Best Food Writing 2010 (35 page)

We made a trip to Mel-O-Glaze. Sun twinkled from the wide parkway outside and into the vintage bakery. I thought the doughnuts were great. The raised glazed was light and dewy within, the cake doughnut was sweet and buoyant in just the right way. But, it, too, was a Holder.

We went to A Baker’s Wife’s, a tiny bakery cluttered as a church sale with baked goods, but the crisp little gem there was also a Holder. We even made the trip to Granny Donuts a nowhere-looking chain in West St. Paul. The doughnuts there were, at best, average, cold, and greasy tasting. I wished I had made mine a Holder, instead of a Taster.

Doughnuts, it turned out, were not the thin end of the wedge. In fact, doughnuts were starting to become a lot like parenting itself, which in my experience is a series of minute, constant, intolerable failures, interleaved with exhaustion, and punctuated by moments of heart-rending cuteness that somehow add up to general success. The success, of course, comes not from anything one does, but because of nature’s plan: The kids grow. Before I had kids I’d hear things like, “Parenting is humbling,” and I’d put that in the same basket as, “Life is sweet,” and “Happiness is worth pursuing.” Whatever. Now I know that parenting is humbling because you can put all the mighty force of your heart and mind into it and you will still be failing. Where’d I put that remote control?

Still, while doughnuts were looking to be a series of failures they also had become a habit, and when I picked Beans up from preschool one day, he asked for a doughnut. It was the end of the day when we stopped at Wuollet’s, and they were cleaned out. So we crossed the street to SuperAmerica. I hoisted him up so he could peer inside the plastic doors at the plastic-looking donuts on their plastic trays, and Beans chose a raised-glazed and a vanilla-iced with bright candy sprinkles. Such doughnuts are the heroes, respectively, of
The Donut Chef
and
Arnie the Doughnut
. Beans put them in a plastic bag, and carried them around like carnival goldfish all evening. The doughnuts even came with us when we walked the neighbor’s dog to the neighborhood garden. And as we sat in this garden, next to an old wishing well, Beans turned a handle.

Ka-thunk, ka-thunk
.

“Mom,” Beans said, “Mom I want to make a wish in the wishing well.”

“Yes,” I said. “You can make a wish. What do you want to wish for?”

“I wish for doughnuts,” he said. He looked at me intensely, a little smile tickling his mouth with its little baby teeth slightly too far apart. “I wish for doughnuts,” he said again.

I took the doughnut out of the bag and, to my astonishment, Beans actually tried eating it. Of course, he didn’t know how, and went in icing-first, from the top. In the process, he gave himself a clown nose of white icing, and a matching goatee and moustache, too.

All I could think was: Really? A SuperAmerica doughnut?

I re-direct your attention to the central tenet of my professional existence, namely, that good food is better than bad food. This could not stand.

We went back to Mel-O-Glaze. Those doughnuts were still Holders. Back to Baker’s Wife’s. Holders. But then one day we were heading back to the house from the playground when Beans requested a doughnut. We stopped at a coffee shop with baked goods straight from some warehouse store. Beans got a pink doughnut with candy sprinkles—and began eating it straight-away, spinning it until he ate all the sprinkles and icing off the top. His one-year-old sister, sitting next to him in a double stroller finished her doughnut, then lunged for his. Amid the tussle, his doughnut cracked in half.

“Mom!” Beans shrieked, preparing to cry. Until he realized the breaking had revealed a secret inner-nugget of icing and sprinkles. Which he ate.

And now Beans eats doughnuts. I feel pride, because eating more, and not less, is an enormous triumph in our little world, and somehow we got from eating less to eating more. But more than that I feel painfully amused, because as per usual, triumph comes at the end of a chain of near total failure. And this chain of failures has even forced me to come to terms with something that readers have been telling me for years, an idea that I have so hotly resisted—that good enough is indeed good enough, that any port in a storm is better than none, and that there may well be no such thing as a bad doughnut. Sometimes.

