by Edward Lee
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon pomegranate molasses
4 Rye Pitas
Olive oil, for brushing
Salt
1 small onion, sliced
½ cup arugula
¼ cup Pickled Sweet Peppers
½ cup Tahini Dressing
Preheat the oven to 350°F.
To make the lamb filling: In a large bowl, combine the lamb, tomatoes, onion, parsley, allspice, cinnamon, salt, red pepper flakes, black pepper, and molasses and mix well.
Split the pitas in half. Spread a thin layer of one-quarter of the lamb mixture on the bottom half of one pita and replace the top half. Repeat with the remaining pitas and filling. Carefully brush both sides of the pitas with olive oil and sprinkle with a little salt.
Arrange the pitas on a baking sheet and bake for 15 to 20 minutes, until the lamb is cooked through.
Remove the pitas from the oven, lift the top of each one, and layer with the onion, arugula, and pickled peppers. Drizzle a little tahini dressing over the top and put the top back on the sandwich. Serve immediately.
Rye Pitas | Makes 8 pitas
1 cup warm water (about 112°F)
2 tablespoons active dry yeast
½ teaspoon sugar
¼ cup rye flour
1¼ cups all-purpose flour, plus ½ cup for dusting
2 teaspoons salt
2 tablespoons olive oil
In a large bowl, combine the warm water, yeast, sugar, rye flour, and ¼ cup of the all-purpose flour and mix well. Let stand for 10 minutes, or until foamy.
Add the salt, olive oil, and 1 cup of the all-purpose flour and gently stir with a wooden spoon for 1 minute to combine. You may need to add a little of the remaining all-purpose flour; the dough should be wet but pull away easily from the sides of the bowl. Turn the dough out onto a floured work surface and knead until it is smooth and holds its shape, just a few minutes, adding more flour if necessary. Put the kneaded dough in a large oiled bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Let it rest in a warm place for 1 hour, or until doubled in size.
Put a baking sheet on the middle rack of the oven and preheat the oven to 475°F.
Punch down the dough and divide it into 8 pieces. Form each piece into a ball, arrange on a floured work surface, and cover with a damp towel. Let the dough rest for 10 minutes.
Remove one dough ball, leaving the others covered to prevent the dough from developing a skin, and, using a floured rolling pin, roll out the dough on a lightly floured work surface to a ⅛-inch thickness, about 5 inches in diameter. Set aside and roll out the remaining dough balls. You can stack them between sheets of parchment. Carefully remove the preheated baking sheet from the oven and place as many dough pieces on it as you can fit. Return the baking sheet to the oven. Once the pitas puff, after about 2 minutes, flip with a spatula or tongs and cook for an additional minute or so. The pitas should remain pale, with hints of brown spots. Remove from the oven and set aside on a plate.
Repeat with the remaining dough. If not using right away, store the remaining pitas by letting them cool to room temperature, wrapping them individually in plastic wrap, and storing in the freezer for up to a month. When ready to use, place in a 300°F oven for 5 minutes to warm up.
Pickled Sweet Peppers | Makes ½ quart
10 small sweet peppers, seeded and thinly sliced, any mix of bell, cherry, or Italian sweets
1 cup rice vinegar
½ cup water
⅓ cup sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 whole star anise pod
½ teaspoon whole black peppercorns
1 large strip lemon peel
Thinly slice the sweet peppers and pack them into a jar. In a small saucepan, combine the vinegar, water, sugar, salt, star anise, and peppercorns and bring to a boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Add the lemon peel, remove from the heat, and let cool to room temperature.
Pour the pickling liquid into the jar, close the lid tightly, and refrigerate overnight. Discard any excess liquid. The peppers will keep in the fridge for up to a month.
Tahini Dressing | Makes 1 cup
½ cup labneh or Greek yogurt
3 tablespoons tahini
2 tablespoons toasted sesame oil
¼ cup water
1 tablespoon sherry vinegar
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
½ teaspoon paprika
In a small bowl, combine the labneh, tahini, sesame oil, water, vinegar, lemon juice, and paprika and whisk to combine. Cover and refrigerate until ready to serve. The dressing will keep in the fridge for up to 2 weeks.
