Hillbillies, Greens and Pigs

West Virginia is a weird place.

Anyplace that is known for moonshiners and Mothman is bound to be seen as a tad bit odd. But I am not talking about hillbillies and banjos here. Well, not directly, anyway.

I am talking about food and culture.

I can hear it now–you are laughing and saying, “West Virginia has culture?”

Well, sure it does–anyplace that has people in it has culture. I grew up in West Virginia, so I reckon I should know something about the culture in West Virginia, or at least enough that I can talk about it in an articulate fashion.

The reason that I said that West Virginia is a weird place has nothing to do with Mothman, and everything to do with history and food.

See, it is like this: technically speaking, West Virginia is considered a “northern” state, because during the Civil War, the northwestern portion of Virginia decided to stick with the Union, while the southeastern part seceded. Which is why West Virginia is a state. Which it is. I just wanted to make that clear, because I have noticed that a lot of folks from other parts of the country don’t get that. They seem to think that when we expatriate children of the rolling hills and red clay soil say “I am from West Virginia,” that we mean that we are from the western part of Virginia. They always ask, “How do you like Virginia Beach?”

My answer is always, “I dunno, everyone in West Virginia goes either to the Outer Banks or Myrtle Beach.”(If you are laughing while you read this, you are probably from West Virginia.)

Which confuses them. But that doesn’t confront me none; my point is this–West Virginia is a state, not of mind, but a physical place that has been a State in the Union for well over one hundred years now. Got it? Good.

Now, as I was saying, West Virginia is technically considered a “northern” state, but when you sit down to eat there, the food you are tucking into and tasting tells you that you are in the south. And if you listen to the accent in folks’ speech as they say grace, you might notice that it sounds a might bit southern.

What is going on here?

Well, as I have been saying for a while, West Virginia is historically northern, but culturally southern, which essentially makes it a no-man’s land that is betwixt and between political, cultural and philosophical borders. The Yankees are a mystery to us, and the Rebs won’t claim us because we stuck with the bluecoats over a hundred years ago, so I guess that the mountaineers stand alone in the cultural map of the United States.

Or do we?

I don’t think so.

I think that the answer is that we are neither north or south, but Appalachian, and our food, music and other cultural trappings all point to this truth.

Let me explain, by way of examining a phenomena that I noticed a while back. That being the phenomina of how greens are cooked and eaten by both black and white folks in the south, the north, and Appalachia.

Greens are a big thing in the culinary world these days. The most recent US dietary guidelines are trying to get everyone to eat more of these nutrient-dense leafy vegetables, along with lots of other fruits and vegetables. The green leafies are even finding their way onto the menus of upscale restaurants, usually cooked either as an Italian-inspired sauté with garlic and olive oil, or in a kind of neo-Asian stir-fry with lots of ginger, garlic and chile peppers.

Which is fine and great by me–I love the things, and will eat them so long as they taste good, in just about any way a human can figure out how to cook them. But those “newfangled” cooking methods are not related to how I grew up eating them, and how I once believed everyone ate them.

In West Virginia, quite a lot of folks eat greens of some sort, whether it is kale, collards, turnip greens, beet greens or creasy greens. Black or white, it doesn’t matter, you likely eat greens of some kind. City folk and farmers alike eat them, and I am told that rich or poor does not matter, though I have to admit that the only folks I personally knew of growing up who ate them tended to be middle class and on down the socio-economic ladder. This could just point to the fact that I grew up without knowing many rich folks, or it could just be that greens were a preferred food for poor folks. I don’t know the answer to that question, and besides it isn’t overly pertinent to the points I am trying to make.

The pertinent and interesting thing is, that unless we were from a different ethnic background, such as Italian, where the garlic and olive oil came in, we all tended to eat our chosen leaves cooked one way–with smoked pork of some sort included. Some people used a hambone, others a hamhock, and some used belly or jowl bacon. What kind of smoked pig didn’t matter, what mattered was that the greens were simmered with it for a good long time so that the smoky flavor of the pork melded with the bittersweet flavors of the leaves and the whole thing became permeated with a delicious richness that one simply could not resist.

Of course there are variations depending on who is doing the cooking and eating; some people added hot sauce or peppers, and others did not, and some used onions, while others eschewed any other additional ingredients as being unnecessary to the point of sacrilege. One thing is pretty well constant and clear in my recollection of how things were done in the kitchen “back in the day.”

And that is the idea that greens and pig go together in the pot.

Why does all of this matter, one might ask, and why would it set my mind to ruminating?

Well, it all started a month or so ago, when I went to cook dinner for the women at a local domestic violence shelter. I volunteer there, and cook dinner once a week, using my culinary skills to give the women and kids there something to look forward to. I take requests, do the shopping, and come out once a week or so to cook. While I’m there some of the women or kids come in to talk with me, or to help, or just to watch me cook, and I find that often I become a sympathetic ear for their woes or a shoulder for their tears. I also become a bit of entertainment, a source of funny stories and laughter.

And, I stand as a testament to the fact that there is a future beyond the cycle of pain and humiliation that domestic violence brings to people’s lives. In my own quiet way, I tell the folks there that that survival can become something beyond a day by day thing, and that growth and strength come from taking the hard road of stepping out of that cycle and into a new life, and working to make it happen.

Anyway, I had gotten a request from the only African American woman there to make collard greens.

So, I brought my pressure cooker and about fifteen pounds of greens, along with a pound of bacon, some onions, garlic and jalapenos, some chicken broth and set myself up to fix about four batches of greens as a side dish. I had to do them in batches to cook enough greens for everyone; luckily, they only take about five minutes to cook in a pressure cooker.

