things out. For example, my grandmother grew rhubarb instead of the jujube berries commonly used in fish stews. When people first migrated to London in the 1970s–80s, many people lived in flats, so they didn’t have gardens available, but with the second, third, and beyond generations, people were more financially stable, and they could move into homes with gardens, or access community gardens–and that’s when they began planting seedlings from Bangladesh. So it’s taken many years to see a surge of interest and expertise in more traditional produce and dishes.

What do you want people to think about when they encounter Bangladeshi cuisine for the first time? 

I hope they start without a comparison to Indian food—because it’s totally different from Indian food, and though there may be many overlaps, readers should approach Bangladeshi cuisine with an open mind, seeing it as fresh and new and hugely varied from place to place. For example, shatkora, the bittersweet citrus, is specific to Sylhet. Further south, you find more Southeast Asian flavors, with more tamarind, dried and fermented fish and so on, but also more spices. Each region has specialty cooking techniques as well: some feature a lot of steaming in banana leaves, or cooking over wood fire (particularly in more rural areas). That technique adds a lot of flavor, but also changes the method of preparation–when you can’t easily control heat, dishes have to be made all at once rather than in stages. Similarly, the intensity of seasoning changes–you’ll find richer, more indulgent dishes in Dhaka, and then you go to a rural area and find food cooked with very little oil.

People need to understand that this is a distinct cuisine—because even though Bangladesh is a small and relatively new country, the cuisine is ancient, and it has been vastly overlooked. It’s important for me to pay respect to my culture and to my ancestors—not just the women in the kitchen, who put so much effort into everything, but also men like my uncle, who worked in the restaurant industry in England. Some people called what he was making inauthentic, but restaurateurs like him were focused on setting themselves and their families up in a new country. They weren’t so preoccupied with calling what they were making “Bangladeshi food.” But now things are changing, and it’s important to recognize that Bangladeshi cuisine has always been there, alongside Indian and Pakistani cuisines, and it should be celebrated. 

Many diasporic Bangladeshis come back to the country during the winter, when they can take part in certain festivals. What was your experience upon your return, and how did you explore those festivals?

When I revisited the country as a teenager, it was a huge moment for me, in part because I realized that what I was eating there was the food of my heritage. Then I went back again as recently as last year, to do my book research, and I realized how much a person would miss if they only went by media coverage of the country. You have to be there to see the vitality of the old culture—and the new developments as well. In some areas of Dhaka, the capital, you could be in any major city in the world, with plenty of coffee shops, bakeries, restaurants, etc. And then you’d go to old Dhaka, the historic district, and you’d be deep in culture and history, in streets with such small bylanes that cars couldn’t fit through; you’d have to go by foot or rickshaw.

And of course the food festivities were just incredible. November to February are the key months where people usually visit for weddings, family gatherings, etc., and of course for the harvest festivals. The rice harvest is a huge event, and the community feeling emerges during that time as well—because whole villages, not just families in villages, gather together. It felt like such a nice way to celebrate the winter, to have all the street food vendors selling pitha, and people mingling late at night with their families, sampling food from everywhere, with lights and decorations on all the buildings.

Rice is the staple food of Bangladesh, and no meal is complete without some kind of rice on the table. What kinds of rice preparations do you highlight in this book?

In Bangladesh, rice is much more important than flour, because there are so many different forms it can take. Very small-grained, aromatic rice known as cheenigura or kalijeera are very popular, and we tend to use that over basmati. You have white rice and red rice (very popular in Sylhet, the region where I’m from). You have rice flour which you use to make everyday fritters, like boras and pakoras and things like that. Then you have ground rice used in pitha, which can be sweet or savory, and take the form of fried or steamed rice cakes, or made into pancakes or crepes. Bangladeshi also enjoy rice puddings, khichuri, and sweets, and molida, a drink that uses coconut cream, coconut water, and flaked rice. If you just had even a few rice varieties in your cupboard, you could make so many dishes out of it.

Similarly, fish is a huge part of the Bangladeshi culinary culture, for Bengalis on both sides of the border.

In Bangladesh fish is an everyday occurrence, not reserved for special occasions. (If anyone were to ask me for the four key elements of Bangladeshi cuisine, I would say “fish, rice, pitha, and bhorta.”) Whether fresh or fermented, fish is one of the things that distinguishes Bangladeshi from Indian or Pakistani cuisine, which tend to be more meat-focused. People source their fish from what’s available–the nearest sea, the lakes in our village, any of the 700 rivers. There are also many kinds of cultural references with fish, and they appear as decorations and motifs in weddings and at festivals, where there are lots of little fish-shaped sweets. (My mom would even make fish-shaped pitha!) My father, who passed away while I was writing this book, had a meticulous knowledge of fish, and he was wonderful at conveying that knowledge to me in English so I could understand. He knew all about the different varieties of fish one could use, and the different cuts to use for different stews or curries. 

