“Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart. For those of you who don’t know, H Mart is a supermarket chain that specializes in Asian food. The “H” stands for han ah reum , a Korean phrase that roughly translates to “one arm full of groceries.” H Mart is where parachute kids go to get the exact brand of instant noodles that reminds them of home. It’s where Korean families buy rice cakes to make tteokguk, a beef soup that brings in the new year. It’s the only place where you can find a giant vat of peeled garlic, because it’s the only place that truly understands how much garlic you’ll need for the kind of food your people eat. H Mart is freedom from the single-aisle “ethnic” section in regular grocery stores. They don’t prop Goya beans next to bottles of sriracha here. Instead, you’ll likely find me crying by the banchan refrigerators, remembering the taste of my mom’s soy-sauce eggs and cold radish soup. Or in the freezer section, holding a stack of dumpling skins, thinking of all the hours that Mom and I spent at the kitchen table folding minced pork and chives into the thin dough. Sobbing near the dry goods, asking myself, “Am I even Korean anymore if there’s no one left in my life to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy?””
@ElsieDee , that article made me cry. Geez. I married a white guy and he’s always game for eating anything Vietnamese (as long as it’s vegetarian), and my family loves him, but there’s a weird sense of cultural loss I feel in that if we do have children, they’re not going to be fully Vietnamese kids, even though we both agree we want to teach them Vietnamese language and culture. Especially since I don’t live near my family and my Vietnamese language skills are just ok. Sigh. Every time I go home to visit, I ask my mom to teach me some of her recipes and she’ll show me, but she never has anything written down in specific quantities. I really gotta get her to write this stuff down so I can at least have it when she does eventually pass on.
I’ve been thinking about this a fair amount recently- it’s certainly not a simple task but other people definitely take this on as well so there seems to be advice out there including this article (with link to the organization featured). It’s pretty basic but it seems like a good start and I like that it’s not based in the technical aspects of cooking but rather the perspectives of those you’re trying to learn from.
For measurements specifically I’ve been looking for techniques to get around that and ran across a useful recipe development tip from ChefSteps (which I couldn’t find a link to, sorry) for measuring ingredients that are added “to taste”: Using a sensitive digital scale (preferably set to metric), put a bowl full of whatever ingredient you’re adding to taste (eg, sesame oil), tare the scale (set it to zero) and add as much as you think is appropriate from the bowl. The resulting negative weight on the scale is the amount of ingredient you used so you can just write that down and figure out the volume later if you want by weighing out that amount and then pouring it into a volumetric measure. I know that sounds complicated but it’s pretty reasonable in person (which is why I wish I could find that damn link, sorry).
That’s actually the reason I’ve been thinking about family recipes for a while. I’m mixed with the asian side of my family having been here since my grandparents earned their citizenship during WWII. I always thought that we only had a few recipes from their background because 1) the lack of resources and ingredients available here, 2) how young my grandparents were when they immigrated, and 3) they were of that dyed-in-the-wool type of immigrants that very much tried to assimilate their children into the US.
As such, we only have a few dishes on my mother’s side that can be said to be from my grandparent’s country at all. However, I was recently asking my parents about how they grew up and realized actually there were more dishes that they used to make that were just lost over time. I was surprised to learn that my grandfather (who died too young for me to remember) made monggo, which was a pretty common dish I’ve literally never had or knew he could make. I certainly wish I had the chance to have his monggo and learn the recipe.
TL;DR, I think your mom would very much appreciate sharing her recipes with you and definitely would want succeeding generations to know about them so I certainly hope you’re able to pursue that. There are so few tangible connections to preceding generations, especially when there are oceans between ourselves and our ancestors. Being able to literally taste something your grandparents tasted (especially if you never met them) gives you insight that just can’t be had from facts or even a photo.
Two pieces from tastecooking.com by Dylan James Ho (thought I’d linked to the Vampiro article before but now I can’t find that post).
The Vampiro article was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award in the “Dining and Travel” category.
