Authenticity

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Speaker 1: Welcome to From Scratch, a production of I Heart Radio. I'm Michael Rohlman. I'm a writer but has spent the past twenty five years in professional kitchens, translating that craft for the home kitchen. This is a podcast about cooking. In each episode, we'll talk with one chef and one non chef about the same theme. On today's episode, we'll be exploring the theme of authenticity and what it means to make authentic food For our guest chef, I visited one of the most decorated chefs in San Francisco's Bay Area. He shared his astonishing story. We'll learn about his assent from being a boy in a refugee camp to Section eight housing in Oakland, to becoming the chef owner of the most prestigious European style fine dining restaurant in Oakland, and why he turned back to his roots to open two casual food joints that feature his other's traditional recipes. I'll try and recreate one of those dishes, which uses a technique that flies in the face of traditional cooking rules. I've never encountered it before, but first I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr KRISHNANDU Ray one of the most brilliant minds in the food world. I asked him to be a guest on this podcast because he focuses his research on the supply side of the food world rather than the consumption side. He's also the perfect person to ask about what it means for a food to be authentic. To start, I wanted him to define a word we don't think much about, but we use it often, and in fact, it's incredibly loaded ethnic. Let's talk about that word. Good word, bad words. You know, it's a it's an interesting word. It comes into play by about the nineteen fifties, especially in journalism, and it's a way to think about cultural difference without falling into the trap of race. So there's a sense of that at there's white, and then there's black, and then there are ethnic people who are kind of somewhat in between. Give your typical example who like French food was never considered ethnic. It was foreign, it was exotic, but it was high class, upper class. Ethnic food is supposed to be the food of mostly poor, working class migrants, and so that is one of the categories. One of the problems of the categories now, so you can't really have really a high priced to ethnic food. That's the presumption. Yes, that's been the historical presumption. So if you if it's very even now if most people, if you say a high price, people have a sense that it can be authentic. So if you're charging more than ten twelve bucks for anything, it can be authentic ethnic. So there's a kind of a funny trap there, you know, so you can cook very good food, and my argument is that kind of sets up a limitation to what kind of ingredients you're going to use, what kind of skill you're going to bring, because the price includes basically the three major thing, which is rent, which is huge in any city, and then the kind of ingredients you're going to put into it, and the kind of labor costs. Okay, that's why if you trap ethnic food, of food of the ethnics as cheap food, it is very difficult to break out of those barriers of good food. But certain cuisines don't stay categorized as ethnic. So that brings us to a major focus of Dr Ray's work. He's developed the really useful phrase hierarchy of taste. I use the hierarchy of taste as a phrase to think about how American notions of what is good food and what is expensive food has changed over time. So what I'm really interested in a hierarchy of taste is this question of how do Americans how and why do Americans change their mind about what is good to eat and what is not good to eat, and how that has changed in American history. Dr Ray helped us look at a few examples from American history that can give context to our search for authenticity. Give you an example, and if you'll read The New York Times eighteen seventeen, eighteen seventy two, there's a lot of discussion about German food and German food is this food that is has kind of weird things like schnitzel, and it says in the New York Times describe saying it's in fact, it's just a feel cutlet with a weird name called schnitzel, and it is all you can eat, real schnitzel for fifteen cents in eighteen seventy two. And there's a lot of discussion about German for instance, beer halls. The Anglos in New York City are very kind of suspicious of the Germans because the German beer halls up and down Bowery. They find that children are there, women are there because the Germans drink with the family, very different from say the Irish or the Angulo pop culture tavern culture, which was a much more masculine culture. Okay, So that there's a sense of this weird people with a bit of weird culture. Some of it is exciting, but most of it we should not do. And despite the skepticism of their social practices, and I did not know this, German became the second most used language in America. German was to the nineteen thirties and forties in the US what Spanish is to the US today. Okay, the most dominant language, by the way. Long before that, Ben Franklin was worried that, in fact, he was going to be swamped by the Germans because he was in Pennsylvania. Remember, and who we come to identify as