(1.) Pan-fried loh bak gow, or Chinese daikon cake. Made from grated daikon and rice flour, and studded with goodies like dried shiitakes, tiny dried shrimp, and fragrant Chinese sausage, it undergoes a preliminary steaming before being seared in slabs and served with oyster sauce. It’s super-laborious but not difficult per se. This is the second year I’ve been making my own, and I think I might have cracked the code.

(2.) Pussy willows, and (3.) A lacquered “treasure chest” filled with the best candies, to usher in a sweet new year.

I posted about this simple dish, my goodness, nearly two years ago. I still love it, and I still make it all the time. In fact, I made two shanks this very week, and my husband has been getting some champion bentos out of them.

I have nothing to add to my original post, really, other than this photo, which I took on a whim the other day because I thought the meat jelly was so pretty. There’s so much gelatin in the shanks, even these boneless ones, that the simmering liquid sets into a beautiful aspic.

“My own wife made them,” he had pleaded, but the officer was unmoved. My mother was secretly grateful for the showdown, since the odiferous cache made her own contraband–three hunks of Yunnan ham and a few sacks of dried shiitakes–look benign by comparison. She passed through without incident.

That wife’s impulse to weigh her man down with smelly greens of her own pickling is the same one that drives my mother, year after year, by mail or in person, to smuggle me these items: Chinese people express love through umami. It’s got to be some inherited memory of peasant life, this enshrining of umami–the instinctive understanding, even among prosperous city-dwellers who’ve never wanted for food, that to eat rice is to subsist, but to eat rice with a smear or morsel of something richly salty is to dine. Sugary indulgences are all right for children, but they’re forgotten the instant they’re metabolized. Only a shelf-stable gift of umami can enliven meals for months to come.

Yunnan ham, if you haven’t tried it (and you probably haven’t, since it’s illegal to import into the U.S.), is a cured pork product that’s a bit like prosciutto, and even more like a Smithfield ham. Dried shiitakes are, well, dried shiitakes, but the ones my mother brings me are several cuts above what’s commonly available in this country. Both ingredients are serious flavor bombs. A slice of Yunnan ham the size of a cheese single can completely transform the character of a pot of stock. As for the mushrooms, when you’re done rehydrating them in hot water, you’ll find that the water itself has become stock.

Since my mother left, I’ve been using these ingredients in just about everything. I don’t really distinguish between Asian and non-Asian applications. Just last night a few slivers of the ham went into a pot of otherwise rather southwestern chili; they’ve also made their way into dishes like steak-and-ale pie. I badly want to recreate my grandfather’s delicious and, as far as I can tell, entirely sui generis take on Yunnan ham sandwiches, which he makes by marinating slabs of it in honey and then piling the salty, gooey stuff between gummy white slices of Life Bread, Hong Kong’s answer to Wonderbread. But I’m about to open the third of my three packets of it, and it seems like a relatively inefficient use of the product. Better to ration it out in soups and braises than to eat half the block in one sitting; I’m less likely to bring on kidney failure that way, too. (Yunnan ham is salty.)

(The holy trinity of sandwich ingredients, à la my grandfather.)

The dried mushrooms have a more identifiably “Asian” taste than the ham. Or the caps do, at any rate; the stalks, which are too tough to eat, add an all-purpose flavor jolt to any brothy preparation. One of my favorite ways to use them is in a casserole I reverse-engineered from a seasonal special at Hon Café. It starts with boneless chicken thighs in bite-sized pieces, which are first flash-seared with scallion tops and then braised with peeled chestnuts* and the rehydrated shiitakes in a mixture of soy and oyster sauces, Shaoxing wine, chicken stock, sugar, and ginger, with a touch of cornstarch for body–all the usual Cantonese suspects, in other words. At the restaurant, they serve it on a sizzling cast-iron platter so that it stays warm and keeps caramelizing, but I’m not that fancy. Here is a not-great photo of my take on the dish, which I served with some dry-fried string beans jazzed up with crispy shreds of that Yunnan ham.

The crumbly sweetness of the chestnuts, the silkiness of the chicken, and the glorious meatiness of those shiitakes, all plump with the braising juices…I’m getting hungry just thinking about it. It happens that I’ve been soaking some mushrooms all day, so I think I’ll make a version tonight that incorporates the red miso I picked up last week at Sunrise Mart. And that concludes this year’s volume of my annual What I Did With My Umami Gifts report. (Last year’s, you might remember, featured a Yunnan ham and shiitake hot pot.) I write them for my mother, to reassure her that I have indeed been dining, not subsisting.