Two semi-related pieces from Gustavo Arellano; unsure when the Southern Foodways article was written, but the LAT piece was live yesterday.
https://www.southernfoodways.org/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-souths-acp-kings/
It’ll never happen but I’d love to see GA in over at the LAT food section.
he does write for the LAT food section sometimes, he has done reviews and other works that are in the food section. did you mean in a more permanent roll?
He has been an editor. I’d like to see him replace PM.
He has the journalistic experience, in-depth local knowledge … he’d be an excellent replacement.
Yes. Do this now. I know many people who regret not having done this when the window of opportunity still existed. It also stimulates generational stories which you can pass on as well to the next generation.
Gustavo Arellano would be a terrible choice for an editor for the LA Times.
As the editor of the OC Weekly, he showed a concerning disregard for facts. When readers pointed out errors in the published articles, he would attack those readers. At one point, he actually responded that he didn’t care about facts because he was all about the page clicks.
Print is in trouble, but the direction he tried to take the OC Weekly never made sense and probably led to it shutting down sooner by driving away long time readers. Who would’ve known that insulting and berating your long time readers was not a good idea?
He wasn’t a good editor; he was a professional troll.
"Kindra Arnesen’s middle school was a plot of marsh a hundred yards off the southern coast of Louisiana. At 12, after her mother lost her job, Arnesen began skipping school to walk to the harbor in Buras, a town near the mouth of the Mississippi River. A dredge boat ferried her to Bay Adams, where she met a crew of oystermen. They gave her a flatboat, rubber boots, burlap sacks and a hatchet. With a rope looped around her waist, she trudged through the marsh, between the mud banks and the tufts of saw grass, tugging the boat behind her.
“It was just beautiful out there,” Arnesen says today. “Serenity.”
It wasn’t hard to find oysters then — they were everywhere. She bent into the water, yanked out a cluster, shook off the mud, tossed it in the boat. When the boat was full, she climbed onto it. She cleaned the oysters, hacking off debris and dead shells, and fed them into the sacks. By the end of the day, she would have filled 10, earning about $100, the cash placed in an envelope with her name written on it that she picked off the hood of the foreman’s truck. She supported her entire family, with enough left over for Girbauds jeans, Z Cavariccis high-waisted pants and white K-Swiss Classics.
After oyster season, she fished for mullet, shoveled ice at Wet Willie’s Seafood or worked the deck on shrimp boats that left after dark and returned at dawn. The summer she turned 14, she and a girlfriend unloaded 100-pound sacks for aging Vietnamese oystermen. The girls hauled as many as 800 a day, for a dollar a sack.
“As a young girl in a port town, a lot of bad stuff could’ve happened to me,” she says. “Instead of getting in trouble, I worked on an oyster boat. The men and women I worked with taught me to stick up for myself. They saved me from the big bad world.”
Arnesen has since devoted herself to protecting those fishermen from that big bad world. She now runs her own fishing business, bringing amberjack, mullet, pompano, sheepshead and shrimp to distributors that service restaurants in New Orleans and ship up the East Coast. Most days, when not at sea, she drives between Venice, the last town before the Mississippi emptied into the gulf, and New Orleans, about 90 minutes north, buying parts for her fleet, signing paperwork and unloading thousands of pounds of fish from the back of her Chevrolet Silverado 3500 pickup. She has nevertheless found the time to become one of the most prominent national advocates for gulf fishermen. Since the BP oil spill, she has attended just about every public meeting or legislative session concerning the future of the Louisiana fishing industry, which provides about a third of all seafood caught in the continental United States."
Climate change. Community. Re-engineering nature.
What is lost, what might be gained.
In addition to this article, I strongly recommend reading Elizabeth Rush’s “Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore.”
Loved this column:
This is the first article I read by this guy. Is he on FTC?
That was excellent, thanks for the link. I share an awful lot of this guy’s opinions. Broadly, I think people who “don’t want everything to be about politics” are lucky they have the luxury to ignore politics. Some don’t, since politics has an inescapable impact on their lives.