the Pennsylvania Dutch, who are really the Deutsch, okay, And so German kind of this antipathy toward Germans is going to turn into this kind of massive pressure on kind of naming of foods. That's when the naming will change from things like Frankfurt to hot dog to a way to americanize these names, and Germans are going to be in some ways written out of the American script. But my argument is, in fact most American food is Germanic food. Think about Laggers and think about the cheese, things about Hamburger. I think, in fact it is in some ways. German case is a very interesting case where what used to be in some ways of foreign ethnic marker, in this case in quotation marks uh in some ways is made invisible by in fact most of us. By the way most Americans, the largest so called ethnic category of Americans, are German Americans. There are fifty million German Americans to okay, yes exactly, and so the German case is an interesting case where it is both suppressed but also it becomes ubiquitous. Most American food, in that sense is Germanic food, with some differences. It's certainly true that German culture has quietly influenced major food trends for America. It's hard to picture, though, the Fourth of July without brats, burders and a cold American lager. Fortunately, for those Americans who may appreciate other flavors and textures, Japanese cuisine and those who prepare it have fought a long and difficult battle for relevance in the United States. There's a beautiful study of Japanese in Hawaii, which is where we have in Hawaii and on the West Coast, we have the fust Japanese coming in as immigrants and relatively poor immigrants and around. If you talked to Japanese and there's a beautiful study but done by a sociologist in Hawaii, the Japanese are saying, yes, we know our food is inferior. The children learn in school that they should be drinking more dairy and we should be eating more protein to make us big and strong like white people. And uh, but you see, I have a bad habit. I'm of that generation. So my children's habits are going to become more American and my habit is going to stay Japanese, and their health is going to improve. This is about people are talking about. And of course Japan becomes an enemy in the Second World War, just as the Germans. By the way, the Japanese case. Similarly, there's a repression of taste for Japanese things that works towards the sense that Japanese food is kind of inferior. For inferior people that begins to flip only in the nineteen eighties, once Japan emerges as a major economic power. And remember, I don't know whether you remember, that's the time Americans are talking about just in time production, how Japanese capitalism is so much agile and more powerful, and when sushi came into the matly totally. And that is and by the way, thing about that where sushi Japanese food comes in is mostly midtown. Even now you go in Manhattan, the high end Japanese restaurants are often in Midtown because this is where the Japanese managers were now really highly valued, would eat. Okay, And so sushi comes in and suddenly we begin to flip. And of course, but then also nutritional knowledge begins to catch up with things like fish and fermented food, and you begin to say, Japanese food is the best food in the world. And then we we we see the data that they lived one of the longest in the world, so they must be doing something right. Okay, But the big one for me is Italian food. I'm married a woman whose family hailed in the late eighteen hundreds from Napoli. Italians swarmed in through l as Island and huge numbers from the eighteen hundreds through really the nineteen forties, and their cuisine is really really influential in America. What would America be without pizza and spaghetti? What's that story? Italian is a very good example because in fact, Italian is one of those cuisines in American history that falls from the top, flattens out, and then climbs back. Is climbing back up right now. What I mean by is this, say with Thomas Jefferson, who in some ways brings in macaroni and cheese, Okay, and there's a sense that it is this is an Italian thing. It's part of the travel through the Mediterranean and bringing in macaroni, which is kind of a generic name for any past that at that point of time. Often they would be registered in restaurants as a slightly frenchified mac and cheese. So that was considered very high high culture. In case said, let's say around eighteen What is fascinating is this, This is what happens is from about eighteen eighty onwards you have millions of poor Italians coming in and what you see is this astonishing disdain towards Italian culinary culture from eighteen eighty to about the nineteen forties. By the way, nutritionists and all kinds of reformers, progressive reformers look at Italians and say, oh, they have a terrible inferior food culture. They eat all this pasta, they eat all this garlic, very garlicky. By the way, it's described as with all these spices and inferior foods, like all these weird greens that you get nothing out of. And most importantly that is what makes them thirsty for all this alcohol. And so to cure them of their alcoholic tendencies, we have to cure them of their food, and we have to change