You call bhorta the “soul food of Bangladeshi cuisine,” but it’s also a very versatile, very comforting dish to prepare. Take us through the process of preparing bhorta.

Bhorta is what Bangladeshis go to when they miss home; it cheers them up instantly when they see it. And they are so restorative for me. Even now, every time I’m ill, my mother makes aloo (potato) bhorta and serves it to me with rice. (When you’re sick, you either want soups or carbs, and this is satisfying in that double-carb way.) You can make it as spicy as you want, and you can make it with almost anything—usually vegetables, but also pulses, fish, meat, even spices like nigella seeds. Because bhorta is really defined by its seasonings, not the ingredients you use to fill it out.

The foundation of any bhorta is chiles—small dried red chiles, fresh green chiles (usually Thai or finger chiles), or a combination of both—which are fried in mustard oil for a smoky, pungent, but very aromatic base. These are usually combined with garlic, onions (raw, fried, or sauteed), and chopped cilantro. You boil or roast your secondary element—potatoes or eggplant or shredded beef or whatever else—and then use your hands to mash it with the seasonings. (This is why I suggest gloves, to protect from the chiles). It’s very tactile and very effective, because when you use your hands, the ingredients will meld together better than if you use a food processor. It’s a beautiful part of a multi-course meal, and there are so many varieties to choose from.

Each element of the Bangladeshi meal seems to work in harmony, in particular the cha nasta (the daily combination of tea and snacks). What is it like to enjoy that?

Cha nasta is my favorite thing, though often I’m astonished by how much work it takes. It can range from something small and casual, to something that takes over your day. Good cha is a slightly sweet tea—sometimes with spices, sometimes without. It’s usually paired with something savory and fried, like shingara (pastry filled with spiced potatoes) or chop (cutlets), or with something like a rice pudding or mishti (a sweet treat). Whenever I’d go to visit neighbors, there’d always be tea accompanied by something sweet or savory. But it’s also what you eat with new acquaintances. Cha nasta is often the meal where people first meet—cha nasta is a way to test the waters, and to be hospitable and welcoming. And its flavors always remind me of celebration, especially for events like Eid and Bangladeshi New Year. 

You talk about how the dinner table in your grandmother’s house played host to small, family dinners, but also huge ornate dawats of up to 50 people at any given moment. What would be on the Bangladeshi table for one of these feasts? 

A dawat is defined by the many, many dishes on hand; you’d have very little space for your plate, since the table would be covered with the main dishes. At my grandmother’s, she’d often have impromptu guests, and then we’d end up putting tables together, so many that they would cross over from the kitchen to the dining room, or we’d all crowd around the sofa, wherever we could fit. The table would always be full; there would be no space for flowers and decorative items, it would be literally covered with food. There would definitely be platters of curry and rice, either steamed or as a biryani or pulao. Fried fish, for sure, would have a place of honor, as would fish curries and stews. For big parties, a whole fish or a large cut of fish would be important for honoring your guests. There might also be a roast chicken, and sweets would follow, along with tea. And of course you couldn’t leave until you were full to the brim.

For Eid-al-Fitr, the traditional feast at the end of the long month of Ramadan, what are your favorite dishes to prepare?

I really like making traditional pitha for Eid. Especially in my home region of Sylhet, we would make handesh or teler pitha, which are fried rice cakes with date molasses. Bangladeshi date molasses is made from the date palm tree (unlike date syrup, which is made from dates) and has a rich smoky taste because it’s cooked down over a wood fire. We would make other kinds of pitha as well, like nuner bora (yellow fritters made with ginger and turmeric) and coconut pitha. The key thing was to have handmade pastry, because that was how we’d spend time together before the feast. The day before Eid, the whole family would gather around the table to make these items, with everyone making hundreds of samosas and pastries. As a teenager, I didn’t much enjoy being in charge of the pitha-making, and eventually delegated to my younger siblings. (I’d say, “Your turn, I’ve done my share!”) But I loved the responsibility of frying handesh—my mother would make the batter the day before, and then I’d fry them one at a time. It takes hours, but it’s the most satisfying thing, to pour the batter and watch them puff up into these amazing cakes, and get into the celebratory mood as they cook.

This is one of the first major English-language Bangladeshi cookbooks on the marketplace today; what does that mean for you as a writer?

I’m inspired by the dishes in this book, the foods that require so much skill, that take years of preparation to fine-tune. The creativity and wisdom of my ancestors, my mother and grandmother, have had such a huge influence on me, and I’ve tried to distill their knowledge into this book. I’ve kept their recipes, the details of how they cooked things, exactly as they did, without dialing down any flavors or techniques. My grandmother passed away just before I got my book deal, and I think she would have loved this book. I’ve written so many memories of her into the book, and I know now that if I’m missing her, I can delve into her recipes once again.

