This is a Story About Chicken Fried Pork
Last Thursday I discovered another link between Southern American and Southern Chinese cuisine: chicken fried pork, which is also called tonkatsu given the right sauces poured on top. This is exceptionally significant because Southern Chinese style tonkatsu (served on rice and without the standard Japanese tonkatsu sauce) is one of my favorite things in the entire world and discovering my favorite piece of Oriental food in a diner in rural Vermont is yet another proof that pork is awesome and transcends global political (but not religional) boundaries.
Not the pork I had because I was too busy eating to photograph my plate of awesome.
The basic idea of chicken fried steak/pork is that you take a steak or pork chop, bread it and fry it like fried chicken. That’s… tonkatsu. Except the local diner (and Southern tradition) puts homemade gravy on it instead of the sweet Japanese tonkatsu sauce. That actually makes it taste so much better. I am used to having tonkatsu on rice with no sauce but I actually prefer homemade gravy much more. Sadly there were no collards—the Southern obsession with dark leafy greens with salt in wet brothy goodness is something else I agree with—with my order like in the picture.
In order to understand why I love fried pork so much I’d have to go back to a story about my father like presidential memoirs do. When he was in Hong Kong he was a mechanic and repaired large looms in textile mills. He had his own machine shop in an industrial building that is now basically almost all offices and art studios since light industry has moved out of the city much like they moved out of New England mills decades ago. I spent a lot of time next to the machine lathes and not next to the arc welders doing basic office work and small prep work. Protip: If your kid has OCD having him organize your business receipts while preparing for a tax audit may not be a bad idea.
Now, pretty much every single industrial building has a cafe formed by knocking down several walls between adjoining shops/spaces and hooking up some basic kitchen equipment where heavy machinery would normally be. The one in my father’s building happened to be next to the rooftop of the garage/loading docks and so it was a swanky outdoor cafe with blue tarps haphazardly propped up with two by fours over folding tables and folding chairs set up on the rooftop. Places like these served large platefuls of meats and carbs for less than a US dollar a pop; located in a tower full of machine shops and small factories means that it gets mobbed everyday during lunch time.
Being six, there really weren’t many things I could eat there. Everything on the menu either contained lots of cheap vegetables stewed in (note: being six I have not developed a taste of vegetables yet) or had a sour or bitter sauce over it. Also, most things on the menu were meant for men who do heavy labor all day and the portions were intense. The solution: tonkatsu over rice with my father taking half the rice so the calorie count was once again something that mere mortals can consume.
As you can imagine a cafe in an industrial building with minimal kitchen equipment (basically a pile of natural gas tanks, some huge woks, several industrial sized gas-operated rice cookers, a pot of hot oil and no fear of exceedingly intense flames because everything is concrete and the chefs are as tough as the guys who carry 100kg parts up and down the stairs) is amazing at deep frying things. Places like this are also great at stir frying things or basically doing anything where being delicate is not necessary and intensity counts for a whole lot. Furthermore I’m pretty sure that they didn’t really follow all that many health codes so they could have put lead shavings into the food to make them more additive; who knows? This is where I developed a taste for breaded and deep fried pork.
And now thanks to rural Southern American traditions I can have fried pork with homemade mystery gravy (the best kind) poured all over it. Om nom nom.
Fried okra! There is fried orkra in that picture! (I admit to being so excited by this I haven’t read the rest of the post.) Do you know where I can find such a food in New England?