Chanterelle Hummus
In an age of culinary appropriation, there is a raging debate among chefs and food writers about what you can and can’t call hummus. For the most part, I tend to side with the purists. Black bean hummus isn’t hummus (it’s just gross). But I do call this a hummus, because the chanterelles remind me of chickpeas in flavor and color. Spread the hummus over pita bread for a wonderful vegetarian snack. This is also great with Pickled Sweet Peppers.
Don’t make this with other mushrooms, though—it won’t taste right. And only use chanterelles when they are at their peak, which may be from early summer into the fall, depending on where you live.
Serves 4 as a snack
10 garlic cloves
6 tablespoons olive oil
1½ pounds chanterelle mushrooms, cleaned
3 teaspoons salt
½ cup water
⅓ cup extra-virgin olive oil
Juice of 3 lemons
1 tablespoon tahini
½ teaspoon red pepper flakes
Preheat the oven to 350°F.
Place the garlic cloves in the center of a piece of aluminum foil. Drizzle 3 tablespoons of the olive oil over them and wrap in the foil, sealing the seams tightly. Roast for 30 minutes, or until the garlic is softened.
Meanwhile, in a medium bowl, toss the chanterelles with the remaining 3 tablespoons olive oil and 1 teaspoon of the salt. Spread on a baking sheet and roast for about 15 minutes, until the mushrooms are cooked through.
Transfer the roasted garlic, with all its oil, and the chanterelles to a blender. Add the water, extra-virgin olive oil, lemon juice, tahini, remaining 2 teaspoons salt, and the red pepper flakes and blend on high speed to a smooth puree. If it seems too thick, add a little water a spoonful at a time until you get the desired consistency. The hummus will keep, covered, for 1 week in the refrigerator.
Chapter 5
Exile and Cigars
The inside of an airport during inclement weather is the last place on earth I want to be. It is a waiting room of uncertainty, paranoia, and helplessness. The anger of delayed passengers is contagious. I try to meditate by gazing out at the tarmac, at the weary planes lurching toward their gates. The sky is overcast, with muted cloud cover. It is the color of smoke, a dense, unmoving smoke that refuses to let sunlight pierce through. It is not raining yet, but that doesn’t stop the plane delays from pouring in. One by one, each destination city is announced. I quickly scan the terminal to see who is throwing up his arms in disgust, as if it were a surprise, as if the heavens were listening. My flight to Miami is over an hour and a half delayed. It is little joy to watch as other people’s schedules are equally dismantled, but it is all the comfort I have right now.
I’m hoping to meet up with chef Norman Van Aken. He’s been a hero of mine since I was a young cook, and of late, we’ve become good friends. I text him, and he apologizes but says he has to head to Mount Dora, Florida, where he’s opening a new restaurant. He’ll catch up with me in a few days, he tells me. I settle back in my seat and follow the drama of a heavyset British man yelling feverishly at an emotionless dark-skinned woman who is typing away robotically on an antiquated keyb
oard. The sky looks like it will open up at any minute and release a storm of biblical proportions.
As a young chef, the only cuisine that mattered to me was from Europe, mostly French. If you wanted to be a chef, you learned French cuisine; you studied Escoffier, you learned the brigade system, the mother sauces. Jacques Pépin and Julia Child were on TV, André Soltner and Gray Kunz in the newspapers. Jean-Georges was making waves with his Asian style of French food, but it was still a Eurocentric approach to food. Asian food was popular, but the kind I saw marketed in the magazines all smelled of an exoticism that seemed disingenuous to me. Martin Yan was on TV, but he was branded for the home cook. Ming Tsai was taking the world by storm with his East-meets-West cuisine, and though I hung on his every word, there was something about his rugby good looks and Ivy League smile that I knew was an ocean away from who I was. In an ironic twist, I had to look to England to find an Asian cook to identify with. Though he was American, Ken Hom did most of his television work and publishing through the BBC. In fact, for most of my life, I thought he was a British chef. Still, as inspirational as Ken’s books were to me, they told a one-sided story. They did not address the conflict of someone like me, who felt about as much a part of the Asian diaspora as I did the American TV dinner generation of my youth. I never understood why the Asian identity and the American identity had to be compartmentalized, the way my Salisbury steak and apple pie were separated in my Swanson’s dinner. I wanted them all in one bite.