It’s also important for me to share this as a mainstream book, because one of my key motivations is to preserve these dishes before they die out. Many younger people, or second- or third- generation Bangladeshi living abroad don’t cook often, or haven’t learned how to cook these dishes. So what I’ve tried to do is to delve into classic old-school dishes as well as the regional and seasonal dishes that people eat every day. For me it’s become a mission to put the cuisine and country on the map, and to help people explore Bangladeshi cuisine and culture in a joyous, digestible way.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The post If You’ve Never Cooked Bangladeshi Food, Now’s Your Moment appeared first on Saveur.

This interview is brought to you by the SAVEUR Cookbook Club, our passionate community of food-loving readers from around the globe celebrating our favorite authors and recipes. Join us as we cook through a new book every month, and share your food pics and vids on social media with the hashtags #SAVEURCookbookClub and #EatTheWorld.

Is there anything Nancy Silverton can’t do? Since she first made a splash in the 1980s with her expertly crafted desserts for Wolfgang Puck’s era-defining restaurant, Spago, Silverton has become the definition of a culinary powerhouse. As the co-owner of several California restaurants including Pizzeria Mozza, Osteria Mozza, Mozza2Go, and chi SPACCA, and the founder of the iconic, now-closed Campanile and the world-renowned La Brea Bakery, Silverton has shaped the way Americans break bread (and pizza, and baked goods) for the last half-century. At every stage of her career, she has been ten steps ahead of what we would eventually realize was delicious: artisan bread, wood-fired pizza, and now, the best-ever versions of classic American desserts.

As the author of 10 cookbooks, it would seem that by 2023, her well of endlessly tested, irrefutably delicious recipes would have run dry. Yet during the COVID-19 pandemic, as we all turned to sourdough starters to fill our days, Silverton turned to a perfect peanut butter cookie, the creation of her friend and former employee Roxana Jullapat, of Los Angeles’ Friends & Family bakery. The beautifully crackled top of the cookie, its perfectly rounded edges, its intensely peanutty flavor, all stopped Silverton in her tracks. She had found a new reason to head to the oven, to make “the absolute best version of the familiar baked goods that we all know and love.” Her next book, The Cookie That Changed My Life, was underway.

Silverton took the time out of her latest research trip in Tuscany to speak with me about her newest book. I already knew Silverton was a masterful baker and recipe writer—as an Angeleno kid, I grew up on La Brea’s bread, and during my early years in New York, I regularly consulted A Twist of the Wrist, a resourceful pantry-based cookbook that was way ahead of its time in celebrating the culinary power of tinned, jarred, and canned ingredients. But I never imagined she’d have so much to say about revisiting classic desserts with an eye towards a thoroughly joyful baking experience. There’s no one I’d trust more to guide me toward those classics than Silverton, or to know the difference between a good recipe and something that is truly, transcendently delicious.

This is your eleventh cookbook. How has your process of cookbook and recipe writing changed over the course of your career?

When I write a cookbook, it’s always because I’ve latched onto a subject that I can’t wait to share. Even though this is my fourth baking book, they’re all completely different. The first one just fell in my lap, because Wolfgang Puck’s agents were frequent diners at Spago, and they fell in love with the desserts and asked me if I would write a book. I was flattered—and intimidated—but of course I said yes, so that book reflected what I was making at the time. Then I went on to write Breads from La Brea Bakery, because I was so excited to share how I’d figured out how to make a loaf of bread. Then I wanted to share the pastries from the bakery, because I’d become so proud of those rustic, non-plated baked goods. When La Brea Bakery and Campanile opened, they really were the first of their kind, the first of the bakery-café concept (before Panera and everyone else joined in).

And then for a while I thought I was out of ideas–I’d done all the restaurant books already. But this cookie got me really excited about revisiting memorable desserts, those things people really want to make at home. I think that anybody who says they want to make kouign amann or croissants at home must be lying—nobody really wants to do that, especially when there are so many great bakeries to get those time-intensive pastries. After I made this cookie, I thought deeply about how delicious it was, and how challenging and rewarding it was to reinvent a staple.

Do you remember the first thing that you ever baked?

 I didn’t grow up baking—baked goods were not part of my mom’s repertoire. She loved two things: apple pie, because you could just patch the crust into the Pyrex pan, and what we used to call Mexican wedding cookies. (She called them “nothings,” because they dissolved into nothing.) But I do recall the first thing I ever cooked—I was probably seven at the time, and I believed I was the inventor of fried bologna. But the other thing that I made was sauteed Hunt’s brand canned potatoes, with paprika. And in my mind I can still see my mother’s stove making those fried potatoes work.

So you may have invented both fried bologna and patatas bravas.

Sure!

How is the challenge of reinventing a familiar, beloved dish different from creating something entirely new?

In this case of this book, there are very few adjustments that I see as fundamentally creative. I often say that I’m not a fan of creativity—because sometimes tasting something “creative” leads a person to say, “I’d rather have the real thing.” But I did harness my own sensibilities, especially when it comes to helping readers. For one, I tried to avoid frosting the sides of cakes, or building cakes in three layers, because I think it’s so challenging. You’re good with the second layer, and as soon as that third one goes on, it’s all of a sudden lopsided, and then you go to do the sides and you start to bring in all the crumbs of the cake into the frosting. And then the whole process becomes one of frustration rather than joy.

