Nasi Lemak 2.0, Malaysia's Answer to the Question "What kind of Chinese Chinese Are You?"

     The above question is scholar/gentleman Warren Tom's favorite line from Wayne Wang's foundational food movie "Chan is Missing."  I was just finishing note-taking from on the Overseas Chinese from Sterling Seagrave's Lords of the Rim, when a plain white envelope arrived from Hong Kong.  It was the DVD of "Nasi Lemak 2.0." I had ordered in my ceaseless search for quotes from pivotal moments in the arrival of Asian food on our shores between 1941 and 2009.
     Malaysia has one of the most complicated histories in Southeast Asia, which is why its population is about 50% Malay, 25% Chinese, 11% indigenous, and 7% Indian in origin.  There is one official language, Bahasa Malaysia. Chinese speak one or two of six dialects. Other languages heard are Tamil, Telegu, Malayam, Panjabi and Thai.  Islam is the official religion.  Talk about identity politics!
     According to Seagrave, the Overseas Chinese, who have settled here since the 15th Century, have done very well.  Jealousy and resentment have flared over the years since Malaysia's independence from the U.K. in 1957.
     "Nasi Lemak 2.0" was made in 2009, so I'm not sure it counts, but it is worth discussing anyway.  Nasi Lemak with sambal, is considered the national dish of Malaysia.

Some of my favorite parts of the dialogue:

Let me tell you this

If you want to learn to make sambal

Please listen closely

I will say this once

Our ancestors interacted with the Malays many centuries ago…

And started communicating in Malay language

So our cuisine also tend to mix with Malay food

(It’s just like white people learning to cook Chinese food.  Chinese food becomes part of his culture too!  This is basically the same concept.)

Nonya people always cook without using measurements.

(Our cooking is based on estimation only)

Yes we use estimation only.

Stop Asking questions

You should try it.

Pimento Cheese and other Schmaltz

The Verdict on Interpretations of Southern cuisine staples, Pimento Cheese,  Cornbread and
Fried Chicken; Can a Yankee-born-Korean-American do it better?

It has been an exciting week in my kitchen.  My in-laws were visiting from Tennessee by way of North Carolina.  My husband accompanied them on NorCal adventures to the Wine Country and Google's galactic headquarters.  We ate at Greens overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge.

These folks have been on some kind of liquid diet since Christmas and have lost phenomenal amounts of weight.  They reveled in In-and-Out burgers, and not just because of the Biblical citations on every piece of packaging.  Ever in search of in-family approval, I decided to go all out on their farewell dinner.
   
Starters: a taste-off of pimento cheeses.  Edward Lee's, the Korean-American chef at 610 Magnolia in Louisville (that's Louvul),  versus Scott Peacock/Edna Lewis' Alabama/Virginia version.  Interesting results:  my husband, nephew and sister-in-law all went for the Peacock/Lewis version because it reminded them of their Aunt Ethel's.  My brother-in-law, bless his heart, went for Edward Lee's.  He felt it had a certain kick.  Men and hotness, observes I.
   
Next was Ed Lee's Dark Braised Lamb Shoulder and his Lardo Cornbread.  Everybody went berserkers.  In my bro-in-law's family, they dip corn bread in milk for breakfast.  He was ecstatic.  Whatever my leftist, Yankee reputation may have been before last night, I am redeemed!
   
Side dishes and desserts were a collection of random recipes gleaned from my serious weeding of Gourmet back issues, and other snatches.  Not the same excitement.
   
The next Big Thing was the call from my son, reporting on the forced slaughter of a rooster in the mountains of Pennsylvania.  He didn't think he could do it, but when told that the dog-wounded fellow had to be put out of his misery, my son screwed his courage to the sticking place.  With the wrong end of the ax he stunned the bird, and with the proper end guillotined him below the ganglia, avoiding the dancing headless rooster act. (Was there some consulting of Google Search to find out the proper location?)  He felt rather virtuous until he found himself listening to "Mack the Knife."
   
I contemplated his chivalry as I begin separating two chickens into drumsticks, thighs and wings to make Edward Lee's Adobo Deep Fried Chicken on one hand, and cut-up breast pieces for Scott Peacock/Edna Lewis' brined and buttermilk-soaked-shallow-pan Fried Chicken on the other.  I did a terrible job.

