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How Asian cuisine reshaped the California palate
By Andrew Lam |
August 9, 2012, Thursday
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WHEN we first came to San Francisco many years ago from Vietnam, my grandmother made a catfish dish that required the burning of fish sauce in a clay pot.
Unfortunately, the pungent cooking caused our Irish neighbors to call the fire department and complain about some "toxic smell." Mortified, our family apologized and kept our windows closed whenever Grandma had the urge to prepare some of her authentic Vietnamese recipes.
Many years passed. Grandma's gone. But I'm confident that, if she were still here, she would appreciate knowing that what was once considered unsavory (or even toxic), and a reminder of how different my immigrant family once was, has become today's classic. One of San Francisco's top restaurants, Slanted Door, is Vietnamese owned and it features caramelized catfish in clay pot prominently; reservations should be made two weeks' in advance.
For in California, private culture has - like sidewalk stalls in Chinatown selling bok choy, string beans and bitter melons - a knack for spilling into the public domain, where it becomes a shared convention.
Think about it: three decades ago, who would have thought that sushi - raw fish - would become an indelible part of American cuisine? Or that curry powder and soy sauce would be found down Aisle 3 of Safeway? Or that an entirely new basic taste -umami, meaning savoriness, a loan word from Japan - is now part of American culinary idiom?
Or put it this way: the Californian palate had shifted along with the state's demographic, where one in four is now an immigrant. There are 112 languages spoken in the Bay Area alone. On warm summer afternoons, the city turns into a modern tower of Babel. The languages of the world - Chinese, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Thai, Japanese, Hindi, Vietnamese, and many more I do not recognize - echo from the street, accompanied by assorted cooking aromas.
To live in California these days is to live in the crossroads of a global society and a global table.
Andrea Nguyen, author of "Into the Vietnamese Kitchen: Treasured Foodways, Modern Flavors," a truly authoritative book on Vietnamese cooking, declared from her Santa Cruz home that, "California cuisine is intrinsically ethnic."
But it didn't feel that way at the beginning. For the first few years in America my family and I were terribly homesick. At dinner time, my mother would say: "Guavas back home are ripening this time of year back at our farm." But then a friend, newly arrived to America gave my mother some seeds and plants. Soon mother's small garden in the back yard was full of lemon grass, Thai basil, Vietnamese coriander and small red chilies. Soon, homesickness was soothed by the fact that home was coming, slowly but surely, nearer to the golden shore.
Transgression
But if California food is intrinsically ethnic, there is another element that is just as essential: the nature of its transgression. It is here that the jalapeno meets star anise and paired with a dry, smoky pinot. Or consider the avocado. Though not served in Japanese restaurants in Japan, it is otherwise as pertinent to Japanese cuisine in California as sunny skies are to the myth of California living. Creativity is fertile when nourished in the loam of cultural diversity and cultivated with openness and a disposition for experimentation.
In my lifetime here I have watched the pressure to move toward some generic, standardized melting-potted center deflate - transpose, in fact - to something quite its opposite, as the demography shifts toward a society in which there's no discernible majority, no clear single center. If there's a theme to the America 2.0, it is hybridization and remix, and diverse heritages. The mismatched becomes the chic.
Instead, the story I often see is one where one crosses, by various degrees, from ethic to cosmopolitanism by traversing those various hyphens that hang over the Hop Fat supermarket.
One lives in an age of enormous options in an astounding diverse and fertile region where human restlessness and fabulous alchemical commingling are becoming increasingly the norm. One can't help but learn to refine one's taste buds accordingly to reconcile with the nuances of the world.
Andrew Lam is an editor with New America Media and the author of "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora" and "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres." His next book, "Birds of Paradise," is due out in March, 2013. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.
Unfortunately, the pungent cooking caused our Irish neighbors to call the fire department and complain about some "toxic smell." Mortified, our family apologized and kept our windows closed whenever Grandma had the urge to prepare some of her authentic Vietnamese recipes.
Many years passed. Grandma's gone. But I'm confident that, if she were still here, she would appreciate knowing that what was once considered unsavory (or even toxic), and a reminder of how different my immigrant family once was, has become today's classic. One of San Francisco's top restaurants, Slanted Door, is Vietnamese owned and it features caramelized catfish in clay pot prominently; reservations should be made two weeks' in advance.
For in California, private culture has - like sidewalk stalls in Chinatown selling bok choy, string beans and bitter melons - a knack for spilling into the public domain, where it becomes a shared convention.
Think about it: three decades ago, who would have thought that sushi - raw fish - would become an indelible part of American cuisine? Or that curry powder and soy sauce would be found down Aisle 3 of Safeway? Or that an entirely new basic taste -umami, meaning savoriness, a loan word from Japan - is now part of American culinary idiom?
Or put it this way: the Californian palate had shifted along with the state's demographic, where one in four is now an immigrant. There are 112 languages spoken in the Bay Area alone. On warm summer afternoons, the city turns into a modern tower of Babel. The languages of the world - Chinese, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Thai, Japanese, Hindi, Vietnamese, and many more I do not recognize - echo from the street, accompanied by assorted cooking aromas.
To live in California these days is to live in the crossroads of a global society and a global table.
Andrea Nguyen, author of "Into the Vietnamese Kitchen: Treasured Foodways, Modern Flavors," a truly authoritative book on Vietnamese cooking, declared from her Santa Cruz home that, "California cuisine is intrinsically ethnic."
But it didn't feel that way at the beginning. For the first few years in America my family and I were terribly homesick. At dinner time, my mother would say: "Guavas back home are ripening this time of year back at our farm." But then a friend, newly arrived to America gave my mother some seeds and plants. Soon mother's small garden in the back yard was full of lemon grass, Thai basil, Vietnamese coriander and small red chilies. Soon, homesickness was soothed by the fact that home was coming, slowly but surely, nearer to the golden shore.
Transgression
But if California food is intrinsically ethnic, there is another element that is just as essential: the nature of its transgression. It is here that the jalapeno meets star anise and paired with a dry, smoky pinot. Or consider the avocado. Though not served in Japanese restaurants in Japan, it is otherwise as pertinent to Japanese cuisine in California as sunny skies are to the myth of California living. Creativity is fertile when nourished in the loam of cultural diversity and cultivated with openness and a disposition for experimentation.
In my lifetime here I have watched the pressure to move toward some generic, standardized melting-potted center deflate - transpose, in fact - to something quite its opposite, as the demography shifts toward a society in which there's no discernible majority, no clear single center. If there's a theme to the America 2.0, it is hybridization and remix, and diverse heritages. The mismatched becomes the chic.
Instead, the story I often see is one where one crosses, by various degrees, from ethic to cosmopolitanism by traversing those various hyphens that hang over the Hop Fat supermarket.
One lives in an age of enormous options in an astounding diverse and fertile region where human restlessness and fabulous alchemical commingling are becoming increasingly the norm. One can't help but learn to refine one's taste buds accordingly to reconcile with the nuances of the world.
Andrew Lam is an editor with New America Media and the author of "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora" and "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres." His next book, "Birds of Paradise," is due out in March, 2013. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.
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