While I was washing the greens, an older white woman came in, and was so excited to see the collards, she hugged me. Her accent told me she was a southerner, and I laughed. “I ain’t had greens in so long,” she said. “I grew up eatin’ collards all winter long. Ain’t nothin’ better,” she added.

It turns out she grew up a sharecropper’s child in the hills of Arkansas. We traded Appalachian farm girl stories, and she helped me clean the greens.

Another white woman came in, and got equally excited. She was from southeastern Ohio, and she had grown up eating greens with bacon, too. Ohio is most undeniably a northern state, but here was a white woman who grew up there eating greens cooked “right and proper” as my Gram would say.

This started me thinking.

Then the woman who had asked for greens came in as the bacon was cooking with the chiles, onions, and garlic. She grew up in Pennsylvania, in the city if Pittsburgh, which is certainly not the south, nor is it overly Appalachian, though I would argue that there is a significant population of Appalachian folks there who came out of the hills and hollers, looking for work in the steel mills.

But I wasn’t surprised by her insistence that greens be cooked with pig. I had already figured out that African-Americans carried their southern ways of cooking with them when they went up north and out west. Again, there are variations, but a lot of black cooks, even after generations in the north, still cook essentially southern food. Soul food and the food that white southerners, particularly poor white southerners, eat is pretty much the same thing.

Years earlier, I had surprised a black friend of mine who grew up in Toledo, Ohio, by knowing how to cook greens. She was shocked that a white girl knew a thing about greens, because where she grew up, greens were soul food that white folks would not touch. I pointed out that I was a southerner when it came to cooking and eating, and that white folks in the south eat “soul food,” too.

When I served dinner that night, two other white women came in and started sniffing the pot of greens that I was dishing up alongside the meatloaf, mashed potatoes and gravy. One was from Newark, which is a small city on the edge of Appalachian Ohio, and she started licking her lips over the greens, and heaped a bunch of them on her plate. The other was from Columbus, Ohio, which is the capital city and is situated in the central part of the state far from the Appalachian foothills. Columbus is where the Great Plains begin, and all of the land from there north and west is flat from being scraped level by the glaciers of the last ice age.

She stuck her nose over the pot, wrinkled it and said, “What is -that-?”

I said, “Collard greens.”

She backed up and made a face. “Aren’t they black people food?”

I felt my shoulders stiffen, and I looked over at the woman who had requested the greens. She just rolled her eyes and shook her head. Casual racism obviously bothered her, but she, as the only black woman in the shelter, wasn’t going to say anything about it.

I, however, didn’t have to live there.

I plastered a smile on my face and said, “Where I come from, they are poor people’s food. Everybody eats them, from the middle class on down, whether we are white or black. We eat them, and love them, because not only are they really healthy for you, they taste really good.”

At which point the sharecropper’s daughter took up the conversation and began singing the praises of greens. The woman who was of Italian descent took up the thread and started telling how her grandma cooked them like rapini, with lots of garlic and olive oil. The tense moment was gone in a flood of food and reminiscence.

I was gratified that the woman from Columbus did eat them, and in fact liked them, but her words made me think and wonder about why it was that some white women in Ohio knew what greens were and how to cook them, while others evinced the belief that only black folks ate them and knew nothing about the eating and cooking of them. It wasn’t even that they cooked them without pork products–they didn’t cook them at all.

Well, it got me to thinking. And here is what I figured out.

The white folks who eat greens are not just southerners–because if that was the case, then no white folks in Ohio would eat them who wasn’t originally from the south. As I noted, the African American tradition of cooking and eating greens traveled up north, as illustrated not only by my friend from Toledo, but by my contact with black students in culinary school from Massachusetts, New Jersey and Pennsylvania who were scandalized by a chef’s attempt to bring down the fat content of collards by cooking them with smoked turkey wings instead of the sacred pig. Their horror was my own.

I finally realized that it was not only a southern tradition, but also an Appalachian tradition, to cook greens in combination with pork. The women from Newark and southeastern Ohio were the key to my hypothesis. They both grew up in the Appalachian region of Ohio, which showed the same exact culinary hallmarks that I grew up with in West Virginia, and the woman from the hills of Arkansas grew up with.

So that is what I think–the tradition of cooking greens of some sort with a smoked pork product is not only a soul food phenomena, or a white southern tradition–it is an Appalachian hillbilly culinary practice, which is just a little bit distinct from plain old southern foodways.

Now, if you have made it this far in my culinary detective work, you deserve a reward. Just for y’all, here is my recipe for my collard greens, which the women at the shelter, both black and white, rich and poor, city and country, insisted that I write down for them.

Quick Collard Greens
Serves 8

Ingredients:

2 pounds fresh collard greens
½ pound bacon
2 tbsp. olive oil
1 medium onion, diced
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 small jalapeno, seeded and minced, or ½ tsp. red chile flakes or to taste (optional)
1 cup vegetable or chicken broth
salt and pepper to taste

Method:

Wash collards and remove the thick vein. Roll each leaf up, cigar style, and cut into ½ inch wide ribbons. Drain well in a colander.

While collards drain, cut ½ pound sliced bacon into ½ inch pieces, and fry in the bottom of a pressure cooker on medium heat until crispy. Remove bacon, and set aside. Add olive oil to bacon grease, and sauté onion until golden brown. Add garlic
and jalapeno or chile flakes and sauté until fragrant.