Nothing like the third century BC butcher to one of the early rulers of China, a description of which, I had sent to the writer, Frances Lam, in honor of his pieces on the last Chinese BBQ chef and Dry Aging of Beef:

Cook Ting was cutting up an ox for Lord Wen-hui. As every touch of his hand, every heave of his shoulder, every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee — zip! zoop! He slithered the knife along with a zing, and all was in perfect rhythm, as though he were performing the dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the Ching-shou music.

“Ah, this is marvelous!” said Lord Wen-hui. “Imagine skill reaching such heights!”

Cook Ting laid down his knife and replied, “What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now — now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and following things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint.

“A good cook changes his knife once a year — because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month — because he hacks. I’ve had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I’ve cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness. If you insert what has no thickness into such spaces, then there’s plenty of room — more than enough for the blade to play about it. That’s why after nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone.

“However, whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until — flop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away.”

“Excellent!” said Lord Wen-hui. “I have heard the words of Cook Ting and learned how to care for life!”

No, for sure, I am a hacker.  I did carefully render some chicken fat for one of the side recipes.  But tomorrow, when the two methods of frying chicken are stacked up against each other, the cuts may not matter so much.

The guests and the event are what matters now.  Five years ago, we hosted an engagement party for this couple, who were married in San Francisco in that break-in-the-clouds when it was possible.  Here we are five years later, getting to celebrate the new DOMA-free-stability in their lives!  My own nephew will join us to be inspired by their pioneering efforts.

   
Did I mention that one of the guests is Georgia born, so able to do this Judgement of Paris thing on the chicken thighs and breasts?  Ed Lee's lardo cornbread, with some added kernels of sweet corn, Peacock/Lewis Tomato Gravy, Ed Lee's updated Ambrosia,  (No, Mom, no canned Mandarin Oranges.) and Ed Lee's Togarashi Goat Cheesecake will complete the menu.  And lots of champagne from that Napa Valley tour.

 
And all sent forth with the best of intentions.

The Recipe - Not Your Ordinary Korean Food Movie

   

The non-supernatural ingredients for Doenjong jjigea.

The first time I watched The Recipe I thought it was just an ode to a much loved local food, as Tampopo is to noodles, or Jiro Dreams of Sushi to freshly caught fish. In the final scene, the journalist Chio sums up the recipe for the transcendent doenjong  jjigea: 

The ingredients of the doenjiang
That Kim Jong-gu missed in his last moments:
Crocks made of clay saturated with ume blossoms,
Salt dried only in sunlight and then drained of seawater over time,
Soybeans grown by baby pigs,
Lacquer Tree Spring water from a deep forest.
Yeast. Ume wine yeast.
Rice stalks. Resonance created by crickets.
Sunshine, wind and tears.
Method for making. You wait.

This recipe was enough to set me searching Manhattan for the proper restaurant to try it.  It was sort of a silly idea on a sweltering June day, as this is the kind of stew you want in a cold Korean winter.  No matter, a sudden downpour left me drenched and shivering and I found the right place not far from Penn Station.  Quite honestly, this was the first time I'd eaten Korean food.  Now I'm wondering how I survived without kimchi and her pickled sisters.
   
But back to The Recipe.  This is a contemporary Korean film.  I don't speak Korean, but I'm enough of a linguist to hear some fun things happening with urban dialects.  Besides loving shots of farmland and forest, which are rapidly being gobbled up by high-rise apartment buildings, there is the expected cut at Japan.  The hero's Japanese grandfather wants him to come home to an arranged marriage, tricks him into leaving Korea, and unwittingly causes his death by blocking his return.
   
The second time I watched The Recipe, I realized that the narrative depends on folkloric devices.  One of the most famous tales of star-crossed lovers in China, Japan and Korea is that of the Weaver and the Cowherd.  Separated by fate, they are the stars Vega and Altair.  Only on the seventh day of the seventh month,  can they cross the Milky Way and be briefly re-united.  In Korea, the festival to celebrate this is called Chilseok.  In The Recipe Chio finds and interrogates the hero, Goblin boy, on the night of a village festival, and learns how the two were separated.
   