Another example is my carrot cake—which of course has a cream cheese frosting, because it’s the best pairing bar none. But by making it a brown butter cream cheese frosting, I added depth and complexity; it wasn’t just to show off, it really mattered. Most importantly, I questioned why carrot cake—one of my all-time favorite desserts—never tasted like carrots, and only of the spices it was made with. So I took the suggestion of someone in my pastry department and roasted the carrots before pureeing them, which added both moisture and a real carrot flavor. That carrot cake probably took me eight tries or more (one of the lesser times I made any of the desserts) before I could imagine people saying, “That’s the best version I’ve had.” The thing with baking is that the answer is never quick—it takes patience to find the right tweaks to get something to the very best version that it can be.

When you’re baking, are there specific things that you absolutely must have to bake well, or certain ingredients that you will not experiment with?

Obviously I need butter, flour, sugar, and leavening, and I love including nuts. I always toast nuts, and I always make sure the baked goods I’m writing about finish with a good brown color; I never make anything with dye. It’s probably easier to say what I don’t have—I generally don’t have sprinkles, even though I have grandchildren now. The first time I ever used sprinkles was in the yellow layer birthday cake in the book, and I was so intimidated, thinking, “How do you put sprinkles on a cake?” Other than that, I wouldn’t have margarine, because it doesn’t have the flavor you want. I don’t generally use alternative sugars or flours that don’t have gluten—it’s not that I’m opposed to them, but I haven’t made the effort to become prolific with them. For the pineapple upside-down cake, I never would have made it with the Maraschino cherries of our Shirley Temple days, so now I switch to Amarena or Luxardo cherries, to give it a sophisticated look and a more grown-up flavor.

Did you ever feel like sometimes the formula of a great baking dish has to be broken to become a great recipe?

Sometimes. I traveled that journey with lemon bars—which I’ve never liked, because they were too sweet, or too eggy, which tasted like sulfur to me. But lemon bars definitely fit into what this book is all about, so I couldn’t avoid them. And I tested them 12 times, and I couldn’t get it right, until I finally said, “My lemon bar is going to be a lemon curd bar,” more like what the French do in a tart shell. It still has the American-style crust on the bottom, and it’s still in a square pan, it’s still everything a lemon bar is supposed to be. But this is my own take on it that still has the name of the classic dessert.

And sometimes there’s a lot of room to improve on the original. Take blueberry muffins: I’m not really a fan of most of them, because they are often so pale and white, and they seem so unhealthy to me, more like dessert than breakfast. For a muffin that would start off your morning on the right foot, you really want it to look like a bran muffin. And so what I did was I adapted probably the best muffin I ever had in my life—the millet muffin from Café Fanny in Berkeley—and I found a blueberry muffin that I would want to eat again and again. (It’s also just a bit smaller than those sold at most coffee shops, which are just enormous.)

A lot of folks are daunted by baking, because we’ve been told over and over again that it’s a very precise science. As a writer, how do you figure out what needs explaining, versus what readers already know?

Well, one of the things that’s very challenging is when you talk about texture, where the cookbook author can’t necessarily describe it in a concrete way that someone can follow. (That’s why it’s so challenging to write about bread.) So the more information an author can give, the better. A good recipe should involve the least amount of equipment that plugs in, and the least amount of technique. So a lot of home bakers have a freestanding mixer, and that really helps. So if you’re going to cream butter in a mixer with a paddle attachment, and you say, “paddle it on low speed until there’s no lumps and it’s creamy”—sure, that’s technique, but most people can figure that out. If you give enough information and you do enough hand-holding, you set people up for success.

I think that sometimes people will look at my recipes and think, “It’s too long, it’s four pages.” Well, it might be four pages, but it’s a step-by-step recipe that works. You need the details to know that butter needs to be room temperature, or cut up into pieces, to avoid leaving room for error. But I also tried to simplify things, and the techniques are generally easy: egg yolks are whipped, butter is creamed, and that’s pretty much it. I learned to bake in France, where they use pastry bags to get batters into things, and it’s such a smart way of doing it, but to many home bakers, it’s not comfortable, and so I had to get away from that. So really what you need for the recipes in this book are a rolling pin, a mixer, heatproof spatulas, some mixing bowls, and a frying pan, but that’s it. Nothing too challenging or complicated. (And every single recipe is photographed—I know from many readers, especially unconfident bakers, that a visual really helps. So I told my editor that I want a picture of every single recipe.)

What makes it into the American baking canon? Are there specific things in this book that you think should become iconic dishes?