them into basically a kind of a white sauce bland food people. Okay, thankfully they failed to do that. And over the next say two generations, as Italians move up from a working class population to a middle class professional they become politicians, they enter the movie business, for instance, their way players in the movie business um and they become culturally visible, and you begin to see the slow shift. Nutritional knowledge begins to catch up with the Mediterranean diet, arguing that in fact, the Mediterranean diet may be in fact terrific for people and by about the nineties seventies you begin to see a revaluation of Italian food. So my argument is that poor people's food are often seen as inferior by people. It has nothing to do with the food. It has to do with the attitude towards class and race. That's what the whole hierarchy of taste argument is like. If you talk to an economist, it's about supply and demand. So the price is shaped by supply and demand. That is correct, but that's an abstract model which is worked by taking time out of the model. As a sociologist, my work is how do people come to demand and why do people come to demand some things at certain prices and unwilling to pay that say, it's very difficult for most Americans today to pay a hundred bucks when in food, we're willing to pay for French, we're willing to play for Italian, but we're not willing to pay that kind of a price for Indian food. And you can say that about Thai, you can say that about Vietnamese, and and we used to say that about Italian. And that's changing, and that's kind of for me, that change over time of demand is the most fascinating story about American cuisines. Thinking about how certain cuisines evolve in the minds of Americans over extended periods of history really helps keep some things in perspective. But adding time to the equation of supply and demand makes it much more challenging to define what makes a food authentic. In eight when Italian immigrant workers were eating spaghetti with meat sauce for their daily meals in my wife's family, they called it macaroni and gravy? Was that authentic Italian food? Or about when a cuisine successfully climbs the social ladder and becomes quote high class. Is the food of Massimo Boutura, a three star chef in Italy, closer to authentic Italian cuisine? There were critics who wouldn't show up at his restaurant because they said it wasn't authentic Italian. He has much more skilled labor in his kitchens, uses more technique, can afford whatever ingredients and tools he needs or wants. Surely his expression must be more authentic with all those resources at his disposal. No. Dr Ray helped put this discussion to rest or, at least down for a nap. He says, there are two kinds of authenticity and food. Yes, there are two kinds of authenticity, okay, talk to me about Yes. I think one kind of authenticity that we were we are willing to pay for is in some ways to think of the chef as the artist his signature okay, say a per se or a French laundry okay, which is the idea of the perfect professional okay, which almost think about it. He is not supposed to the chef is not supposed to have any ethnic mark on him. It's just technique, an ingredient and skill pure wald of in some ways the world of the perfect ingredient with the best skill in the world. Okay. That's almost the opposite of the other sense of authenticity ethnicity, sorry, authenticity. So the first sense of authenticity is linked to the signature of the artist, and the other side of it is the idea that is this someone's grandmother's cooking. It belongs. So the authenticity there is a test of belonging to a community. Okay. So it's in a sense so in a sense of the bottom end of the market we tested by when we say use authenticity, we say how is it? How similar is it? Two? When I went to Mexico and ate this in Puebla, or I went to Ohaka and ate this is this similar? Is that difference? That's what we're saying when we're thinking about authenticity at the bottom end of the market kit at the higher end of the market, we are thinking about authenticity as the signature of the artist. In this case, the chef my tie name is some jit, some kids, some chit, some some that's chef James sea Boot. We sat down at a communal table at Hawking Bird, one of his three restaurants. Yeah, James derived from my loud name at home, Oh mom, I'll go by again, homes again and James. It was the kind of the closest thing that our social worker picked out so culturally, umlao speak loud nationally, I'm tie my father from in At the end of the Vietnam War, the neighboring Laotian government fell to Communists. Many people saw the writing on the wall and did everything they could to get out, including fleeing into refugee camps. Beginning around the United States started issuing green cards to Looatia refugees. Yes, we came from an asylum after Vietnam War. Has refugees. We landed in Oakland um In. I was about two years old. Never left. Still here. I like it here, It's home. James's parents jumped at the opportunity and eventually settled into Oakland. They both proved to be industrious. His father worked as an auto mechanic and his mother as a So I was always around parents working with their hands and almost a