Add broth, and bring to a boil. When boiling, put collards on top, put lid on pressure cooker and lock into place. Bring up to full pressure and cook for five minutes. Quick release pressure, open lid, stir in bacon and serve.

Note: If you do not have a pressure cooker, this will take several hours to cook—plan time accordingly.

Book Review: The Story of Corn

The Story of Corn
Betty Fussell
North Point Press: New York, New York 1992
Winner of the IACP Jane Grigson Award 1993
Out of Print

This book isn’t a cookbook, but it is a book that cooks might enjoy. It is a book that unlocks the cultural history of that most American of crops: corn.

If you think of corn only as that stuff in your freezer that you pop in the microwave and serve with butter, you might not realize the complex tangle of mythology, history, biology and anthropology that come together to weave the complete tapestry of this one plant’s relationship with humanity. But, if you realize that corn underlay the entire diets, monetary systems and religions of various Native American societies, you might have an inkling of the power that this crop held and still holds today. Or, if you are a farmer who grows the stuff and knows just how dependant upon human intervention corn is for continued existence, you might know a piece of the picture Betty Fussell paints. If you live in a Latino community and you cook and eat such corn-based foods as tortillas and tamales on a daily basis, you will know that corn is integral to the lives of you, your family and your neighbors, and more importantly, you will understand intimately that corn is a part of you, your culture and your people.

All of these different facts come together in The Story of Corn; it is a monumental achievement to write such a complex cultural history of an extremely important foodstuff; Betty Fussell’s research is complete and very accurate. Because of this, some readers whose interests are not so catholic as my own might skip around from chapter to chapter, but the book is written in such an engaging way that I cannot imagine not being enchanted by finding out where each new thread will lead as the author unravels the tangled skein of corn’s meaning and place in the world.

Interesting facts abound in the book; from a culinary perspective there are many nuggets of worthwhile knowledge to be mined here. For example, Native Americans of various cultures discovered that treating dried flour corn with alkali in the form of wood ashes or slaked lime (calcium hydroxide), not only removed the hull of the grain and made it more digestible and easier to grind, but actually made corn more nutritious as well. Alkali treatment made more protein available for digestion and released three important amino acids–tryptophan, niacin, and lysine–for use in the human body. Simply grinding corn into meal or flour does not release these necessary nutrients, and so it was found that people who live with simple ground corn as a staple will contract pellagra, a nutritional deficiency that, if untreated by a change in diet, can kill.

However, every Native American society that used corn as a staple also treated the majority of it with alkaline substances, thus creating a variety of very nutritious foods, and so were able to thrive on their corn based diets. The variety of foodstuffs created from this treated corn were great–there is hominy, and of course, grits, both favorites in the Southeastern United States regional cuisine. Then, there is posole–hominy that is dried after being processed, and then later cooked into stews in the Southwest. Posole with green chiles and pork is a traditional festival stew in the Pueblos; among Anglos and Latinos in New Mexico, it has become a favorite Christmastime dish. And, of course, the damp, treated corn can be ground into a flour known as masa, which then can be shaped and cooked into tortillas, or mixed with various other ingredients and made into tamales. Both of these dishes have roots that are twined deep in pre-Columbian history; the Aztecs cooked and ate both tortillas and tamales for centuries before Cortez “discovered” them and recorded the range of their foodstuffs.

Though there is not a recipe in sight in the book, reading it did make me hungry. I found myself longing to taste some of the dishes described in the book, so I went into my pantry and dug out some posole, and set to work making up a pot of stew. I had neither pork nor green chiles in the larder, but I did have lamb and various dried red chiles; remembering that the Navajo are herders of sheep and will eat mutton and lamb, I named the dish in honor of them. Since I can’t very well invite everyone who reads this review to come over for a bowl of stew, I will share the recipe. It is written with the use of a pressure cooker in mind, but if you do not have one, just use your regular stewpot. However, I would suggest soaking your posole overnight, and draining off the water, and then making sure you have time to simmer the treated corn for at least three hours to get it to cook properly.

Navajo Posole

1 large onion, sliced thinly
3 tbsp. olive oil or bacon grease
1 lb. lamb stew meat
3 tbsp. flour
salt and pepper to taste
2 chile colorado toasted in a hot pan and soaked in hot water until softened
1 ancho chile done just as the chiles colorado
1 tbsp. whole cumin, toasted
1 tbsp. whole coriander seeds, toasted
1 chipotle en adobo
2 tsp. adobo sauce
4 large cloves garlic
1 ½ cups dried posole, rinsed and drained
bay leaf
1 cup chicken or vegetable broth
1 can Muir Glen fire roasted diced tomatoes
Flour as needed to thicken
Fresh cilantro

Heat olive oil or pork fat in pressure cooker and cook onions until they just start to brown.

Toss lamb with flour, salt and pepper until well coated. Brown in hot oil with onions until well browned.

Take the stem and core out of the three dried chiles and discard seeds if you like. Grind along with cumin, coriander, chipotle and garlic into a rough paste. If you use a blender, grind spices first with a mortar and pestle or a coffee grinder.

When meat is browned, add chile mixture and cook until fragrant and rich-scented. Add soaking water and chicken broth. Fill pressure cooker until halfway full. Add posole and bay leaf, bring to a good boil, lock down lid, bring up to 15 psi.

Cook on low heat for 45 minutes. Take off heat, allow pressure to lower naturally, open lid and put back on high heat and reduce liquid by about an inch or so. Add can of tomatoes and reduce liquid further until it is only about 1” above the level of the solids.

Thicken as needed with flour, correct seasoning and serve with fresh cilantro.