“This idea of prison foods—mainly, “What is good enough?”—requires a fair bit of philosophical reconciling. Constitutional scholars have argued the extent to which prisoners’ rights are afforded ever since the 13th amendment was adopted: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.” These terms leave a lot of leeway for interpretation when it comes to deciding what’s for dinner in lockup.
One argument is the inmates broke societal law and deserve to be here, thereby forfeiting their right to complain about the mushiness of food. Another is that taxpayers foot the bill, so if they don’t like the watery goulash, well, tough shit. The counterargument is that the $3.717 spent on each prisoner covers not only food costs, but labor, paper towels, and cleanup supplies, plus equipment repairs. At that price, you cannot possibly provide sustenance resembling anything a free citizen would deign to call food.
But is being fed poorly inhumane? Should criminals be deprived of any pleasure from food? Isn’t that counterproductive if the purpose of imprisonment is rehabilitation?
Prisoner advocacy organizations exist in every state, in the form of religious groups and the ACLU, but getting substantive legislative reform for prisoners’ rights is perhaps the steepest of uphill battles. For one, making the voting public empathize with criminals is a hard sell.”
Originally published in Lucky Peach
I found this to be an intriguing read:
As a white woman, raised in a very rural (and blindingly white) community, this glimpse into a new(ish)-to-me world is much appreciated - and gives me a better understanding of discussion in the thread @hanhgry started:
(If people feel this belongs on the Boba/Bubble Tea thread, I’m glad to move it!)
Thanks for the article, @ElsieDee!
I can relate to a lot of what is in that piece. I grew up in the diverse suburbs of Washington DC, but bubble tea shops didn’t become a thing until the mid-2000s, when I was in high school and college. I had heard of it and knew it was an “Asian thing” but first tried some random bubble tea place in high school and got hooked along with my other Asian (and non-Asian! friends). Of course when you’re 16 you can down all sorts of sugary stuff. When I got to college there was an abundance of boba shops everywhere-- I’m sure the large number of Asian international students had something to do with it. I have fond memories of sitting in the giant Ten Ren right off campus, studying (haha yeah, actually studying) with my friends and ordering snacks and boba for hours. And then introducing my then-boyfriend (now husband) to boba for the first time and being happy that he actually liked it instead of being weirded out by it. 
"Really, aguachile is a roadmap to Sinaloa, a state whose name is often tied to the drug war and the larger-than-life dons who have become its bombastic, public face. Aguachile, Valle explained to me on my first visit to Don Vergas, began in the hills, where chiltepín still grows wild between plantations of poppy and cannabis, then drifted west toward the sea. Along the way, it touched Sinaloa’s disappearing indigenous traditions, centuries of mestizaje , cultural and economic ties to the United States, and two of the major industries — shrimp and agriculture — that drive the Sinaloan economy.
On my first visit to Don Vergas, in April 2018, Valle told me that if I wanted to try the “original-original” aguachile, we could go look for it together in Sinaloa — on what he would later call our “super mega mission.” I told him I would love to go, only half expecting it to happen, as he slid a plate of aguachile across the counter. Crystals of Maldon salt cracked between my molars. The chiltepín blazed a trail of heat across my tongue. I’d eaten plenty of aguachile before, I told him, but nothing quite like this.
“ Verga ,” he exhaled with a Cheshire smile, using the word that gives his restaurant its name. Translated literally, it means “mast” (as in a boat). In this context, it meant something more like “dude” or “no way”’ Sometimes, it means “cool” or “good;” sometimes it means “shitty.” Mostly, though, verga means “dick.”
“That’s because you’ve never been to Sinaloa.”"
This is a quite unexpected and intriguing list.
“… a list of state-specific cuisines, each based on a longstanding diaspora (like Vietnamese food in Louisiana), an Indigenous community (Abenaki in Vermont), or something totally endemic (New Mexican in New Mexico). Our goal was to highlight a cuisine worth traveling to each state for, much of which you truly can’t get anywhere else. In some cases, it was so hard to choose that we included an honorable mention. At a time when much of the travel we’re doing is domestic and road-trip-based, it feels apt to celebrate America’s varied food cultures—and maybe even discover a little something about our home states along the way.“