curious boy, you know, running around with sharp objects and you know, babysitting after school program, was being in the kitchen his mom, you know, segmenting onions, dis seeming tied, chilis, peeling, garlic, peeling challatts. I had the perfect little hands for It's some my mom put me to work. Yeah, so that's that was my weekends. You know, remember doing my homework on top of the bags of rice in the dry storage room. Man, that's my was my first involving were cooking. And like the Japanese stories from Hawaii, the Lao community in Oakland did not shy away from their traditions around food preparations. So grew up in the Lao community. We always have this like almost like a c S A a group by so the whole neighborhood set the whole neighbor was like loud refugees. So there we go by half a cow, half a slaughter, a whole slaughter, and we'll divide it up. It's like, oh, so and so we'll like to have a hundred dollars worth, So and so we have worth, and you get the whole thing, awful little sack of warm beef bial some blood. But the most intense preparation was James's mother's homemade paddock or fish sauce, which will make her own. We used to go out fishing in the Alameda, like crab Cove, and she'll make her own fish sauce, sauce, um sea salt, ice cream, salt um, leaders of anchovies and small all crabs whatnot, and in a dark place in the closet with bricks on top of the press it. And then you know, you wait a year later and you have it. That's what your house smells like. That's what my house smells like. Yeah, that's what my clothes smells like. That's why I smell like going to school. So you can imagine, you know, being elementary school, but with a funny name of some kid I wasn't. And here's where we discovered another version of Dr Ray's hierarchy of taste. His mother eventually took a job as a cook at a successful Thai restaurant in Berkeley, California. She and her fellow cooks, mostly from the Lao community, prepared traditional Thaie dishes for American diners. Eventually, the curious James asked her why, Like, wait, mom, the food we're eating kind of never made it pass the kitchen and he was like, He's like, nah, that's not what people want, you know, that's it's too spicy. And he's like, the party think it smells and stinks. I'm like, well, it's sous delicious and so so what is the food we're serving. It's like, oh, it's Thai food. I'm like, okay, but you never made pot tire for me. The answer that James received may not have been satisfactory, but he couldn't do anything about it yet. After the break, we'll learn about how James hustled his way up the hierarchy of fine dining restaurants and the surprising choice he made after he got to the top. Before the big craze of the celebrity chef in the nineties, in the US. There was a documentary TV series called Great Chef of the World, highly recommended. Find it on YouTube. It was made by John Bear and John Shoop out of New Orleans, and what made their program one of a kind was that they only filmed in real restaurant kitchens, never in TV studios. It was full of no nonsense, matter of fact, detailed explanations of dishes by professional chefs just going about their business, mostly within very traditional French influenced kitchens. Young James loved it. Write about sophomore year in high school. You know, if I watch a little bit more TV, and I remember watching Chefs of the World and I was starting seeing a French kitchen for the first time on TV, and it's like, wait a minute, this is not a look like my mom's kitchen. Like wow, he just had to have a single speck on his chef's coat with his nice toke copper. Everything stose without flames. They're not they're standing up to do prep. They're not sitting out a little plastic stools and are not the means And positive wasn't printing two repurpose plastic bags from the market, So I'm like, wait, restaurants exist like that. What appealed to you about that? I just everything about it. Um, the intensity, the focus, um, the discipline. Um. It was just a first, a higher level that I didn't know of. Like I told my mom that I want to cook for a living and there's like school. She's like, you're nuts. It's like why It's like I was like, I actually enjoy it. And before that show, I had like, Okay, I know where she's coming from, you know, the whole Asian strtypical Asian parent. I mean, when did you come to America for you to be a cook? You know? Why do you go to school be a lawyer, to be a doctor and have a better living for ourselves and not do what I'm doing. I get it, but you know, I you know, I think at that time she was just glad that I wasn't incarcerated or get in trouble with other kids running in the streets. She's like sure. So James enrolled in culinary school with the California Culinary Academy. The first task that really blew his mind was baking, specifically the precision it requires. Tie or louse. Cuisine didn't use much dairy and weren't known for their pastry production actually baking, and that's where I really fell in love was cooking, was baking because the science and the preciseness of it. You know before momscu goes intuition, no recipes, a little dash, it is a handful of that you asked for for recipes, like, yeah, handful of this, handful of that that looks