HOME RUN: MY JOURNEY BACK TO KOREAN FOOD

By Roy Ahn From
Gastronomica

Though he now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Roy Ahn has had many hometowns—Seoul, South Korea; the Detroit suburbs; the San Fernando Valley in Southern California. His evolving sense of “Korean-ness”—epitomized by Korean food—is still a work in progress.

L
ast winter, I dined with my then-pregnant wife, Amy, at a Korean restaurant in a suburban strip mall, where all good Korean food establishments seem to be. This hole-in-the-wall, located on a stretch of highway outside Boston flanked by retail plazas and ranch houses, was filled with Koreans like myself, plus a Caucasian or two, Amy being one. The proprietor sat us in a spot away from the section with barbecue-grill tabletops, but the smell of seared beef mixed with garlic, soy sauce, and brown sugar still permeated our clothing. (Pop quiz: How long does the smell of beef
bulgogi
linger in a pair of blue jeans? Answer: Until it gets thrown into a washing machine.)

The waitresses spun like dervishes from table to kitchen to table, bringing out vegetable and fish
banchan
dishes in one pass and clearing them away in another, with little respite between customers to wipe their beads of sweat. I took particular notice of the diners’ white bowls, which reminded me of outsized pieces from Go, my late father’s favorite board game.

After a cup of tea and our own
banchan
, we awaited the main courses. Mine would be
galbi-chim
—braised short ribs—served with rice. I imagined pulling the meat off the bone and the flecks of burnt sesame seeds staining the white rice a deep brown, so I was understandably shocked when the waitress placed before me a bowl of oxtail soup. Had she misunderstood? No, I quickly realized. I had ordered the wrong dish.

On the surface, confusing
galbi-tang
with
galbi-chim
would seem an innocuous lapse. Both are beef dishes whose names share the same Korean-language prefix. But the two couldn’t be more different. Imagine a Bavarian confusing knockwurst with bratwurst! As I lowered pieces of
kimchi
into the beef broth to give it a spice kick, and as Amy sipped her way through her bowl of bean-curd-and-vegetable stew, I wondered whether my slipup was an omen: could I be losing my ethnic bearings? If so, there could hardly be a worse time.

I was harboring all sorts of yuppie anxieties about first-time fatherhood—the unit cost of diapers and 529 College Savings Plans chief among them. But as a Korean-American, I was also worrying about our son’s cultural identity. I especially looked forward to introducing him to my culinary heritage. That task would be solely up to me—Amy is from a multiple-generation Wisconsin family with European roots, and our culinary union is best described as Land of Rice meets Land of Cheese. Consider some of the foods you might see in her parents’ house near Madison: pepper Jack, butterkasse, and Limberger cheeses, along with sauerkraut, pickled Brussels sprouts, and wursts of all kinds.

As for my parents, they won’t be around to introduce my son to their native foods, teach him how to bow properly to his elders, sing Korean nursery rhymes, or explain to him that the number four represents bad luck for Koreans. Both of them died in a car accident when I was twenty-four.

I was born in Seoul in 1972. My parents, a physician and an elementary school teacher, were concerned about raising children in South Korea at a time when military conflict with North Korea seemed imminent, so they immigrated to the United States with my older sister and me when I was four. My official, stamped Korean passport noted that I was “90 cm” tall and weighed “11 kg”—about the equivalent of a twenty-five-pound bag of rice. But soon enough I began to grow, my chubbiness a testament to my successful American acculturation.

As a kid living in suburban Detroit, I loved two things above all else: Baskin-Robbins and the Detroit Tigers. (I still think the ice-cream-inside-miniature-batting-helmet remains one of the industry’s greatest inventions.) Inside our apartment I would mark out my own baseball diamond, sprinkle the floor with talcum powder, and, using my father’s thick medical textbooks as bases, slide my way across the room as though I were Lou Brock. Like many American boys, I dreamed of becoming a professional baseball player but lacked the athleticism to play beyond high school. My dream of pro ball quashed, I once told my mother that I wanted to become president of a Fortune 500 company. She laughed. A Caucasian businessman would never allow a Korean to have that job, she said, steering me into the sciences instead.

