Chinese Food and me
Chinese Food: culture, history and eating, Fuchsia Dunlop. James Baldwin: interview. Design codes: architects should be involved, good for sustainability. Grants.
UnConference Invite: You are invited, do come (Sep 15)
James Baldwin: interview
Design codes: architects should be involved, good for sustainability
Grants: Magnificent Grants, Century Fellowship; Non-Trivial Fellowship
Chinese Cuisine: I was excited to do the podcast with Fuchsia Dunlop (pod notes below). Food has always been important in my family. Cuisine and cooking was thoroughly discussed, debated and eaten while growing up.
Enough that I took some of that to university where I ended up writing a cookery column for the student newspaper.
The conceit of the column was that you needed to (1) be able to cook on no more than two electric hob rings (2) cost the same or less than the canteen (3) take less than 30 minutes, and the quicker the better.
There is a great deal of cooking and a great deal of Chinese cooking that you can do with these constraints. Especially if you had a rice cooker or perfected microwaved rice (an underrated technique for certain food; good for 1 cup of rice or microsteamed/blanched vegetables).
When we met, my partner thought the food obsession was particular to me and my family. However, as we started some travels around Asia, she picked up that our chats in food were closer to the median person. In my home town of Ipoh, Malaysia the natural rhythms of food chatter: where to eat, how to eat, what to eat, how best to cook… is a constant topic of discussion.
Of course, Europe and the Americas and so on have food obsessions but, I contend, to understand the Chinese diaspora you need to understand the relationship to food - the history, culture, art and philosophy - and of course the cooking and eating of food.
Chinese cuisine in its entirety is too enormous for one person or one life to truly grasp. You glimpse this truism from Fuchsia’s books. On one level, this is unsurprising for a nation and diaspora of a billion+ people, multiple cultures within a culture and thousands of years of cuisine.
On reading Fuchsia Dunlop, I started to understand the cultural and historical underpinnings of my family and food. I had a greater appreciation for my mother’s food arts and what skills she brought from Singapore and before that China. These are a few vignettes that my conversation brought to mind.
Sweets and deserts: My father liked sweet, stodgy British puddings. In large part, this was because he never had this growing up. My Mum still talks about ice kachang (an iced desert popular in Malaysia and Singapore), and Cendol that were available for 5 cents in the 1960s and while that part of SE Asia has a kueh (cake) tradition, the pudding tradition is absent in Chinese food. Puddings sit too heavy at the end of a meal. Milk and diary are not prominent.
Finding British puddings appealed to my father’s sweet tooth. I can see now that a small part was also a reaction to what was missed growing up.
Steaming: I steam a moderate amount in cooking. In particular I will just use a wok and a trivet or chopstick to steam fish and other dishes. This turns out to be a rarely used Western technique. It’s a very old and long serving Chinese cooking technique. It also seems to surprise most uni students, but is very easy to do on one cooking ring.
Knife skills, racism, cultural wars: Much Chinese food is cut up small. We use chop sticks so need small pieces of food. Evenly sliced pieces of food cook in a more even fashion and enable wok cooking. Knife skills are highly rated to enable this and other dishes. But, in earlier times these small and some times unidentifiable (to westerners) pieces of food were used to accuse Chinese restaurants of poor quality, low quality or cheap ingredients. Many of these ingredients such as offal are considered cheap cuts in Europe, but prized cuts in China and its diaspora.
Mouthfeel and gloopy bits: This value difference on offal (in modern day) is in part as the western traditions tend to lack strong traditions on valuing texture or mouthfeel. I love gloopy, gelatinous, boney, knuckle pieces. My Mum and I will gnaw over bones and the like. We enjoy texture and mouthfeel. In some dishes this is the major joy. Jellyfish is all about texture, it has no flavour. Much offal, or off cuts are about the unique textures they bring to the mouth.
I think if you’ve not grown up to value mouthfeel and the stories around texture, this is difficult to appreciate.
Vegetables and soup, also health: At a Chinese meal, my Dad will always order soup and also whatever was a good looking vegetable. These were always major parts of the meal. You needed a wide spread of textures, contrasts, types of food and a soup and vegetables were always part of this. Reading Fuchsia, I understood more intellectually the Chinese banquet and the harmony the meal seeks even if potentially a gourmaud goes too far. MyMum will also talk about what types of food to eat under certain illness conditions.
Here is the podcast with Fuchsia and notes below.
Fuchsia Dunlop is a cook and food writer specialising in Chinese cuisine. She was the first Westerner to train as a chef at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine, and has spent much of the last two decades exploring China and its food.
In her latest book, Invitation to a Banquet, Fuchsia explores the history, philosophy and techniques of China's rich and ancient culinary culture. Each chapter examines a classic dish, from mapo tofu to Dongpo pork, knife-scraped noodles to braised pomelo pith, to reveal a singular aspect of Chinese gastronomy, whether it's the importance of the soybean, the lure of exotic ingredients or the history of Buddhist vegetarian cuisine.