Well, are madeleines or canelés part of the baking canon? I put a canelé recipe in one of my past cookbooks even though I’d never eaten one, because I was inspired by a sketch of a canelé and said, “This is gorgeous, I have to figure out what it is and how to make it.” And I turned to the only French baker that I knew at the time, who was a bakery designer, and I showed him the illustration, and he happened to be from Bordeaux. Now I think canelé is a household name, even though it might not be sitting alongside a lemon bar or a pineapple upside-down cake—but I think it exists in a world where you can imagine the best version of one. I think that’s the same with the Portuguese custard tarts, the pasteis de nata, and the black sesame seed cookies I first learned about from a baker in Copenhagen. So that was me thinking ahead, to ensure that my book isn’t completely outdated in 10 years.

There are also a few recipes that are looser, newer entries. In the 1990s, there was a very popular dessert called Chocolate Decadence that I included, and something that I call the Alaska Cookie because I first tasted it in Anchorage, which falls into the category of these “kitchen sink” cookies that people are making nowadays, with dulce de leche and marshmallows. When I felt like I couldn’t make a better version, I asked to include the recipe itself—case in point, Claudia Fleming’s ginger cake from Gramercy Tavern. Nobody can make a better ginger cake than that, so why should I even try? That is the best of the best.

So much of the appeal of these dishes is based in memory. What is it about memorable baking goods that get us excited about cooking?

With baking, even without a lot of knowledge and not a lot of even skill, you can really make these things. There’s a value to making something that is so delicious that you can feel satisfaction in it, because you know you get what you were working towards. There are so many recipes out there, and so many books out there, and not all of them are well-tested. And yes, it’s wonderful that we can Google “peanut butter cookies” and get 5,000 choices, but then you think, where do I start? So I really wanted to be able to provide that roadmap—you want a chocolate chip cookie, a poundcake, banana bread, you come right here to this book. So if you trust me and like my tastes, you have those as a resource, and even the most novice baker will feel satisfied and proud of the results.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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This recipe is brought to you by the SAVEUR Cookbook Club, our passionate community of food-loving readers from around the globe celebrating our favorite authors and recipes. Join us as we cook through a new book every month, and share your food pics and vids on social media with the hashtags #SAVEURCookbookClub and #EatTheWorld.

“Here in Taiwan, we mind our own business.” Thus begins Clarissa Wei’s debut cookbook, Made in Taiwan. It’s not the most expected way to start a cookbook, but it’s Wei’s way of staking a claim to her nation’s culinary and cultural self-determination. While many of the dishes enjoyed in Taiwan have Chinese roots, here Wei reclaims and reframes the Taiwanese culinary story as one that thrives independently of Chinese history and governance. 

Wei’s parents were raised in Taiwan in the 1960s, while the island was governed via martial law by the Nationalist Chinese government, and at a time when, as Wei notes, schoolchildren were “taught more about the history of China than the history of their own people.” Yet Taiwan was considered the ideal place to sample regional Chinese cuisine at the time, both because of what the ruling political elite consumed and the many traditions and techniques brought by recent immigrants to the nation. For though the island may be relatively small, it has produced some of the world’s most extraordinary dishes—the proliferation of xiao long bao soup dumplings, made world-famous by Taiwanese vendors, “crystal” meatballs stuffed with pork and fried shallots in a delicate rice paper wrapper, and brittle threads of pork floss sprinkled over pillowy tangzhong milk bread. 

As Wei explains, the specific joy of Taiwanese cooking is how it demonstrates the nation’s resistance against cultural and culinary homogenization. “It’s my strong opinion,” Wei writes, “that the food of a place can tell a story far more vividly than any textbook, and the food of Taiwan tells a tale of a country that has been subjected to multiple colonial influences but remains vibrant in its self-expression.”

When I spoke with Wei from her home in Taipei, she asserted that her book was shaped by her acute awareness of the present-day political atmosphere, as well as her growing appreciation for the complexity of Taiwanese identity and history. She writes lovingly of the island’s many traditions, from the Indigenous foods nurtured by the lush climate, to the dishes introduced by Chinese immigrants in the mid-twentieth century, to the fried delicacies sold at night markets and outdoor beer restaurants (rèchǎo), lightly seasoned with the trinity of garlic, ginger, and scallions. Wei collaborated with Ivy Chen, a cooking instructor based in Taipei, to develop accurate recipes, aiming to “tell the story of Taiwan as best we can before it’s too late.” Wei’s passion is both to honor and expand the narrative of Taiwanese cuisine and culture. “I always say that Taiwan is talked about in either one of two ways: it’s either a potential World War III, or it’s a place for night markets and beef noodle soup,” Wei told me. “There’s a disconnect there, where it’s all doom or gloom or all tourist consumption without asking where things come from. I wanted to bridge those two narratives.”

This book is fueled by a palpable sense of urgency. As someone who’s written about a lot of different topics in food, how did you decide you were going to focus on the story of Taiwanese food, and how did you decide to tell this story via a cookbook?