Then I learned about Norman Van Aken, a person of vaguely Dutch roots but also French and maybe some German as well. Originally from Illinois, he moved to the Florida Keys as a young cook and began a culinary journey that would embrace all of Florida, from the Southern roots of the Panhandle, to the flavors of Cuba, to the spices of the Caribbean, to Asia and beyond. He was doing all this at his restaurant, Norman’s, in Miami. In fact, it was Van Aken who coined the term fusion, an idea that caught on so wildly that fusion became a national catchword for any dish that combined the disparate flavors of two cultures. The term, and the gimmicky cuisine that followed, quickly became a joke, though. Fusion became wasabi-flavored mashed potatoes or roast chicken with a sticky, sweet mango-ginger sauce. What everyone missed was the real impact of Norman’s message.
Van Aken’s cuisine was one that could have happened only in South Florida, where a world of flavors met at his tablecloth, as he would say. It was his openness, his inclusion of these cultures that made him important to me. He was making a case for a permanent cuisine, one that embraced both one’s own ethnicity and that of one’s geography. All of a sudden, you didn’t have to choose. You didn’t have to live in a culinary solipsism of forced borders. To him, cooking Caribbean food was natural if one lived near a market that sold jerk spices, goat meat, and mangoes. Norman’s brilliance was in harmonizing “foreign” ingredients with his formal culinary training and understanding that both could coexist in a meaningful way. The term fusion, therefore, was not about combining or co-opting disparate cultures, not about spiking shitty mashed potatoes with artificial wasabi powder, but about finding ways to balance the formal structural cuisine of Europe with the home cooking of the immigrant cultures around him. That was the fusion. It was a powerful statement by a chef who, quite by accident, influenced the cuisine of every young chef who came after him. Because the term fusion would become so badly misinterpreted, Van Aken would not get the credit for it, and it would take an entire generation of chefs to refute it and the next generation of cooks to embrace its true meaning. It was Van Aken who convinced me that it was okay to study in the French tradition but also to know that I could have a career outside it.
In 1998, I went to Norman’s in Miami. I boarded a Greyhound bus from New York City and slept most of the way. At the restaurant, I nervously ordered almost everything on the menu and quietly savored every bite. I didn’t ask to meet Norman, though I knew he was in the kitchen that evening. I stole a menu. I had nothing else to do in Miami, so I returned to the bus station and waited for my ride back home to New York. While waiting, I read his menu over and over again. When I moved to Louisville in 2003, to take over the reins at 610 Magnolia, the first thing I did was frame it and hang it on a wall.
After two hours of waiting, I finally board my plane to Miami. I like the quiet isolation of planes. I have in my hand the manuscript for Norman’s latest book about Florida. It is an ambitious work. He is trying to define the cuisine of Florida, a place of so many geographic and cultural layers that it seems impossible to touch upon them all. His publisher asked me to write a blurb for the book jacket. It feels strange to be doing this. To write a sentence of encouragement for someone I have looked up to for so long is a daunting task. In many ways, heroes can never be your peers, no matter how much you achieve. I feel they should remain distant and polished, for to know someone intimately is also to observe in him the flaws that make him human, and maybe I don’t want to know or accept that in Norman. To me, he is a chef, a writer, and a thoughtful historian. He is also a complex person who has had business failures. He has not gotten the attention bestowed upon some of his peers. At sixty-five, he is rebuilding his empire. We are at a place in the timeline of American cuisine when the gatekeepers are defining its history. It is difficult to see Norman creep back into the American consciousness when I feel he never left. In coming up with a blurb, I’m trying to find the words to pay him homage but not sound like a drooling fan. I want my quote to sound dignified and grateful at the same time, but for now, the words fail me.