When Chio tries to find him again, he realizes he had seem a ghost, much as in the American folkloric trope, the Hitchhiker.  The plot is more complicated than Le Grand Chef I and II.  What they share is idealization of pure ingredients and cooking from the heart.  

More Asian Food Movies: The God of Cookery

Stephen Chow and friends await customers for their newly-developed Explosive Pissing Shrimp Beef Balls

   




Hong Kong produced The God of Cookery (Chinese: 食神; traditional Chinese: 食神; pinyin: Shíshén; Cantonese Yale: Sik San) in 1996, a year before Hong Kong's reversion to Chinese sovereignty.  For my purpose---a source of quotes conveying the spirit of Hong Kong cooking in the '90s---that's spot on.  The locations alternate between the Night Market stalls of Temple Street, brightly lit banquet boats and a roof-top view of the sky-scrapers of the city center.  

   
I'm not a student of Stephen Chow's films, but this comedy seems to riff on just about everything, everywhere.  Stephen, a Top Chef type who styles himself The God of Cookery, satirizes the Chairman, of Japan's Iron Chef, by over-analyzing everything from banquet dishes to a bowl of ramen.  If the Kitchen God is the messenger of moral behavior from Chinese families to the Gods, the message on Stephen is not good.  He's abusive, shallow, and greedy; about as far from a Confucian gentleman as you can get.  He can't cook but he can manufacture showy items with kung-fu style, yet another cinematic touchstone.  The market ramen scene and simple bowl of rice scene have to be nods to Tampopo, the 1985 Japanese "noodle Western,"  which similarly dissects the components of ramen soup. (Here, I must note that noodles were invented in China during the Han Dynasty, and presumably so were noodle soups...)  Of course Stephen Chow does finally learn both cooking and moral behavior when he happens upon the Shaolin Monastery and apprentices in its kitchen.

   
Could he have learned to cook the dish both chefs start for the final contest, "Buddha Jumps Over the Wall," in a Buddhist monastery?  It is a dish that requires two days of preparation and contains quail eggs, bamboo shoots, scallops, sea cucumber, abalone, shark fin, chicken, Jinhua ham, pork tendon, ginseng, mushrooms, and taro.  

   
As it turns out he cooks a different dish for the contest, a simple rice dish made for him by the stall cook, Turkey, with love.  Stephen says "Everyone can become a God of Cookery.  Even parents, brothers, sisters and lovers, as long as they have heart.  Everyone can become a God of Cookery." (Strange words coming from the king of franchises and vendor of canned Explosive Pissing Shrimp Beef Balls.)

   
This "cooking from the heart" trope is only one of the themes in Tampopo, where ramen is all about getting the precise recipe and correct technique.  The 2010 Korean film Le Grand Chef 2: Kimchi Battle definitely comes down on the side of heart.  

   
In my reading of Gourmet Magazine of this era, the travel articles about Hong Kong encompass both vendor food and banquet cuisine, while the restaurants opened in San Francisco and New York as a result of the influx of Hong Kongers before Revision leaned to the elaborate techniques and extensive ingredients of the banquet boats.  Enjoy both and The God of Cookery!

On Asian Food Movies

Which is the real modern Royal Chef?

Warren Tom, my fellow Asian Art Museum volunteer, has a theory: Food is the fourth religion of China.  It's Warren who suggested my study of the packaging of Asia by Gourmet magazine for WASPs like me would be incomplete without including  popular films featuring Asian food.  He even gave me a list of must-sees, which leaned heavily towards the work of Wayne Wang, featuring San Francisco's Chinatown.

I needed a break from book proposal crafting and historical research, so I'm on it.  I've learned so much!  It's not just the Chinese who worship food.  Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam,  all make films in which food has a starring role.   (You can catch most of them on Netflix or Amazon Prime.)  I'm going to write about them, in no particular order, musing about food and what seems to this old white girl to be their cultural content, and asking questions.  I will discuss the plot, so you probably should watch before reading further!