Living in Hong Kong in 2019-2020, I was present for the entirety of the pro-democracy protests and COVID; when I left in summer 2020, it was the day they passed the national security law. So I saw how Hong Kong transitioned from a vibrant democracy to what is now very much a part of China, and it was shocking how quickly that happened. During this time, I would fly back to Taiwan all the time (it’s a one-hour flight), and it was clear to me that people in Taiwan were watching this from afar, and they felt that urgency, too. They elected the current president, Tsai Ing-wen, to her second term, with the greatest number of votes in Taiwanese history, because people were compelled to vote for someone who was staunchly anti-China and pro-keeping Taiwan safe.

So I pitched the cookbook with that political and social urgency in mind. I’d done a proposal in the past that was far less political, more of a general compilation of Taiwanese recipes, and it didn’t go anywhere. But once the world saw the Hong Kong protests, and once they saw Stop Asian Hate, and once COVID happened, I finally was able to sell this book. I had a different approach than the journalists who came in to cover potential cross-strait tensions and the prospect of World War 3. I wanted to use food as a way to contextualize and celebrate the people of Taiwan.

If someone described this book as a “political cookbook,” how would you feel about that framing?

That’s a really good question, because I feel like lots of people, including me, get confused. This book isn’t meant to be a political statement per se, but people think it’s political because Taiwan is constantly being politicized. But I wanted to capture the zeitgeist in Taiwan, and how people in Taiwan today see themselves. The majority of people here identify as Taiwanese, or as a mix of Taiwanese or Chinese, and a very small minority only sees themselves as Chinese, and I think my book embodies the former, not the latter. But the fact that that’s controversial is really interesting. Whatever my take, I don’t want my own feelings, or my perception of the country’s tensions, to override the book. The first 40 pages offer a portrait of what’s happening in Taiwan, but the rest is really a celebration of the food and the people. But you need the preface to frame that celebration.

How did you find your co-author, Ivy Chen, and how did you develop a process that incorporated the stories of so many contributors around Taiwan?

Ivy has been teaching about Taiwanese food for 20 years, and she was such a natural fit for this project, because she grew up here, and she’s from a different generation. (I think a lot of people have grandmas or other elders who taught them how to cook, which I didn’t have.) Tapping into Ivy’s knowledge made this book what it is today, especially as she could pinpoint specific ingredients that could make or break the dish. For example, in Japan they use bonito flakes to create flavor in broths; in Korea, they’ll use anchovies. Here in Taiwan, we use the dried olive flounder, this bony little fish which you can’t really find in markets anymore. But Ivy knew exactly which ingredient it was, and what gave soups their distinct Taiwanese flavor, and it made the book much richer and more nuanced.

I also wanted to give credit to every single person that we interviewed. In so many cookbooks, interviewees are seen as a backdrop—someone you talk to, then leave, and you never see them again. I wanted this to be more of a historical document or a work of journalism, where you give credit where it’s due. I’ve been inspired by cookbooks that are doing that, such as Hawa Hassan’s In Bibi’s Kitchen, or Toni Tipton-Martin’s Jubilee, and I wanted to do that for Made in Taiwan. So we shared credit, and every single person we interviewed got a copy of the book, and it’s cool to see how excited they are to have their stories out in the world.

Your guide to the Taiwanese pantry feels like a walk through Taiwan’s history as a colonized nation. What should we understand when we use these ingredients?

The biggest realization for me was that these pantry items are our history, that they were made in Taiwan. A lot of them are made with Japanese-era colonial recipes, because the Japanese monopolized a lot of our core industries for over 50 years–so the way soy sauce, rice wine, black vinegar are made reflect the Japanese style. But there are also condiments that you can only find in Taiwan like soy paste, or the sweet red sauce known as Haishan sauce. Someone will always argue that Taiwanese cuisine is just a branch of Chinese food, but when you look at the history of these condiments, they evolved from Taiwan’s distinct history. I didn’t really understand how Taiwanese cuisine was different from Chinese cuisine before breaking down the pantry items, and it was a huge help in developing the thesis of the book.We have our own distinct food in our own distinct pantry, because we are a completely different country.

There are so many ingredients and textures and techniques in this book. Is there a specific Taiwanese textural or sensorial approach?

With Taiwanese food, it’s all about texture. And Q—that textural blend of both elasticity and chewiness, sort of like a gummy bear—flows through so many dishes. Even bread or noodles have a little bit of a spring and resistance to them. There’s a recipe in the book for a meatball soup, where the vendor told me that the meatball should be “so chewy that you should be able to play ping pong with it,” and that’s so central to the pleasure of Taiwanese food. Items like pork floss may not be for everyone, because it’s quite dry by design. But it was created because people needed to store their excess pork; and in the process, it gained a wispy, coarse texture that, when you put it over porridge or bread, becomes something quite distinct—very sweet, but also savory as well.

This book was created with an all-Taiwanese design team. What conversations did you have about the look of this book?