It is a windy day in Miami when I arrive. The palm trees are bending at the waist. My first stop is at Versailles, an institution in the Calle Ocho, also known as Little Havana. I get a Cubano, fried plantains, and a beer. Norman had e-mailed a list of places to visit: El Mago de Las Fritas, El Tambo Grill, La Camaronera, Garcia’s, Azucar, and many others. I won’t have time to visit them all. At Versailles, there is no shortage of people who will tell you the history of the neighborhood. It seems odd to credit Fidel Castro with the economic boom of Little Havana, but if you talk to enough Cubans here, it won’t be long before his name comes up. From the moment Castro took power in Cuba, it was clear that the ideological fight over communism would be played out on American soil. Refugees were coming to Miami as early as the late 1950s, and the U.S. government was happy to have them partake in the superiority of the American way of life, to lord it over their communist neighbor. The result was multiple waves of Cubans refugees whose numbers rose and fell with the whims of Castro’s policies. From the early refugees of the 1960s after the Cuban Revolution to the Marielitos in the ’80s, Cuban immigrants tell a story that is long and manifold. The opinions of the older refugees are not always shared by the younger generations who arrived much later in the saga. Maybe the only thing that unites them is their disdain for Castro, even as he is still revered by many inside Cuba. “We left our families, our friends, our homes to come to the United States,” says one older man wearing a straw fedora, whom I met at a juice stand in the Calle Ocho. “Here, we are united against Castro.”
The sky threatens rain all night, but it never comes. A swirling wind brings salty grit to the already humid air. I spend the night in my hotel room reading Norman’s book cover to cover—so many recipes, collected over a lifetime in the kitchen; so many stories. The crazy thing is that for all his writings and recipes, I feel that the best thing about Norman is listening to him speak. He has a conviction in his voice that is quiet but unstoppable. The words in the book don’t do him justice. To hear him speak those same words would make a world of difference, the difference between information and truth. Sometimes, all that is needed to make that leap of faith is the candor of a reassuring voice.
The next day, I head to El Mago de Las Fritas for one of its paprika-spiked pork burgers topped with potato sticks. The meat is bouncy, almost a little too worked over; the spices create a thin crust on the patty that makes me nod in approval. The potato sticks fall all over th
e place, and the only sensible thing to do is to grab the burger with both hands and flatten it. The bun is cheap, processed, and soft—in other words, perfect. It’s not the original way the burger is served, but I get mine with a fried egg on top. I don’t look up until I’ve finished. I order a water and a mamey juice. I have a tamale, too. I look around the restaurant. It is a colorful place, with plastic ferns and old-fashioned menu boards. The waitress looks at me furtively.
Oh, fuck it. “Give me a plate of churros, too,” I tell her.
The problem with food exploration is stopping oneself from overeating. When I’m enjoying a meal, I don’t know how to stop at one or two bites. I walk out of Las Fritas too full to eat again right away. I walk a few blocks to the Wynwood Art District and find a cozy cigar shop where I can rest and rekindle my appetite. It is dark, hazy, and air-conditioned. The manager takes me to his humidor to peruse his selections. I ask him if there are any locally made cigars, and he guides me to a Canimao. It is robust and balanced, he says. I don’t know what that means, but I’m willing to give it a try.
There are two other people in the lounge puffing away: a sinewy woman with deep smoker’s lines on her upper lip, sitting in a leather chair much too large for her small frame; and next to her, a young man, broad and clumsy, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, with a short military haircut. He is talking about jazz; she is talking about politics. They are both drinking cocktails. She is holding her cigar so deftly. I imitate her grip. I introduce myself to them and am given a box of matchsticks to light my cigar. The young man is going next door to the bar and offers to bring me back a rum. I gladly accept. Klaus Waldeck is playing over the speakers; it is like ballroom music on a psychedelic acid trip. On a large-screen TV is a black-and-white video of Fred Astaire dancing. I can’t tell if the video is random or a part of the music. The mood here is laid-back. No one is in a hurry to go anywhere. The manager tells me that if you stay here long enough, you’ll meet everyone from the neighborhood.
