In this James Beard Award-winning book, Chef Edward Lee presents a fascinating and ever-evolving picture of American cuisine. Each of the sixteen chapters is a narrative of his visit to cities in America that have a distinctive food culture, owing to a history of immigration. Lee, a second generation Korean-American who grew up in Brooklyn “where their kimchi had to be made with Jamaican chilli powder”, and is married to German, is himself a product of the collision of cultures. However, by his own admission, he is less interested in the ‘authenticity’ of a cuisine than in how a cuisine transformed once it landed on American shores and had to coexist with other cultures.
To search for this kind of unique food, Lee undertakes a journey of subcultures within towns and cities and eats at mom-and-pop shops that are often overlooked in the restaurant reviewer scene. In Clarksdale, Mississipi he meets a pair of Lebanese sisters who sell wigs and make cabbage rolls; in Lowell Masachusetts he narrates the story of a Cambodian chef whose food reflects flavor combinations of his growing years in Thailand, Cambodia and northeastern US; in , he learns how to make smen, a type of fermented butter in the kitchen of a Moroccan lady; in Paterson, New Jersey, known for its largest concentration of Peruvian restaurants, he experiences Chinese Peruvian cuisine, also known as Chifa, that arose in Lima due to the influx of Chinese laborers from Canton in sugar plantations in the nineteenth century. To me, each of these stories was a fascinating journey to uncover distinctive dishes and unusual food cultures I had never even heard of.
The book is ambitious and expansive in scope–Lee’s exploration of American melting pot cuisine ranges from the story of immigrants who came hundreds of years ago (the Englishmen and Irishmen who settled in Appalachia, the Swedes in Seattle, Germans in Wisconsin) to the food journeys of more recent waves of immigrants (Cambodians in Massachusetts, Vietnamese in Texas). He constructs the foodscape of a city and the foodways through which a particular cuisine evolved through the lens of the people cooking the food. “I cannot eat a dish without wondering who cooked it, and what her story is…These stories I believe, are the building blocks of a new American cuisine, one taking root, all through the country.” Lee takes the time to get to know the cooks, is empathetic to their journeys and in doing so, paints a humane story of an American melting-pot rich and replete with diverse immigrant cultures.
The thirty recipes in the book are Lee’s own twist to traditional recipes (think traditional Thai dipping sauce nuoc cham spiked with Kentucky Bourbon), reflective of his own journey and his reticence to conform to what is deemed authentic. “Maybe cooking the food of others is appropriation, maybe it is learning.”In a world where ‘hatred for the ‘other’ has seeped into our everyday lives, Lee forces us to confront our own notions of authenticity and cultural appropriation, and demands that we keep an open minds to unfamiliar food and lesser known cultures. “Our food reflects who we are as a people. And if my small journey is any indication of where we are as a culinary nation, then we are living through an incredible time in a beautiful place.” Thank you @chefedwardlee for offering deliciousness, knowledge and hope all in one package.
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