A good hot bowl of this stew was just the thing to drag me out of my snow-induced cabin fever; eating it while reading the Story of Corn was enough to transport me across time and space and deposit my imagination among the cliff dwellers and the folk whose king was feasted upon hundreds of masa-based dishes and who drank chile-spiced chocolate. Reading the book gave me a sense of how much the foods of the New World changed the way that every culture on Earth ate, and it helped boost my appreciation for the creativity and ingenuity of cooks everywhere.

Interestingly, after writing this review this morning, I ended up making a variant of posole stew this evening for dinner. I had taken out a pork butt to cook into shredded pork; I had planned to make corn tortillas and use the pork as a filling. However, upon unwrapping it, I discovered that there was a larger than usual amount of fat running throughout the piece of meat, and the thought of shredding it was very unappealing to me. So, a change of plan ensued.

Out came my trusty boning knife, and I began removing as much of the fat as I could while cutting the meat into bite sized chunks. I had already begun to caramelize a thinly sliced onion and jalapeno pepper, so I decided to make a pork stew. After I took care of the meat, I tossed it in flour and Penzey’s Adobo seasoning. I then added the meat to the onions and chile, and browned it, adding four thinly sliced garlic cloves and another jalapeno and a minced chipotle. I deglazed the pot with a good slosh of sherry, and added chicken broth, some freshly toasted and ground cumin and coriander seeds and Penzey’s Mexican Oregano, then poured in about a cup or so of rinsed dried posole. I locked the lid down on the pressure cooker and cooked it at 15 psi for about twenty-five minutes. While that was going on, I picked over some pink beans I had, and rinsed them.

When the timer went off, I released the pressure, opened the pot and stirred in the beans, along with some frozen roasted red bell pepper bits I forgot I had laying around. I locked it back up and brought it back up to pressure and cooked it for another twenty minutes, opened it up, checked the beans–they were nearly done, and threw in a can of Muir Glen diced fire roasted tomatoes, some paprika and some more adobo. Then, I locked the lid back on and cooked it for a final fifteen minutes. I thickened it up with a little bit of roux, and served it garnished with some sour cream and cilantro.

Considering it wasn’t what we expected to eat, nor was it what I expected to cook, dinner turned out fabulous. Zak pronounced the recipe a keeper, which is why I went ahead and wrote it down here in abbreviated form–it is better than relying completely upon my memory or scribbling it down on a notepad somewhere. Or worse, on an envelope.

The flavors were complex but quite clean–I credit the freshness of Penzey’s spices for that. The meat was fantastic–it was tender and very flavorful, and there was enough fat to moisten it and give it richness without leaving the stew mired in pools of liquid grease. That is always an unappetizing prospect. The posole, as always, gave the entire stew a good strong corn flavor, and the kernels themselves were both tender and chewy, and complemented the pork perfectly. The beans were soft without falling apart, and gave a nice textural contrast to the chewier corn, while at the same time adding a bit of thickness to the broth.

I am glad I was forced to change my plans–it is fortuitious accidents such as these that lead to happy challenges for the cook, and memorable meals.

An Evening With Grace Young

I remember the first time I saw Grace Young’s first book, The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen.

I worked at the Borders Bookstore in Columbia, Maryland in the café as a barista. That wasn’t all I did, of course–I also was a personal chef and had just started teaching Asian cookery through Howard County Parks and Recreation’s excellent adult education program. But I kept my job at Borders for several reasons; I enjoyed making coffee drinks–being a barista, I have always said is like having all the good parts of being a bartender–the fun atmosphere, the cool coworkers, the witty banter with guests, and the creativity of making drinks–without the downside of dealing with drunks. In addition to actually enjoying the job, I got a great benefit–a discount on books, music and DVD’s.

Anyone who has seen my library can attest to the love of books being a major portion of my life. Cookbooks, especially, take up an inordinate amount of room on my shelves, and I am constantly looking at new titles in bookstores, as well as scouring musty-smelling used bookstores for long out of print titles which might contain a crumb of information that I would find crucial at some point in my culinary wanderings.

So, the first time I saw Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen, I had just finished my shift at the Café at Borders and decided to check out the new cookbook titles I had seen a coworker studiously shelving all day. There is where I discovered Grace Young. And her mother and grandmother, all of whom smiled at me from the cover of her book. I picked it up and was hooked.

Unlike many cookbook authors, Grace Young is a storyteller. I appreciate that, since not only do I cook from cookbooks, I read them the way other people read novels. I fully admit that perhaps such behavior is strange; however, it is an outgrowth of a belief that I have held since I was a child that if only you understand what people of other cultures eat, how they cook and why they cook and eat it the way they do, then you have a hold of a key which opens the door to your understanding of them as a people. Food is a transmitter of culture, and I have understood this since childhood. Every culture has special foods that are eaten at certain holidays that have not only nutritional value, but layers of symbolic religious and cultural meaning that can help us understand a great deal about others if we only try and decipher what those meanings are.

I came by this belief because of a single photograph in one book. That photograph haunts me still–it was of a little girl who was probably about four years old in Hong Kong, eating a simple bowl of noodles with chopsticks. The photograph was a close-up, focusing on her eyes, her hands as they held the bowl up close to her mouth, and her expression as she deftly ate what looked to me to be impossibly slippery thread-slender noodles with her chopsticks held in softly rounded fingers.