I met an amazing food stylist and photographer duo—Yen Wei and Ryan Chen—who work out of Tainan in an old soy sauce factory-turned-photography and pottery studio. Tainan is like the Williamsburg of Taiwan–it’s super hipster and I love it. When I visited their studio, I saw in the back room they had all these props and old antiques collected, and Yen wanted to incorporate them into the food styling. So I met them on that challenge, and reached out to a few museums that offered us bowls and dishes and tiles to photograph. While we were shooting, Yen kept telling me all the stories of the dishes, and so I incorporated the stories back into the book. (I’m so proud of the design of the book, and in particular the cover. I really love its color, because it reflects what you see when you look at Taiwan. That deep green is the color of our forests, our mailboxes, our passports. As it turned out, the book’s designer, Jen Wang, is Taiwanese-American, and she got it immediately.)

You call Tainan the “food capital of the nation,” the “snack city.” What is it about the city that makes it ideal for the maximalist snack culture?

Growing up, my parents only took me down to Tainan because that’s where they’re from, the oldest city in Taiwan. Then as I got older and I became a food writer, I was really confused why every single article focused on Taipei, never on Tainan. But it makes sense—because foreigners might fly into the capital, but if you ask any Taiwanese person, they will all tell you to go to Tainan. Street food culture came from there, and the idea of the one-stall special, which evolved around the periphery of temples. The first temples and markets were in Tainan, and it still has the densest concentration of temples in the entire island. So a lot of these street foods that are unique to Taiwan originated in Tainan, and once you know the history you see why.

The night markets you can find in Taiwan today are very different from the night markets of the past. How do you distinguish between the night market and the street vendor food culture?

Even street food itself is sort of fading away, in part because, as the older vendors that I interviewed revealed, they don’t want their kids to be one-dish specialists anymore. It’s low-paid, it’s hard work, and they want their kids to go to college and have a better standard of life. Also, the people who are entering the night market business now aren’t longtime street vendors, but young people who want to try out new concepts. So the markets don’t necessarily offer old-school dishes anymore—they offer things covered in cheese, or made Korean-style, or framed with quirky Instagram-ready aesthetics. The night market is becoming more youthful, more trendy, and also populated by more chains. Many of the foods are also made in central kitchens that are shipped to night markets all over Taipei—so you see the same vendors or same type of foods being served everywhere.

You also speak with a lot of affection about beer restaurants known as rèchǎo. How would you describe these spaces to someone who’s never been in one of these restaurants?

It’s like going to your local pub, sometimes semi-outdoors—though now with climate change, most folks have indoor air-conditioning—and it’s family-style food that is greasy, full of flavor, and really diverse. The rèchǎo started in the 1980s, usually combining regional Chinese foods, Japanese condiments, and local seafood into their own genre of dining—and all of it has to be cooked fast, which was made possible by gas burners that were introduced across the island in that era. I think the rèchǎo represents how people really eat these days—it’s where most Taiwanese people will decompress after a long day of work. The night markets are more for Taiwanese-Americans or tourists from other countries, but if you check into a rèchǎo, you’ll see how actual Taiwanese people enjoy a great meal.

You give a whole section of the book to the Indigenous foodways of Taiwan. How do you see the continuing influence of those foods on contemporary Taiwanese food today?

There are 16 recognized Austronesian tribes in Taiwan, but that classification is very generalized, and was in many ways forced upon them by the Japanese, so it’s really hard to define. Every tribe has their own area, where what they eat is very specific to the region, so it’s difficult to expand the staples of Indigenous cuisine. Certain tribes have been able to promote ingredients that can be farmed, but it’s still very difficult, because a lot of their ingredients still grow wild. But where you can really see the influence of Indigenous foods is in the fine dining scene. For example, we have a spice called maqaw—it tastes exactly like lemon pepper—and some Indigenous tribes will use it to season meat or sausages. Fine dining chefs are incorporating maqaw into their dishes as they learn about ingredients native or endemic to Taiwan. These young chefs are training abroad, in the United States and Europe, then they come back and redefine modern Taiwanese food while exploring their Taiwanese heritage and identity.

You explore some endangered culinary traditions, such as pastries made with the rice dough known as kueh. How do you see recipes in a book like yours carrying them forward?

There’s a couple that I profile, Huang Teng-Wei and Chou Pei-Yi, who are actively trying to preserve these recipes, and they took me to their local wet market and introduced me to the kueh vendors, all of whom were grandmas over 70 years old, selling their kueh for a buck or two at most. It was really heartbreaking, because once these grandmothers pass away, you won’t see these foods sold anymore. But no one values it here—if you go to Taipei, you see a lot of fancy chocolate shops and modern French bakeries instead. But I hope that by showing how much effort goes into the kueh, people in Taiwan will see why it’s worth preserving. 

So many of the recipes we collected came from older folks, like the scallion pancake recipe offered by Tung Yu-Chu, who was in his nineties when we spoke. But many older generations don’t write things down, they don’t measure lengths or weights correctly. And that’s so necessary in preserving recipes, because without those measurements, dishes will be lost. The Western culture of writing cookbooks is such a beautiful thing, and I hope in the future there’ll be more cookbooks like that here in Taiwan as well.

