Brighter Flames Arrayed

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.

Wing :: Jan.24.2010 :: Posts :: 1 Comment »

Last Saturday I carved my first turkey. I suppose that it’s some form of an American rite of passage into the dominate male provider of the family; a coming of age food-related ceremony much like eating your first chicken fried steak and surviving to tell the tale. Since I ate my first chicken fried steak on Monday. I suppose that this is American food ritual week or something.

Oh wait, it is.

Talking to the basil queen about Thanksgiving plans reinforced my belief that I don’t really like turkey much. I much prefer chicken and, if the Lord may see fit to bestow upon us this most magnificent of bounties, goose. Granted, the turkey I had last Saturday was really good—but that was made by a great chef using a quarter-million dollar brick oven and I’m sure that I’d like chickens or geese cooked in the same manner even better. In fact, all carving a whole turkey did for me was to remind me how long it’s been since I roasted a chicken. So I went, got a chicken, wrapped it in herbs, garlic and bacon, roasted it and will be having chicken for the next three days or so.

The whole idea of traveling during Thanksgiving weekend is, frankly, dreadful. Just like I try not to drive through Boston during rush hour I tend to avoid getting on the roads when everyone else is doing the same thing. Making a fourteen (or more) hour round trip (usually twelve, but the interstates are quite clogged currently) to see my parents is probably not the best use of my time considering that I’ve been working nearly non-stop for the last two weeks and am completely exhausted even without the traveling. The extended family never gets together for both mobility and drama reasons—I expect that the next time the entire extended family will get together is for a funeral—and that’s fine. I’m not really interested in spending a day with people asking when I’ll be expected to reach the next stage of the socially acceptable lifestyle and me telling them something non-committal instead of providing the possibly heart-attack-inducing truth.

You see, rituals are great. But when they cause more grief than joy it’s time to reevaluate the necessity of the ritual. Besides, I’m more of an efficacy kind of person anyway. So my Thanksgiving plans involve doing all the things that I need to do but didn’t have a chance to do in the last month. For example, cleaning my bathroom and updating my blog. Really, for this Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for all the people in the country who are busy struggling to get together with their families and overeating inferior fowls (more on that next time) so I can be left alone to relearn vector calculus and watch all those movies from Netflix that I have piled up.

Wing :: Nov.25.2009 :: Posts :: 1 Comment »

In Taiwan, there is a clothing store named Nigger King. This is actually from a two-year old article from The Real Taiwan and recently resurfaced on Reddit. People mostly take two camps on the issue: offended or amused.

But if you think about it, the people who opened the store (and the folks who shop there) probably have no idea what the word nigger “really” means; I wouldn’t be surprised if none of them knew that Americans once kept negro slaves and that it took over a hundred years before black folks were given remotely the same rights as white folks in America. They know that racism exists but I doubt any of them had actually had the chance to experience it personally.

What they do know is that black culture is a major part of the American culture export and they like it enough to spend money, say, by shopping at Nigger King, to be closer to said culture.

These folks probably have never heard the word nigger outside of modern rap and hip hop music or movies about “gangstas”. When they hear the word nigger, they aren’t thinking about plantation overseers whipping black slaves or white men in fancy hats spitting at a black man who got too close. They are seeing strong, tall black men wearing baggy pants and gold chains while fearlessly strolling down dangerous Harlem streets to a soundtrack of gangster rap. Or maybe it’s a black basketball player leaping over others and scoring points in Madison Square Garden while tons of beautiful women cheer at him. Because they don’t know the racist use of the word and only how it’s used in modern black American culture a nigger is strong, fast, rich, independent and he gets all the women.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that proper research before naming a clothing store isn’t important—actually, in Chinese cultures it really isn’t beyond legal “oops this name is taken” purposes. But it really delights me to a certain degree to know that, out there, there is a group of people who has nothing but positive associations with a word that’s way too loaded and negative around here.

Wing :: Mar.10.2009 :: Posts :: 2 Comments »