* A note on peeled chestnuts: I have boiled and peeled them from scratch, and I have bought them ready-to-use. Let me tell you right now that there is absolutely no benefit to doing it yourself. It’s time-consuming, kind of painful (the tough inner skins can get trapped under your fingernails, in some cases forcing the tip from the nail bed–ouch!), and I’m pretty sure it’s actually cheaper to buy them pre-treated. I don’t really understand the economics of it, but there it is. If you are in New York, you can stock up on $1 vacuum-packs of them at Pearl River Mart. 

At first glance, it looks like the main difference is in the casting. Depending on your region, you’d have gotten either Enrique Iglesias or (Egyptian popstar) Amr Diab as your emperor. But the real divergence doesn’t happen until the final moments of each spot. In the Iglesias version, the coup is successful, and his despot is catapulted into the arena just as the portcullis is raised on a hungry lion:

In the Diab variation, it’s the emperor who raises the portcullis, releasing the lion on the three women:

Of course, there’s no actual footage of anyone getting mauled, but it’s perfectly clear what’s happening. And it blows my mind.

Now, I don’t want to get too facile here and do a purely misogynistic reading of the Diab commercial. Clearly there’s a political element to it all, and to some extent the three gladiators are being punished in their capacity as rebels, as challengers to the social order, and not simply as “women” per se. In his paper “Advertising and Empire: Selling America in the Middle East”, Robert W. Lawrence even argues that what the women represent, above all, is American imperialism. As such, they must be symbolically crushed by Diab, an Arab, so that the Middle East can feel better about buying Pepsi–which is, of course, among the most culturally imperialistic of American brands.

None of this makes the Diab spot any less chilling to watch. I don’t care if Britney, Pink, and Beyoncé are portraying flesh-and-blood women or abstract symbols; the fact is that, in both commercials, their rabble-rousing is working and the crowd is on their side, and still Diab’s emperor flips the switch and condemns them to a violent death. Now, if I happened to be the political advisor to an actual tyrant, this is just what I’d tell him to do, but as a marketing executive for a soft drink (a soft drink!), I might opt for an approach that didn’t end in the capital punishment of folk heroes without trial.

I have long urged copywriters to consider the consequences of playing fast and loose with high-stakes rhetorical propositions. As I noted some time ago, encountering the conceptual morass pictured above, gravitational collapse is not the only process that can create a black hole.

As usual, nobody has listened to me.

Domino’s Pizza recently introduced a new line of “Artisan Pizzas.” Or did they? “We’re not artisans,” the copy reads. “But this might just convince you we are.” They go on to describe the new crusts as “artisan-style.”

So let me get this straight: The pizzas are artisanal in style, but not actually artisanal, although they taste so close to artisanal that they might fool you, only they never get the chance to fool you, because Domino’s has a policy of total artisanal transparency, although it’s a muddy sort of total transparency, seeing as they’ve opted to call their convincingly artisanal yet admittedly unartisanal pies “artisan,” and, while we’re on the topic, what does “artisan” even mean anymore?

After all that, it comes as a relief to learn that the toppings on Domino’s Artisan Pizzas are standardized and non-customizable, allowing me to skip straight past the part where I’d have had to decide whether to ladle my pie with a white sauce or a “robust inspired tomato sauce,” a concoction apparently inspired by robustness, but not quite so inspired that it is able to attain either legitimate robustness or a hyphen, unless I have it all wrong and the sauce actually possesses both robustness and inspiration as entirely distinct qualities, although we are left guessing as to the particular source of that inspiration.

For some of you, the real story in this post may be that I sometimes order from Domino’s. I don’t know what to tell you other than that the only way I can be made to sing karaoke, an activity I avoid as much as possible until it can no longer be avoided, is by the administering of liquid courage in such doses as to result in a profound depletion of mineral salts, for which the only cure is a Domino’s pie with 24 times my RDA of sodium. So what I am basically saying is that my occasional Domino’s orders are manifestations of a form of sporadic, distress-induced pica.

You believe that, right?

I bought a stack of old Life magazines from a junk store a few years ago and this was in one of them. (It was a great issue all around; check out the pictorial exposé on short shorts–or, as the publication memorably puts it, “tourniquet-tight abbreviated britches.”) I would say that it was ahead of its time, only nobody seems to eat Limburger cheese anymore. I think it would do nicely as a poster, too.