It was in a book that was part of an encyclopedia set for children, and the book was about culture and holidays around the world. The girl with the noodles headed the chapter that was about food around the world. My cousins had that book, and every time we visited them, I would take that book out and absorb the photographs of people all around the world celebrating beautiful, wondrous holidays and eating foods that I could not even dream of, they were so fascinatingly different. But I always came back to that little girl, her bowl, her noodles and her chopsticks. I just knew that if I could eat those noodles, if I could pick them up with chopsticks and taste what she was tasting, I would be able to have some measure of understanding of what lay behind her haunting eyes. I would be able to experience her world.

So, I took to reading cookbooks about foods from other lands, and in my mind, I traveled to kitchens all over the world and smelled and tasted the lives of people who did not speak English, but that did not matter. I knew that we spoke the same universal language–that of food, family, and celebration.

I digress. At any rate, I opened Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen and came upon a wealth of stories from Grace Young’s family, tales of what they cooked and ate and how they cooked and why they cooked it that way. A full four chapters covered the celebration of the Spring Festival, also known as Chinese New Year, with discussions of the symbolism behind each food that was eaten at that time, and how and why. The complexities of Chinese philosophy and folk belief could be conveyed in a single meal, and I knew I was in familiar territory. Grace Young -got- it.

Clutching the book to my bosom, I scurried up to the cash register, plunked down my tips and bought it. I then spent several days devouring it in great gulps of fast reading, and then, later, took my time digesting the many treasures within.

One great piece of information had me rushing in to flap my arms and crow excitedly to my husband, “That’s it! That’s how to do it! I thought it was impossible!”

Zak is a patient man. He looked up from his drawing desk where he was working on a project for his master’s thesis in digital art and blinked owlishly at me. “What?”

I then rattled off in breathless sentences how Grace Young was the only author who told the secret of getting the true scent and flavor of stir fried food on a home stove. “You have to let the meat sit on the bottom of the wok without stirring it so it will brown a bit and after it sears, -then- you start stirring it!”

He looked at me as if he was disappointed in the great revelation. “But don’t you do that already?” he asked mildly.

I nodded avidly. “Yes, yes, but I thought I was crazy! No other author says to do it. They all say you have to stir fry as soon as the meat goes in, but if you do that, it doesn’t get that seared taste that you get in restaurant kitchens because the stoves are so hot. In a restaurant kitchen, you -have- to stir fry immediately or the food will burn! I’d been doing this, because I answered the phone once while cooking and left the wok on the heat and it turned out really good, but I thought I was doing it wrong! Now I know that is how Chinese American home cooks have been doing it all along!”

I dashed away before he could shake his head and mutter at me. He is patient, really, and can discuss food intelligently–my nattering has probably worn off on him. But sometimes, I still speak in tongues when I come running up to him and blather some incomprehensible thing in his general direction. He almost always smiles and nods, because he knows that he will reap the benefit at the dinner table.

So, at any rate, I felt confident teaching that technique of stir-frying in a wok on a home stove, knowing that it was taught in at least one Chinese-American cookbook and was a technique that had been passed down in a family. It wasn’t just a mistake that I made once that turned out really well. It was something that other people really did, too.

At any rate, when Grace Young’s second book, The Breath of a Wok came out, I ordered it immediately from Amazon. And when it was delivered, I tore the cardboard wrapping from it and proceeded to stare gleefully at the beautiful photographs by Alan Richardson and to read snippets of Grace’s prose, my eyes breath quickening as I learned more about wok culture in one book than I had been able to synthesize from my years of experiences working in a Chinese restaurant, reading Chinese cookbooks and teaching Chinese cookery to countless students, both public and private.

It was funny, too–I had just received a flat-bottomed Chinese cast iron wok from Tane Chan at the Wok Shop in San Francisco, and had been cooking the best Chinese food that I had ever made in it, and was amazed at how hot I could get it on my electric cast iron burner elements on my stove. I had started producing dishes filled with “wok hay” which is what the title refers to–the breath of the wok. It is that wonderful rich scent/flavor that you get from Chinese restaurant food that comes to your table sizzling hot, filled with the savor that comes from being cooked at very high heat in a well-seasoned wok. It is that elusive flavor that I called “wok taste” for years when teaching cooking, but which I refer to now by its Cantonese name, which sounds more poetic, and does have that mystical connotation that food is not only a bundle of nutrients, but it has an energy of its own that we add to our personal energy that exists in our bodies.

“Wok hay” has been pronounced as impossible to recreate at home by such Western cooking authorities as Alton Brown, who insists that Americans are better stir-frying in a regular sauté pan and just resign ourselves to never having Chinese food at home that is as good as a restaurant. Well, I have wanted to tell Alton Brown for a while now that I am going to side with all the thousands of Chinese American mothers, grandmothers, fathers and grandfathers who have been serving food blossoming with “wok hay” and passing the knowledge of how to do it along with their woks to their kids for generations.

At any rate, it was back in November when I found out that Grace Young, as part of her tour of public appearances, was going to be in Columbus at Sur la Table to teach a class on “The Chinese New Year Menu” on January 12, 2005. As soon as I saw that, I emailed Shelley, the coordinator of the culinary programs at the Columbus store and asked if I could volunteer to assist Ms. Young that night. Usually, Sur la Table employees assist the instructors, but I thought that it might be nice if there was someone there who specialized in Chinese cooking to help with prep and cooking so that Ms. Young could talk and teach at the same time and not worry about things like playing with the deep frying oil for the spring rolls.

I was thrilled that Shelley gave me a very enthusiastic yes.

When I showed up that afternoon, Shelley was nowhere in sight, but there was Grace, and an assistant, chopping away at things. Although I was, as my Gram would say, “as nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs,” I did as I always do in those circumstances. I held my head high, walked in as if I was supposed to be there, stowed my jacket and purse, put on an apron, and walked up and asked if I could help.