My childhood love of ice cream notwithstanding, my favorite Korean dish was a bowl of rice drizzled with soy sauce and topped with a raw egg. I learned to crack the egg over the rice while it was still piping hot, so the egg would cook a little. Sometimes my mother would add some sliced
daikon
to this silky porridge that glided so easily down my throat. Over time, I began to add my own flourishes—a handful of cooked ground beef and a pinch of dried red-pepper flakes.

During my teenage years, after we moved to Los Angeles, I chose to downplay my ethnic roots. I was a Ralph Lauren-clad American teenager living in “The Valley,” and my Korean heritage was an inconvenience. This applied to my culinary traditions, too.When I went out, I ate all the things my friends did—pizza, hot dogs, enchiladas, and fries with greasy chili that turned the paper wrapper orange. It’s worth noting that two Korean-American boys were among my circle, but we rarely went out for food from the homeland. Whatever the reason, they were much more comfortable than I was with being Korean-American. Still, when my circle of guy friends went out, we’d usually opt for fried zucchini with ranch dressing at Carl’s Jr., chicken burritos at a Mexican food chain on Ventura Boulevard, or pasta at the Cheesecake Factory in Beverly Hills, all the while rocking out in our cars to the Beastie Boys and Run-DMC.

When I got home, I chased down all that American food with Korean fare. My mother, who spoke to me almost exclusively in her native tongue, cooked it herself or stocked up on prepared foods from our local Korean supermarkets. Variations of
kimchi
abounded: red-pepper-flecked radish cubes, cucumber slices, bell-flower root, and cabbage. Occasionally, too, there was yellow daikon, which paired well with ground beef, spinach, and rice. Or she would make ginseng chicken stew and
japchae
, a stir-fry of glass noodles, sliced carrot and onion, slivers of beef, and pink-and-white fishcake in a soy and sesame-oil sauce. Food to fuel the brain for studying deep into the night: a mother’s loving manifesto for her son. I never had the heart to tell her that the food had the opposite effect—the sugar crash put me to sleep atop my school papers.

I should mention that our house in California had two refrigerators: one in the kitchen for American food, and one in the garage for the Korean food. I’m not sure why my mother was willing to go dual-fridge. I imagine she’d had enough bellyaching from me about the garlicky stench of “Mom and Dad’s food” and complaints of how embarrassing it would be if my friends ever got a whiff of the real stuff we ate. She must have decided it wasn’t worth the aggravation.

My father, for his part, took my resistance to Korean food poorly. He’d wanted me to be proud of his homeland. “Italian food smells, too,” he once told me. But Korean dishes flavored with garlic smell different than Italian ones, and I imagined the odor exuding from my every pore. Leftover Korean food was even worse, announcing itself like a flatulent guest at a wedding. Never mind that a diet of smelly fermented vegetables, stews, noodles, and meats has nourished Koreans for generations.

You may imagine that my father disapproved of American ways. On the contrary, he immersed himself in the culture of his adopted country. Interstate road trips to amusement parks, Kentucky Fried Chicken, bowling. While he loved being Korean, he was fascinated by cultures other than his own and especially enjoyed commingling them. To this day, I can’t picture a bucket of KFC extra-crispy without adjacent bowls of white rice and
kimchi
. My father’s stacks of Japanese novels were piled right alongside Westerns by Louis L’Amour, and he listened to instructional language tapes on Spanish and Mandarin in his spare time. He often serenaded us on road trips with his rendition of “Tears on My Pillow,” a number he’d learned from the soundtrack of
Grease
. Once, I watched him eat a bowl of white rice with ketchup, straight up. Another time, he used chopsticks to pluck Vienna sausages out of their tin. He was so pleased with his concoctions, so original in his wackiness, that I believe I inherited my own willingness to improvise from him.