about right. James loved the uniform too, so colmor school like really like I was like, okay, this is like what I saw on TV. Kind of confirmed it, right, you know, I got a uniform, got negla chief toakes right to French style of sut and making youd like to brigade and how that works right. It was yes, chef, you know it was. It was just it's difference in rolling to the military. All of a sudden, did you like it? I loved it. I loved it. I was I wanted more of it. After culinary school, James took the first job he could find. He cooked a couple of pan Asian restaurants, which really helped him understand how to cook at higher volumes. But this still wasn't what he hungered for. I still had this itch of French cuisine and European cuisine. Then that's when a fellow cook recommended he applied to a hot new restaurant in town. He asked James if he knew anything about Spanish food, Spanish food, like absolutely than not. Know, Spain's right next to France, and that was that's about it. You know. He's like, yeah, I was getting more elaborate details. He's like, yeah, he's doing this thing. You know. It's kind of malecler and you know, a little bit of both, and it's a kind of food was kind of cattle on. I'm like, okay, you say it was food of Spanish influence, so what's catal on? You know, like getting getting deeper deeper deeper into it. So um, yeah, So I got my car, drove m de los Gatos. Now we're driving from Oakland. Knock on the back door. To this day, it's common to physically show up at restaurants not during service please and asked for a stage, which basically means they trail in the kitchen doing whatever is asked for free. This way, the kitchen and the stage get to know one another. James had shown up at a three Michelin star restaurant called man Teresa and chef David Kinch gave him a shot. But I remember walking to the kitchen for the very first time. It was like walking to like Starship Enterprise. You know, it's like like stainless deal for miles, copper pots and pans. I'm like a bonnet stove. I was like, wow, this is a still of us on TV. It's like, no, no flames, I want to turn knobs. Many fine dining restaurants used stoves which, instead of exposed gas flames, over graded areas have what they call a graduated flattop, one giant iron surface with varying temperatures depending on where you put your pot. Hot in the center, cool as you move out. And I was like, okay, this is like this is like the major leagues. I feel like I just got drafted into the NBA orself in. But of course it wasn't easy. It was rough for Yere. It was just like a rude awakening. James was drilled in the traditions of a fine dining kitchen, many of which at first glance seemed pointless. Keep your white towel folded in four exact folds with a thin orange stripe facing outward. Keep your small pans in your station at exactly ninety degree angles. Wiper cutting word after this cut, but not before that one. There are a thousand tiny quirky details that are unique to each kitchen and chef. Also, because of the time pressures in professional kitchens, they don't really have time to explain why for all of them, and I don't quite understand. I was like, oh, it's just like busting my balls because I'm a new guy. But in time of his time, like it makes sense, you'all translate to what I would put on the plate. He's just one one minor detailed that contributes to the big picture. And that's why I needed. That's yeah, that that discipline. Being that mind frame, James eventually adapted and thrived. He stayed for five years, learned every station in the restaurant backward and forward, and then knew it was time to move on and did so with the encouragement of Chef Kinch. He then went and cooked for short periods of time at multiple prestigious restaurants in Europe. He got to the top of his game and was having a blast before he went back to Oakland. He traveled and ate just traveled around, traveling around, eating and many mission in star restaurants like I could. That was for me, that was I coined it as my grad school for school. That's that's how I wrote it off. When I saw my credit card bills. Yeah, it's like this is grad school. Absolutely. Yeah. Single diner you know in Paris appeared one year and he had a great time. He actually confused many of the restaurant's staff. It's very rare to have someone come alone to extremely fancy restaurants in Paris and look so critically at each detail of every dish. I thought was a Michelan inspector. But this seemingly strange eating spree was critical to his success. He knew he needed to know exactly what goes into a meal at the most prestigious Michelin starred restaurants. Upon returning to Oakland, he kept cooking while getting a plan together to open his own fine dining restaurants. You didn't have investors, had investors with all friends. And then one disclaimer I had before the signing was like, hey, just ten thous dollars are you giving me, I'm gonna lose all of it. Just let you know and We'll still be cool, right It's like, oh yeah, as a tax right off, what'll still be cool? On a more serious note, James was embarking on a quiet path. There just wasn't much fine dining in Oakland. But you know again, it's like why not. Why not kinda find dining restaurant exists