Grace looked at me, smiled, introduced herself and as I shook her hand and told her my name, and said that I taught Asian cooking at Sur la Table, specializing in Chinese, she squeezed my hand, her smiled widening, and said, “Oh, you are -that- Barbara. Shelley told me you would be here.” As I started wiping down countertops and straightening things, Grace began the process of getting to know me, which meant she began asking a lot of questions. I could tell that she was good at interviewing people.

As she handed me several pounds of romaine lettuce hearts to wash, dry and cut up to be stir fried (yes, stir fried lettuce–I am getting to that), she asked me how I had learned about Sichuan food. I told her the long tale of how I had worked as a waitress in a Sichuan restaurant in, of all places, Huntington, West Virginia, and how I then became “adopted” into the family of the chef/owner, who then started feeding me dinner at his table. In that simple act–in that one act of fellowship, Huy Khuu, the chef, began the process, completely unknowingly, of training my palate to parse out the flavors of Sichuan food. I began to understand the difference between Americanized Chinese foods, and true Chinese foods, both celebratory dishes and home style meals. As I related to Grace, Huy had under chefs from all over China; one was from Beijing, another had been educated in Shanghai, and several were Cantonese, and one grandfatherly gentleman who took a great liking to me, was a dim sum chef from Hong Kong. All of them cooked dishes from their repertoires for employee meals and celebratory dinners that Huy and his wife, Mei, would host.

I told her that once Huy realized that I could cook, I wasn’t allowed to watch him cook anymore, out of fear that I would give away his secrets, but that the other chefs, particularly Lo, my dim sum chef friend, would take me aside and teach me on the sly. It was from Lo that I learned my first Sichuan dish–it was extremely popular in the restaurant, and people would line up around the block to get it when it was a lunch special. It was called “Shredded Chicken with Garlic Sauce,” though the proper name is “Shredded Chicken with Fish-Fragrant Sauce.” Fish-fragrant does not mean that it tastes like fish, it means that the sauce is traditionally used on fish to give it a beautiful, delicious scent. But you can see why the name is nearly always changed to “Garlic Sauce” on an American menu; while it is less poetic, it is more appetizing to the average American.

I told her how, on my last day working at the restaurant, Lo waited until Huy had gone to take his daughters lunch he had cooked for them, then beckoned me back into the kitchen. Glancing around furtively, the tall man, whispered to me to get out a pen and paper, and he said, “I will show you this one time. One time.” He took my elbow and brought me back into the chef’s domain–the inner sanctum. He brought me back to the wok stove, and picked up the Peking pao pan–the smaller, one handled carbon steel wok, and then, began the process of cooking “Shredded Chicken with Fish-Fragrant Sauce.” He explained carefully, in his spotty English, what he was doing and smiled at me as I scribbled furiously in a notebook.
When it was done, we ate it together, and he said, “See, this tastes like my garlic sauce, not like Huy’s. He does something different. I cannot show it to you–it is his. But I give you this gift to say goodbye, because you remind me of my granddaughter back home–full of wanting to know. When you cook it, you will think of your old friend, Lo.”

Lo was right–his garlic sauce tasted different. I had known that for a while–I could always tell when Lo cooked it and when Huy cooked it. There was the slightest different flavor that I could not for the life of me quantify, but it was there.

I told Grace how I remember nearly crying at the sweetness of Lo’s gift that he had entrusted to me, and how for years and years, I studied and looked up recipes in books, and cooked that recipe over and over. And how, finally, about ten years later, figured out what the difference was.

Lo used only white rice vinegar in the recipe, while Huy used both black and white rice vinegar.

Such a small thing, but something that was crucial, that put Huy’s stamp on a traditional Sichuan recipe, and made it his own. When I finally replicated that flavor, I did cry, because I remembered both Huy and Lo, and how Huy would teasingly hide his wok while he cooked with his body when I was in the kitchen, and how Lo would, behind Huy’s back, explain the mysteries of Chinese food to me.

Here is the recipe for Chicken with Garlic Sauce–if you want to taste it as Lo taught me, then replace the black rice vinegar for white rice vinegar. If you want to taste it Huy’s way, then use both. I do not feel guilty giving this recipe away now; Huy has retired and his restaurant is closed, and besides–there are good recipes for just this dish in many other places, if you know where to look. (Try Fuchsia Dunlop’s excellent book, Land of Plenty–it is the single greatest work on the food of Sichuan province written in English that is in print today–I will review it in a future entry. But don’t look for the secret under the name Chicken with Garlic Sauce, because you won’t find it!)

Chicken with Garlic Sauce

1 lb boneless skinless chicken breasts, cut into 1″ long thin strips.
2 tbsp. Shao Hsing wine, or dry sherry
2 tsp. cornstarch
1 tbsp. freshly ground black pepper
2 tbsp. rice vinegar
2 tbsp. black rice vinegar
2 tbsp. dark soy sauce
1 tbsp. Shao Hsing wine
2 tbsp. sugar
2 tsp. chili garlic paste
1/4 tsp. sesame oil
1 head garlic, minced
2 tbsp. minced fresh ginger
1 bunch scallions, white and light green parts, minced
8 fresh water chestnuts, peeled and thinly sliced *
1 piece (about 2 ½-3” square) black cloud ear fungus soaked and drained
1 bunch scallions, dark green parts, thinly sliced
2 tsp. cornstarch dissolved into 2 tsp. water
Peanut oil as needed for stir frying

Marinate chicken with wine, cornstarch and black pepper while cutting vegetables. Mix together sauce ingredients: vinegars, soy sauce, wine, sugar, chili garlic paste and sesame oil. Set aside.