     I

I'm crazy about Le Grand Chef (Hangul: 식객; Hanja: 食客; RR: Sikgaek), the 2007 film from South Korea.  Here's the set-up:  A Japanese, Fujiwara, wishes to return the knife of the last Korean Royal Chef to its rightful owner.  Durring the Japanese occupation of Korea, his father, a Japanese officer,  had witnessed the last Korean Royal Chef cut off his hand to avoid cooking for the conquerors.  The son wants to atone by retuning the knife.  (As it turns out, this Korean-Japanese tension will boil up at the movie's end.)

     

But how determine the rightful heir to the knife?  Ah hah!  A cooking contest, of course!  One of the contenders, Bong-Jo, owns a restaurant which is a remnant of the Joseon Dynasty cooking traditions, Woonam-Jung (Old Stone Bowl). Bong-Jo has dreams of franchises.  The other, Sung-chan, is an itinerant produce seller, caring for his senile grandfather on a small farm. Bong-jo and Sung-chan are one-time rivals, grandsons to former assistants to the Royal Chef.  (They are shown above, standing in front of crocks of fermenting kimchi. )

     

The contest reveals beautiful and intriguing dishes, a celebration of  Korean food.  Two of these, golden blowfish and Korean beef, will have a special role.  The blowfish turns out to have been the source of Sung-chan's dropping his apprenticeship at Woonam-Jung.  In the end, Sung-chan will sacrifice his pet cow to produce perfectly butchered beef, and the contest-winning beef soup, the one cooked for the last Choseon Emperor.  His cow goes peacefully to the slaughter, which is shown un-apologetically in the film, reminding me of the Chinese sacrifices to ancestors.  In contrast, Bong-jo's steer is badly handled and its meat hemorrhages, setting up the final round, the beef soup that made the deposed Emperor cry.

    

Little bites of history intrigue the viewer:

*The Choseon Dynasty kept hawks to catch pheasants.

*Taro root was sometimes called herring.

*In cooking films, the camera alternates between the shoulders and face of the actor and the hands of stand-in professional chef.

*Charcoal is a key ingredient in classic Korean cooking.  (This interested me because of the fuel shortage evident in China which made the discovery of coal in the Han Dynasty a boon.) 

*Korean country-cook stoves resemble the little Han ming-chi stove in the Asian's collection.  

*Charcoal burners are lonely the world over.

*As he sells his produce, Sung-chan dispenses nuggets of "food as medicine," so familiar in ancient Chinese writing on food.

 Not all is taken seriously:

*The judges are over-the-top in their descriptions of tastes.

*Instant ramen, maybe because it was a Japanese invention?

*A fight breaks out among the beef carcasses.

When he tastes Yuk-ae-jang, the beef soup Sung-Chan makes according to his grandfather's recipe, the Japanese Fujiwara announces:

"Now I understand why King Soon-jong was moved to tears.

The beef soup contains every aspect of Korea.

The long serving cow is Korea’s grass-roots democracy.

The hot-pepper oil is Korea’s hot and lively spirit…

The taro roots represent a nation that does not submit to foreign power.

The bracken is the vigorous life that spreads like wild grass.

What the Royal Chef cooked for the King was not just simply beef soup.

To the king who had lost his crown, he demonstrated that Korea’s spirit will live on.

The king could read his chef’s heart. And that’s why he cried."

Bong-jo thinks he's discovered the secret beef soup recipe, but it is really a Japanese recipe given to his grandfather by the occupying general.

Fujiwara explains:

"It's delicious but it's not something the Royal Chef would have made.

Using fried bean curd and soy sauce is a Japanese tradition, not Korean.

I'm actually stunned. This tastes exactly like a soup that's been in our family for generations.  It's as if my mom came to life and made it for me.  I don't know how you learned to make it but whoever gave you the recipe, probably didn't want it to be revealed because it is a soup with both Korean and Japanese origins."

Gasp!  

Sung-Chan is wins the knife.

     

Lest you think this is all just cinematic diversion, let me point you to Anders Riel Muller's comments on the situation of small farmers and food in South Korea.  With less than 8% of the population employed in the agriculture sector, 90% of its food is imported.  Only since the Asian financial crisis of 1997 have farmers and consumers sought the kind of alternatives seen in Sung-chan's produce truck.

Le Grand Chef  has given me an appetite for Korean food, and for Korean art and history, which thankfully, are next up in my Asian Art Museum training.

     Stay tuned for Le Grand Chef 2: Kimchi Battle!