in Oakland. It's just no one's done it before, and you do not think I'm the one to do it. His new restaurant would be called Comi, which is a name that I love. Comey is a name for the very bottom level cook in a French brigade system, basically means assistant. For James, the name his gorgeous fine dining restaurant, Comi is playful and respectful. He's two decades removed from that position, and there are a thousand Comis who would be honored to work under James now. Comy just celebrated its tenth anniversary, which is a great run. Also, James has earned two Michelin Stars for the past four years, which puts him among a small club. Of the approximately seven hundred thousand restaurants in America, only forty four have either two or three stars from Michelin. Despite his humble beginnings, he's now in a great position. Dr Ray helps us contextualize this special club. And there's that network at the top. Would say, that's network of about five hundred thousand people. It's a very small network. That's a small night. It's a very small network. And in that network there are some connections being made. It's like professors. I would almost call it peer review, peer review amongst five hundred uh chefs and and evaluators and journalists and restaurant critics. You can enter the world through that. As a Michelin star chef, it's a it's a signature of that you have really arrived in that peer peer review evaluation. Once you do that, then you allowed a little more freedom to mess around and play with other categories of food. And especially if you're not basically a French or an Italian very high end chef, you will eventually there will be some pressure in you to go back to your roots. When we come back, we'll hear why James drastically reversed course after he reached the top. We'll here how his mom made him question is hard earned high end cooking techniques, And I'll cook one of his recipes in my home kitchen, one that when he told me about it, I bought the book on the spot so that I could give it a roll. After a couple of years of success at COMI, James noticed his mother wasn't doing as well as she'd like to be. My mother is still running a tie restaurant. You know. She was tired of the restaurant business. She was worn out, burnt out, worked hard, too hard, and she wanted to leave. She wanted to go back, go home and raise water buffalos and grow rice again and be with her family and the country life. You know, I don't blame her. You know, it's like the time for retirement. But she got stuck on this lease. And then's like, okay, let me take the lease from you, and now let me deal with it. I'm gonna tell it, maybe I'll do something different COMI was. You know, we're busy at the time, so I was like, okay, let's just do something maybe a Kumi bistro or something casual. And but I grew up in that restaurant space, so I had this like sentimental value to it. I could let go. It's like, okay, Mom's leaving. I'm like all these dishes that we cooked in the kitchen that we're all not on the menu that we fed ourselves. I had no idea. I never cooked him before, and I was kind of saddened, like, this is a shame. The thing that made me fell in love with cooking kind of turned my back on um for many reasons. One was like, yeah, it's kind of embarrassed by my own culture. Yeah it's not uncommon, and it's like I'm getting tired made fun of, you know, like pre school was like I'm over it, and but yeah, so I kind of felt like, man, I'm it's time to make up for lost time. So he decided that instead of a French inspired bistro, he would open Hawker Fair Hawker meaning basically street food. After remodeling, his mother's former dining room, would become a hip Louisn restaurant which honors his family's cultural heritage. The space is funky, with neon colors, elaborate wallpaper patterns, and bright red folding chairs at the communal tables. The menu is designed to be shared among friends, and they have a teaky hour instead of a happy hour. But the hard part wasn't the decorating. It was learning his mom's family recipes. But you know, those flavors were really ingrained in my head and I started to work backwards. You know. My mom was like, hey, she asked me. You wanted me to teach you anything, let me know before I go back home. I'm like me being like, oh, I'm a mission star, show I can figure the ship out right wrong. Despite his many years of experience with the highest culinary technique, his initial tests were way off, you know, like time Jeffer charey there on the ground scale and just like too analytical. What's what's one of those dishes? Describe one of those dish? One of the dishes making Cormie, which is like allow Verona call me. Is one of those noodle dishes where you eat like Buddhist holidays. Every time you go to a kid's birthday and allow kids birthday is always called me. And I was like, Mom, am I doing it right? It's like, well, you didn't have enough oil to like how much all you're putting in the core me sauce? Do you put oil in the sugar when you're making the caramel? I'm like, what are you talking about? No, it doesn't work. James was shocked because here's what they've been teaching in culinary schools for decades. Caramel is made by carefully melting sugar in a heavy bottomed