Slice water chestnuts into shreds, about three pieces per slice. Trim any woody parts from the fungus and discard. Roll up fungus into a cigar shape and thinly slice crosswise to make thin ribbon-like shreds.

Heat wok on high heat until it is about to start smoking, add oil and heat until it shimmers, then stir fry garlic, ginger and white part of scallion together for thirty seconds. Add drained chicken, and pat into a layer on the bottom of the wok. Allow chicken to brown lightly by sitting undisturbed on the wok for 45-60 seconds. Stir and fry until chicken is nearly done.

Add water chestnuts, fungus and sauce ingredients. Bring sauce to a boil. Add cornstarch and water, boil until thickened and glossy. Remove from heat and garnish with green scallion tops.

*If you cannot find fresh water chestnuts, which is a very sad thing, then I would suggest that you do like Ming Tsai says and use jicama instead. Jicama looks kind of like a cross between a water chestnut and a giant radish, and has a similar crisp texture and slightly sweet flavor that a fresh water chestnut has. It is also increasingly available in grocery stores. Just peel it and cut it into pieces a bit smaller than the chicken strips, and cook as you would the water chestnuts. If you cannot find jicama, then go ahead and use canned water chestnuts. They have the nice texture, but they contribute nothing to the flavor of the dish. I tell you, that if you use fresh water chestnuts, you will turn up your nose at the canned ones for ever afterwards. There is just no comparison. The fresh ones are sweet and divinely crisp, and they add a delicate sparkle to this particular dish.

By the time all of these stories were told, the lettuce had been washed, drained, put through a salad spinner, cut into bite sized pieces and then towel dried. I was just portioning the lettuce into three bowls for cooking–it had to be done in batches, there was so much of it, and was nearly finished with that when Grace said, “So, you have this old Chinese soul in you and you don’t know where it came from, do you?”

I looked up in shock, and then laughed and said, “In culinary school, all of my Asian student friends used to tease me and say that in my last life I was an old Chinese epicure, and that my tongue is constantly trying to find those familiar flavors again.” She laughed with me and nodded. “Maybe they are right.”

We kept working together, and after that, we traded stories like friends. I discovered that she is as much of a storyteller in person as in print, and we had a good time as the students began trickling in, and the prep work was done. We watched them, and she told me a story of a friend who once had the fortune of having a class with Julia Child, though this friend was not a cook herself. She had been invited to go along with another friend, an avid cook, who bowed out at the last minute. When she realized that it was a hands-on class, the woman tried to bow out, but because she had brought Julia a bottle of wine as a gift, Julia insisted that she stay, and promised to help her.

Well, when the recipes were given out, Julia gave the non-cook the sole, because it was the simplest dish. As the other students scattered with their recipes and began working, apparently our non-cooking protagonist began to make great messes and as Grace said to me, “All the other students just kept as far away from her as possible.”

When the dishes were assembled and done, and were given to Julia to present to the class so they could be eaten, apparently the sole was burned. Completely black. And this, Grace said, was way before Paul Prudhomme had taken the country by storm with his blackened redfish. So, when Julia picked up the dish, and presented it to the class, she said, “And this is a very fine dish of blackened sole. Do try it.”

To the horrified cook, Julia said in an undertone, “Never, ever apologize my dear. Present it as if it is meant to be that way, and smile, and you will be fine.”

Just as the class was about to start, Grace and I nodded together and I agreed–one should never apologize–many dishes’ births come from culinary mistakes.

So, the class began, and we started work. Grace was a wonderful teacher, full of witty stories and funny tales, not only of the dishes themselves, but of her experiences in writing the book. She told of standing behind the cooking line in restaurants in Hong Kong where the wok stoves pour out flames that can jet many feet into the air as the chefs toss the food in large heavy pao woks. She told of one incident where her photographer had clipped a flash to the hood of the stove and she was taking notes avidly beside a chef while three-foot flames roared up from the stove and heat blazed into her face. She said she was thinking to herself “This is great–I hope he is getting lots of pictures.”

When they left the restaurant, she said to Alan, “Did you get a lot of shots of those flames, weren’t they great?” And he said, “Well, I hope I did. The flash fell.” Apparently, it had fallen off of the hood and into a simmering pot of stock and every time the shutter tripped, a flash of light was coming up from the stockpot instead of down from the hood. When she asked him what he was going to do about the flash, he said blandly, “I’ll take it apart and dry it out.”

Apparently, it all worked out well, because there are photographs commemorating that restaurant visit in the book, and she said that the flash, though greatly mistreated, did dry out and work fine.

As she told these stories, Grace was busy cooking cleanly-flavored home style Cantonese dishes in her well-seasoned carbon-steel wok. Blackened by years of careful use and cleaning, she had brought it in her carry-on luggage from New York City, much to the fascination of the TSA. Though she was happy for it, she, just as the rest of us, found it amusing that nail-clippers were too dangerous to carry aboard a domestic flight, but a heavy steel pan was perfectly safe. Though, while it was perfectly safe, she added, it was subject to much careful scrutiny as it was passed through the x-ray machine twice.

She cooked a great version of salt and pepper shrimp, then launched into a home style braised sweet and sour chicken dish that used lemon slices and thick planks of fresh ginger as well as a dash of sugar and some rice wine. Then she made the stir-fried lettuce, which comes to the New Years table to symbolize abundance.