My mother, by contrast, was never comfortable in the States. She struggled to pick up English and didn’t make many friends outside her Korean church. A short woman with permed black hair, large brown eyes, and caramel-colored skin, darker than that of most Korean women I knew, she watched a lot of Korean soap operas on the VCR and seemed content to have a vicarious American experience through her children.

Little Korean boys do not take formal cooking lessons from their mothers; the kitchen is considered a woman’s domain. Nonetheless, I made excuses to spend time with her there. Cooking Korean dishes means a lot of sautéing, boiling, grilling, and frying. She rarely baked. I considered my mother a great cook, although she always told me she was only so-so, modestly claiming there were other women at church who possessed skills far superior to her own.

I don’t recall that we did a lot of talking while I watched her cook. She did not share with me the latest in church gossip, nor did she try to impart wisdom in the form of hackneyed analogies about food and life. Such things are better left for movies involving white people and karate. Instead, I recall marveling at the way she so deftly used a paring knife to peel fruit, her thumb applying pressure until the skin unfurled in a continuous ribbon. She had good hands for peeling, with strong fingers, neither long nor stubby. I watched her make simple dishes that, later on, when my parents both went to work, became my latchkey-kid staples.

There was one American experience my entire family did enjoy: eating steamed crabs at the Redondo Beach Pier. The dining experience was far from formal. We’d place our order, lay several pages of the
Los Angeles Times
atop one of the many communal tables, and wait for the crabs to steam. I remember how excited I was to buy lemons (for cleaning our hands afterward) and rent crab mallets. I’d crack my crab with authority, as though I were a judge lowering a gavel. Using my hands to eat, I tried my best to avoid touching the mustard-colored crab guts. Afterward, I played Skee-Ball until I drained my parents of ones and fives. As a family, we walked off our meals along the beach, sometimes until the sun set. My parents seemed so contented there. My mother was at ease at the beach, less concerned about fitting in, and she laughed a lot.

For a few years after my parents’ deaths, I lived in a weird fog, unable to focus on my future or reconcile my past. I lost interest in all things Korean, including food. When my mother was alive, she would ask me questions in Korean and I would respond in English. After she was gone, my grip on the language loosened.

I began to work summers as a cook at an artists’ colony café in a resort town in the Rocky Mountains. There, under the best of all possible circumstances—cooking for, and being inspired by, the master printmakers, woodworkers, painters, and ceramic artists who came through the colony—I learned to make crème brûlée, venison stroganoff, and other European dishes. In that nurturing atmosphere, as my confidence in cooking grew, so did my expressiveness through food. (Within limits, of course: my idea for a “healthful” sugar cookie made with lemon Ricola cough drops never made it onto diners’ plates.) But something even more unexpected occurred: latent Korean influences began to insinuate themselves into the food I prepared. I fried rectangles of tofu in vegetable oil. I tenderized flank steak in garlicky
kalbi
marinades. I slipped scallions into whatever dishes I could. Sesame oil found its way into my sauces.

I can’t say that I channeled my parents by cooking Korean food, or that food reinvigorated my innate sense of Korean-ness. I’m not at all certain about the synapses that get fired when human beings experience emotions from cooking and eating the foods of their childhoods. All I can say for sure is that something sublime happened in that mecca of Korean cuisine—the Rockies—where I rediscovered my native food heritage. My mother left behind no recipe cards. Instead, I created dishes based on my recollections of watching her cook, imagining her in that café kitchen with me, telling me to add a few more red-pepper flakes or dial down the sesame oil.

I still harbor mixed feelings about my parents’ move to the United States. Would they still be alive today if we had stayed in Korea? It is, of course, a fool’s errand to speculate about something like that. What I do know is that, because of their sacrifice, I have had terrific experiences and opportunities, and that our son, Charlie, will inevitably have the same. One day, if he so chooses, he may even become a corporate CEO—a Fortune 500 one at that. Or a professional baseball player, if I have any say in the matter.