pan. It's either cooked dry or with just a little water enough to make the sugar the texture of wet sand. As they say, you've got to heat it very carefully, not stirring, just swirling the pan as the edges turn brown. If it gets too high and the sides, the sides can burn, you want to brush that down with a damp pastry brush. And then once you get it to the perfect color, then you add your fat, usually cream, and it foams up violently. It's all very sensitive and precise. James's mom was suggesting to do almost the opposite of like, you know what I should listen to mom, This sounds really bizarre. Yeah. Oil, you have to fry the sugar. You start a cold pan, what oil, lots of oil, lots of oil and sugar, probably like equal parts oil, equal parts oil and sugar and sugar, and and you cook it until the sugar caramelizes. And then does it separate from the oil, Yeah, it separates from oil. Yeah, yeah, but it does, it doesn't doesn't crytallize anything. I followed the recipe for James Kwamie from his book Hawker Fair. This is a simple dish of caramel and oil sauce with aromatics, tossed with medium rice noodles and garnished with an omelet, bean sprouts, scallions and cilantro. Ahead of time, I measured out all my ingredients, slice the shallot, minced the garlic, and cook the omelet topping. Now it's time to fry some sugar. I've never done this before, and it's just doesn't make any sense to me. Here we go a half cup of sugar going into a Dutch oven and we're gonna put a half cup of oil in there. This is crazy, all right. So we've got it. Looks like, you know, spacetry chefs called it like a wet sand. Look. It kind of looks like wet sand, but quite a bit more liquid than the wet sand. I'm afraid it's stiring it too much, because when I stir sugar and water or just plain sugar, crystallizes gets crunchy on you. And I guess that's not going to happen because they're all each all the granules are coated in oil. Because we add an everything whole. It doesn't look like anything's it's been about a minute so far. This is crazy. Yeah, the oils, it is little, it's kind of crystallizing. It's kind of clumping up and bubbling, still bright white. I'm just gonna let it sit there and let the sugar do its thing. Now normally I'm cooking sugar. I just tilt the pan and swirl the pan. It's usually edges started to turn brown first. There's some brown there starting to brown through the hot spot on the burners, and swirl it around. It's been two minutes now and it's starting to turn brown, as sugar will do as the heats up. Now the sugar is sort of really um coming together and separating from the oil. But he did say it would separate from the oil. But it's still sort of a fluid paste and it's turning a nice gorgeous color. It's turned from granular to smooth, which means the sugar is melting anyone a nice amber color because that's ever went a little bit of bitterness, I presume, but not too much. It's kind of very cool. I think the deeper brown. You get it, and we're colorful. We're gonna have it. But we're getting really close. The color is that it's a deep, deep tan and it's starting to foam a little bit. So I think we're getting pretty close. In fact, I'm gonna I'm ready for the air maats now. And it's just the sweet peas and ye, half a cup of shallots help the table stings of barlet, and then we're gonna let those sweat and cook. And James was absolutely right. The kitchen smells fabulous now, Okay, So now we're gonna have the seasonings. We've got fish sauce and oyster sauce. You've got soy sauce and maybe a half teaspoon MSG mix it around. So now we've got our air mats in there. We've made a nice brown sauce with lots of lots of minced garlic and sliced shalloon in there, and all these soap noodles go on. They're pretty pliable. And now the sauces noodles are soaking up a sauce. It looks gorgeous. I love all these ara mats in there. Yeah, powerful flavor. Look, I've never tasted before, caramely, salty, delicious. It's gonna beautiful. I can tell already, man that oil and sugar is kind of transformative. It looks bizarre at first, but it makes so much sense in the end. The sugar caramelizes, You've got great control over the cooking of it. It turns a beautiful amber. It sinks to the bottom of the pan. But in the end, when you bring all the ingredients together, they all mild beautifully and coat all the noodles, and the noodles absorb all that sweet, wonderful goodness. It just changed my whole approach to kind of almost everything, you know. It's just like, there's gotta be a different way to do this. Yeah, if this, if I didn't know this, what else do I know? Exactly exactly? It's like, maybe there's a different way. You know, this is an amazing dish. I can't wait to introduce this to my wife, to my friends. Fella cooks, especially the cooking sugar and a lot of oil. But for James, it means even more than that. Oh my God, like making these recipes, just the smells alone, like I feel like I closed my eyes and I feel like I was in that room when I was when my mom was making I was twelve or ten years old. You know, all of a sudden, all these vivid memories are like Also, I knew what my mom was wearing that day. You can remember that just from that dish. Yeah, I just saw something just like takes