In this podcast episode, Fuchsia joins host Ben to dive deep into the history, culture and techniques behind Chinese cuisine. From the ancient origins of steaming to the finer points of knife skills and texture, Fuchsia provides fascinating insights into what makes Chinese food so unique. We talk about our origin food dishes:
“there's one dish that is very dear to me that sort of expresses partly why I fell in love with Sichuanese food. And that's fish fragrant aubergine or eggplant. I think when I went to live in Sichuan in 1994, what was so impressive was that the local food was unlike anything I'd had in England. It was all very fresh and healthy and all these seasonal vegetables and amazing flavors. That's the thing about Sichuanese cuisine that it's all about the art of mixing flavors. So this particular dish for me just represents the sort of-- I mean, it's made with pickled red chilies, ginger, garlic, spring onion, and a bit of sweet and sour. Then you have the sumptuous kind of golden butter-ness of the aubergines. So it's a really homely dish with cheap ingredients and it's sensational. Sichuan everyone thinks [numbing and hot], lots of chilli and Sichuan pepper. But actually, it has this kind of melodious heat with a hint of sweetness and it's just conjuring up this complex flavor from a few limited palette of seasonings. I think that's one of the things that I fell in love with Sichuanese food”
Fuchsia debunks common myths and misperceptions about Chinese food in the West, from the idea that it's unhealthy to the notion that exotic ingredients are eaten only out of poverty. She traces how historical circumstances led Chinese cuisine to be seen as cheap and lowbrow in the West compared to French or Japanese food.
Delving into the cultural exchange around food, Fuchsia offers a nuanced take on debates over cultural appropriation and argues that an openness to different cultures can be "life enhancing." She shares colourful anecdotes from her research and travel in China that bring dishes like Pomelo Pith and Shanghainese "Western food" to life.
We chat about:
Steaming and its importance as a cooking technique.
The importance of bland food, and how my mother needs to eat rice regularly
How to understand mouthfeel and the joy of texture in Chinese cuisine
Knife skills and the skills of the wok
Fuchsia’s writing process
On mouthfeel and texture:
“if you want to be able to experience it all and to eat on a kind of equal basis of appreciation with Chinese friends, then you really need to open your mind and palate to texture because it's so important. But the interesting thing is-- because I've written about this and talked about it a lot because I find it fascinating. It's also really funny because so many of the words we use in English to describe these textures sound really disgusting.
Transcript here/Podcast episode. Self recommending!
I was reading the Paris Review Interview with James Baldwin. He was asked:
Can you discern talent in someone?
JB: Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.
That last part… endurance. Some call the quality… stamina, or energy, or grit, resilience. This ability to keep going on. As I age - increasingly I think this is a very important quality. This ability to endure and continue to create work.
The interview is 29 pages, and is like a heightened podcast of today, though done in 1984. The Paris Review version is here (I think still freely available from archive) , or if you are paywalled, write me as I have a copy.
He ends:
Q: How does it strike you that in many circles James Baldwin is known as a prophetic writer?
BALDWIN
I don’t try to be prophetic, as I don’t sit down to write literature. It is simply this: a writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees. No one can tell him about that. No one can control that reality. It reminds me of something Pablo Picasso was supposed to have said to Gertrude Stein while he was painting her portrait. Gertrude said, “I don’t look like that.” And Picasso replied, “You will.” And he was right.
Hana Loftus writes in the Architects’ Journal:
Design codes could – and should – be the quickest and most effective way of pivoting the construction industry into delivering low-carbon, climate-adapted buildings that are designed for our ageing population and changing ways of life. They offer the opportunity to replace the stock building designs – which cheap plan-smiths repeat time and again across different sites – with models that are exponentially better for people, place and planet.
The reality is that not every client – whether private or commercial – can afford (in time or money) a new bespoke design from the award-winning end of our profession, which is why they rely on the end of the industry which turns out a pattern-book planning application at a very low fee.
Codes should provide practical and robust design templates – just as the Victorian and Edwardian pattern books did for their generations – that can be easily adapted with little effort to a given site, and that are buildable, affordable, and resilient.
But design codes will only deliver on this potential if our best architects elbow themselves into the process of developing them, rather than standing on the sidelines with a mixture of disdain and fear. This is an opportunity to shape a whole generation of new buildings for the better – and one that architects should seize quickly, before it is too late.
As long time readers know I run a microgrants programme. So, I keep an eye out on other grant programmes. Here are a few (EA tinged) aimed at young people:
Non-Trivial Fellowship for people aged 14-20 - 8th October. If you're accepted, you'll join an 8-week online program, with expert guidance to get you making a difference right away. You’ll also receive a $500 scholarship and will be eligible for $30,000 in funding
Magnificent Grants is a new $100,000 fellowship over two years. You need to drop out (leave university).
The Century Fellowship is a 2-year program that supports people early in their careers who want to work on challenges the world may face this century that could have a lasting and significant impact on the long-term future.
Links:
Insects represent >80% of animal species. They also have a special magic: most of them undergo complete metamorphosis. The ladybug begins life as a spiky black crawler; the garden tiger moth starts out life as an extravagantly furred caterpillar. (New Yorker) . https://twitter.com/benyeohben/status/1698014445081940065?s=20
“Marriage is the single most important differentiator when it comes to happiness.” (Atlantic).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oi38cQMORQY