The lettuce was simply cooked and seasoned, with the oil flavored by a lot of whole cloves of garlic simply smashed under the side of the cleaver and tossed into the hot wok. Once they were browned, in went the completely dried lettuce–if it is wet, it cools down the wok too much and you lose the “wok hay” and your lettuce steams or braises, rather than being stir fried. A bit of salt, pepper, soy sauce and sesame oil and the dish was finished, fragrant and sizzling. As we tasted it, I was struck by how the romaine was a study in contrasts; the central rib of it was still crisp and very sweet, while the edges of the leaves had been softened to the texture of silk, and had soaked up the savory flavor of the sesame oil. It was a completely unexpected set of sensations and flavors and I think surprised everyone with its simple, yet satisfying flavors.

After the break, she demonstrated the making of both spring rolls and jiao-zi–northern style boiled dumplings, which she learned from Amy Tan and her sisters. Both dishes represent abundance because they are shaped like different styles of ancient Chinese coins. I had agreed during the break to heat up the deep frying oil and to both fry the spring rolls–something I have done many times myself–and put together the rest of the spring rolls so there would be enough for everyone to eat. It was fun to do the cooking while Grace went on with demonstrating the making and rolling of the dough for the dumplings, and then demonstrated filling and shaping them. By the time the spring rolls were done, the dumplings were ready to put in and I once again got to mind the pot while Grace continued explaining New Year customs and food symbolism, which helped make her teaching go more smoothly and easily.

After class, every copy of The Breath of a Wok was bought and signed by Grace; even though I already had a copy at home, I bought another and had her sign it for me. I didn’t mind–I want her to be as successful as possible with her book tour. I asked her if she had any idea what her next book was going to be and she shook her head and said, “I have no idea.”

Whatever it is, I have no doubt it will be not only beautiful and filled with very useful information, but it will be a very personal recounting of her journey in understanding Chinese cookery, a journey which we are privileged that she shares with us.

Introduction

If I were to open a restaurant, Tigers and Strawberries would be the name I would choose. It is in reference to an old Buddhist koan which goes something like this:

Once, a young monk was sent forth from the monastery to carry a message to another monastery far away. As he walked through the dense forest, he caught glimpses of orange fur in the dappled shade and heard low growls. Surmising that he was being stalked by a tiger, he quickened his steps, but the large cat easily kept pace with him. Fear gnawed at the young monk, and he began to run blindly through the trees, leaving the path he knew in an attempt to outdistance the hungry cat whose panting breath he could feel upon his neck.

The monk lost his way, and to his terror, found himself at the edge of a great precipice. Behind him, he heard the tiger stop, and begin pacing back and forth among the trees, its golden eyes glinting among the leaves. Shaking, the monk looked down and saw that there were vines clambering over the jagged rocks and he determined to try and climb down them. Just as he swung himself over the cliff, and began clambering down the vines which creaked under his weight, he heard the tiger roar, and saw it stare balefully down at him from above.

From below cane an answering roar, and the monk startled and looked down to see a second tiger, pacing along the stones that lined the bottom of the cliff face, waiting for him to descend.

Shuddering, the young monk closed his eyes and clung to the vine, his only means of support. The sound of nibbling teeth caught his attention and he opened his eyes to see a mouse chewing at the vine that held him suspended between the hungry cats.

Next to the mouse, he saw a flash of red.

A wild strawberry grew in a crevice of the stone, and a lone fruit shone invitingly.

The monk reached out, and plucking the crimson fruit, held it to his nose. The sweet fragrance rushed into his nostrils as the last bit of the vine gave way and the monk began to fall. As he plummeted toward the tiger, the monk popped the strawberry in his mouth, and the flavor was the sweetest thing he had ever experienced.

I am inordinately fond of that tale; there is something beautiful in the idea of savoring every small experience given to you in life, even in the face of death, and the idea that life gives us gifts of unexpected sweetness even in the darkest times has given me comfort every time the shadows of sorrow have threatened to overtake me.

In lieu of starting a restaurant, a venture rife with financial and personal risk, I decided to start a blog by the same name instead to chronicle my culinary doings and to give form to many of the ideas that have been fermenting in the back of my brain for years now. Writing is my other passion next to cooking, and it seemed logical to blend the two into a new and interesting presence on the web. Here you will find not only recipes and photographs of the foods that I cook, but also rants, links to articles involving food, essays and book reviews.

My greatest love in the culinary world is Asian food; I have been teaching classes in Asian cookery for years now, with much success. Of the Asian cuisines, I admit that I am most firmly attached to the varied cuisines of China, most particularly the complex flavors of Sichuan province and the clean, pure colors and fragrances of Cantonese cooking. I have tracked down recipes and cookbooks, teachers and tools, ingredients and philosophies inherent to Chinese food for years now, and so will give away these experiences to you in the course of writing this blog.

But it isn’t all about China. You will hear about all of my experiments in the kitchen, whether I am learning how to brew mead or perfecting my ability to make a pie that not only has a flaky crust and tastes phenomenal, but is also beautiful to behold as well. I will document failures as well as successes, and endeavor to tell the whole truth about the good, the bad and the ugly things that go on in my laboratory, my temple, my kitchen.

There will be restaurant reviews and meditations on the sacred nature of food and the psychology of eating. I will talk of history, tell of my cookbook hunting adventures and let you know how my latest classes are going. I hope to entertain as well as inform, and in addition to feeding bodies with good food, I also hope to feed minds and souls as well.

Welcome to my world. I hope you enjoy your stay.