you back, almost like a time machine. Dr Ray found himself craving a similar experience. He needed essential flavors that he remembered from seven thousand miles to the east, and flavors that he had never prepared before. When I first came from Indian in fact, I was a lower middle class Indian kid, being a male. I never I did not know any anything about cooking, you know, And so partly is this nostalgia and partly this absence that I could not find this food in the most of the cheap Indian kind of bunglades. She run Indian joints that were in this town. There were three of them. So this absence in some ways became the memory of that absence. So red chili flakes didn't do it. For chili flakes to do it, I mean, some things works well about rad cheli flakes, like the chart or something, right, but a lot of every day like my mom say, uh fish curry with the mustard sauce, you know, fresh ground mustard, a little bit of ginger, a little bit of garlic, and a lot of green chilies, Okay, and you just basically almost like steam it. That was just a impossible to get it anywhere. No one was doing it in terms of an Indian restaurant. And second, not not that any of the red chilies would not play that role of replacing that that green slightly citrusy kind of the green chili tastes. And what were you missing by not having those ingredients? Really, what what I was missing was the kind of a sensory memory of another place, you know, sensory memory of my personhood. Because think about food, right, Food is the way we incorporate the external world into ourselves, which becomes us. That's what culture is all about. There's no other object we absorbed like that. So our sense of personhood anywhere in the world is built on these habitual, everyday palettes and flavors and senses. The way we think about all the senses we use in eating of food, say in this case, uh fish, say trout with mustard, sauce with green chilies. Right, is the it's it's the it's the palette, it's deep inside us, okay, it's inside us. The smell, the nose, especially retro nasal smell, Okay, and of course touch. I I still do when I am eating Indian food. I still use my fingers directly because forks feel like a cold, metallic barrier to that taste. Again, this kind of, this whole what you can almost call what an anthropologist David Sutton cause synesthesia. How all your senses are pulling together and pulling together into some sense of personhood. And that personhood, remember, is my relationship to other substance and my relationship to other people. And that's what food is about. Food has the power to help us find our long lost personhood, to connect the unconnected, to travel, time and space. And one wonderful thing about the world of cooking is that we can pick and choose, keep and discard traditions based on what we want for our lives. James C. A. Boot has done a great job of keeping vital family recipes alive through his work as a chef, and in terms of family traditions outside of his work, James just passed on a special one to his daughter, who's in kindergarten. Walking school bus, and I walked my daughter up to school with like six other kindergarteners in ahead and in some other parents first week, you know, Oh, Emma, what do you do this weekend? You know, and and we goes my daddy killed duck. Like it's like, oh really, It's like, what do you mean, Emma. It's like my daddy killed duck and didn't because like, like what does she mean, because like, yeah, we saw our duck. How does she respond? Um, she just looked like not in shock, but she's like looking interest. She has like almost hypnotizing, you know. She'd been to the zoo, she's been to the petting zoo, you know, taken to the state fair, you know. But for me, like bleating up dock, feathering it right, you know, and then cooking it and she's eating it. So I think it brings it a kind of full circle to her. Before I left James and our delightful chat in the middle of the bustling hawking Bird dining room, I had to ask him one more question. Fish sauce is one of those great essences that's like nothing else on the planet. I had to ask him if he has any homemade fish sauce projects going on in dark places at his home like his mother did. No, I figured you got too much going on and making. I tried wiped him. She was not too happy. Thank you to our guests Dr Christi ned Ray and Chef's James Sef. For more information, to check out Dr Ray's books The Migrants Table, Curried Cultures, and The Ethnic stratur Also, you will not be disappointed with Chef Seaboot's book Hawker Fair. And if you're in the Bay Area, you could try any of his three amazing restaurants scattered across the hierarchy of taste. Our show is produced by Jonathan Dressler. Our executive producer is Christopher Hasiotis, and our supervising producer is Gabrielle Collins. All the music on From Scratches by Ryan Scott off his album A Freak Grows in Brooklyn. Also, I've got a new book out called From Scratch about ten staple meals and all they can teach you about cooking. We'll have a link in the show notes, or go to Amazon or any independent bookseller. From Scratch is a production of I heart Radio. We're more podcasts from iHeart Radio. Visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. She sh Shore