1. Cha Chan Tang (45 Mott St.)

In Cantonese, “cha chan teng” is the generic name for the East-meets-West diners indigenous to Hong Kong. This year-old café gets the transliteration a bit wrong, but the execution mostly right.

Cha Chan Tang is a real treat for Hong Kong nostalgists. Four mock windows–that is, flat-screen TVs with shutters–look out onto looping footage of Hong Kong at sunset. (I assumed at first that they were webcam feeds, but the time difference didn’t add up). The central light fixture is a chandelier made from Vitasoy bottles. And Hong Kong’s iconic iced milk tea is treated here with almost comical reverence: no ice is added to the tea itself, for fear of diluting the precious elixir; instead, each order comes nestled in its own ice bucket.

There are other restaurants in the area operating in the Canto-Western idiom, but Cha Chan Tang is both the sleekest and the most focused. Unlike its competitors (I’m looking at you, Hon Café, with your billboard touting “Sichuan Home Cooking”), Cha Chan Tang doesn’t try to be all things to all tourists. It sticks to the canonical items: crustless toast with condensed milk, ketchupy rice casseroles, beet-free Cantonese borscht. It does this pretty well, and it does it at prices that, even for Chinatown, are remarkably low.

2. Chuko (552 Vanderbilt Ave., Brooklyn)

I’m going to try not to lash out at Chuko, the new ramen restaurant in Prospect Heights. It’s just that I was so looking forward to this addition to my neighborhood’s grim Asian-dining landscape.

(Artist’s impression of the Fort Greene/Prospect Heights Asian-dining landscape.)

It hasn’t delivered.

The good: the noodles are fine, the eggs are great. But Chuko’s pork-broth ramen is very, very rich, and not in a pleasant way. I have had Thai coconut curries thinner than this broth. It actually feels emulsified, almost fluffy on the tongue. And there’s no sharp or pickled element to relieve the palate. The mustard green topping was probably intended to fulfill this role, but it doesn’t. This ramen is exhausting to eat.

I noticed a lot of customers leaving with plastic tublets of left-over broth. Maybe the cooks are congratulating themselves on this imagined coup: “Oh, they love it so much they’re taking it home with them.” But if I were working in that kitchen, I’d be asking myself, “Why are we serving ramen so rich that a diner can’t finish it in a single sitting?”

1. This rather Schiaparelli-like sugar cookie from the Montauk Bake Shoppe:

2. The lobster roll brunch (there were garlicky steamers, too) that followed the wedding of one of my oldest friends:

(Photos by Marisa Marchitelli.)

So, I’ve made my peace with summer and am now fully ready for fall.

There is a Cantonese expression that pops up in kung fu movies to describe an over-eager disciple who has practiced his moves too much, too hard, and has totally snapped as a result. It sounds like “dzou foh yup moh,” which translates literally to something like “the fire is extinguished and the beast enters” (although I could be mistaken on that count since I was never taught to read Chinese–coincidentally, another topic I would rather write about right now than food–and am just kind of guessing phonetically at the morphemes) and it perfectly describes how I am feeling at the moment. It’s similar to the Western idea of “burning the candle at both ends,” but it covers the consequences of over-extending oneself, too: that is, leaving one vulnerable to all sorts of bad things, represented here figuratively as demonic possession.

It doesn’t help that almost all of the social issues in food are what sociologists call “wicked problems”–problems, that is, with complex and changing requirements that mean that there are no true or false solutions, merely better and worse ones. (School food is a perfect example.) Every wicked problem produces dozens of opposing camps, each with its own perspective and arguments, and the trouble is that I am usually sympathetic to several of them at once. Trying to decide where I’m going to stand in the debate overwhelms me to the point where I’d rather retreat altogether.

So, for a little while, I think I’m going to retreat. I’m going to let my brain breathe and see how I feel. And I’m not coming back until I’ve written a goddamned detective story.

Savouries:
If it’s a land-dweller, roast. If it’s a water-dweller, batter and fry. If it grows in the ground, boil to death. Do not, on pain of death, season. Potatoes with everything.

Sweets:
If it’s palatable, slop on a shitload of custard until unpalatable. If it remains stubbornly palatable, bung it in a large bowl in layers and call it a trifle. If in Scotland, batter and fry Mars bar.

I don’t really take it back.