You bring up the point of certain dishes already being iconic—the beef noodle soup, for example. Are there other dishes that you would love to see rise to the same level of prominence?

One dish is braised minced pork belly, because it really should be popular everywhere—it’s more iconic in Taiwan than beef noodle soup, and it’s so easy to make. Another one is the crystal meatball, because that embodies Taiwanese cuisine: very Q, very chewy. It’s seasoned with tapioca starch and sweet potato starch (two of our main carbohydrates) and stuffed with pork (the island’s main protein) and you can’t find it anywhere else in the world. So it’s an effective way to tell the narrative of Taiwan in a single dish. People might not love it everywhere due to the texture, but maybe it’s a matter of time. Fifteen years ago I couldn’t have written a cookbook that included stinky tofu, but now people know it and love it. It’s awesome how fast things have changed.

When you talk about family feasts, you mention your mom having a rule of six—the idea that six elements always had to show up on the table without fail: soup, seafood, meat, vegetables, rice, and fruit. If you were going to assemble your table of six, what would be on your table?

I think family-style food is very much designed for a big crowd, which is slowly fading in Taiwan—we have one of the lowest birth rates in the world, and a lot of young kids don’t cook. But if you end up in a grandma’s house, that configuration of six will be there, to ensure you don’t have a boring meal, but also to ensure your meal is balanced. My six-part meal would look like this: braised minced pork, daikon and pork rib soup, stir-fried sweet potato leaves, stir-fried clams with basil for a seafood element, and fruit (a must at all times). And fried rice for my carbs, of course. But I picked dishes that are easy to prepare, and some folks would rather put a huge amount of effort into their dinners. It takes a lot of work to make this meal, and if you had a really big family, you would pull out all the stops.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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There’s a moment during every cook’s first milk-braise when it becomes clear that life will never be the same. For me, it happened when the creamy liquid hit the hot skillet, gushing between two double-cut pork chops that had been seared to deep mahogany. My kitchen became thick with the scent of bloomed fennel seed and sweet dairy, and almost immediately, the milk began to simmer, creating a luxurious hot tub in which my pork would become so tender, the first bite would nearly make me lose my balance. 

For my newfound milk-braising bliss, I have Rita Sodi and Jody Williams—who recently released Via Carota, a tome of Italian recipes centered around dishes served at their eponymous West Village trattoria—to thank. Contained within are the secrets of their braciole al latte, pork chops braised in milk, which alerted me to the magic of this technique.

The recipe begins with pork fat—more specifically, with instructions for making strutto, an empyrean paste of pancetta, pork belly, garlic, rosemary, and fennel. You rub down the (previously brined) chops with this mixture, then sear them in a hot skillet on both sides, nestling in a few leaves of lacinato kale. Then in goes the milk, enough to partially drown the chops before you slide the pan into the oven to finish cooking.

Milk-braising relies on lactic acid, which tenderizes meat and inhibits dryness. In an acidic environment, meat pulls in more moisture and softens more quickly. Then there are the sugars present in dairy, which round out the flavors of whatever’s being braised. As the milk cooks, it curdles—a good thing, for once—and in Sodi and Williams’ braciole, it makes a creamy, aromatic gravy for the chops. 

Sodi, who grew up north of Florence, has known about milk-braising for as long as she’s been cooking. People have been braising with milk in Italy and elsewhere for centuries if not longer. “It sounds like something a dairy farmer would do. If you had money, you’d braise in wine with spices,” says Ken Albala, culinary historian and professor at University of the Pacific, who points to recipes for other slow-simmered dishes in early cookbooks. 

Of course, there are many early examples of meat simmered in dairy or dairy-like deputies, as with yogurt-based curries or the coconut-milk-based soups of Thailand. As Harold McGee notes in On Food and Cooking, intentionally curdling milk in cooked dishes dates back as early as the 17th century, when French writer Pierre de Lune described reduced milk being “marbled” by acidic currant juice.

Pork is a good starting point, but as I’ve learned, you can milk-braise just about anything. “You could do pumpkin with cinnamon sticks, or big turnips with juniper,” Williams says, adding that celery root and cabbage take wonderfully to the technique. 

Her only hard and fast rule? The braising liquid must be whole milk; forget cream (too oily) or skim (not enough fat). The meat or vegetable you choose should also be large enough that it won’t overcook before the milk separates, which takes time.

Williams recommends searing the main ingredient before braising it (at 400ºF); you’ll know it’s ready when it has fully surrendered its rigid structure. 

“You’ll want to wreck it,” says Williams.

This story is brought to you by SAVEUR Cookbook Club, our passionate community of food-loving readers from around the globe celebrating our favorite authors and recipes. Join us as we cook through cookbooks new and old, and share your food pics and vids on social media with the hashtags #SAVEURCookbookClub and #EatTheWorld.

Recipe

Via Carota’s Famous Braciole al Latte (Milk-Braised Pork Chops)

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