Buttermilk Graffiti

by Edward Lee

  In 2014, Sarah produced a story for NPR about a photographer who asked pairs of random strangers to pose for a picture together. It’s a fascinating story. The photos are rich and haunting. Two random strangers pose in an embrace, then they go about their lives. There is nothing but this captured moment that connects the two people, and yet, in many of the photographs, they seem to have a real bond. Sarah says she sees real intimacy between these strangers, even though she knows it’s not really there. It’s only imagined, for a fleeting moment. Yet I see it, too, as does everyone who looks at the photos. Maybe it’s because we want to see it, because we want to believe that an instant of intimacy can exist. I’ve listened to this NPR story many times, and each time, it makes me smile. Maybe it’s because something that is so hard to find in the real world can easily exist in a fictional photograph. That is enough to keep me going.

  Finding the intersection of soul food and Korean food is easy for me, almost second nature. I find the rhythms to be similar, the simplicity, the frugality. A lot of the raw ingredients are shared: pig’s feet, cabbage, sweet potato, peanuts. Koreans food tends to ferment more, while soul food tends to cook low and slow. Yet both evoke the same range of feelings in the end. I love nothing more than combining the technique of a low-and-slow food with something fermented. That is the most perfect dish I can think of because it is the best of two worlds I care deeply about.

  Octopus Stir-Fry

  (Nak-ji Bokum)

  This octopus stir-fry is a mainstay in every Korean restaurant. The octopus is stir-fried quickly until just cooked, with a chewy but pleasant texture. Do not overcook the octopus, or it will become impossibly rubbery. Have all your ingredients cut and ready to go. Use a large skillet or wok over high heat to get your pan screaming hot.

  Serves 4 as a first course

  gochujang sauce

  3 tablespoons soy sauce

  2½ tablespoons gochujang (Korean chile paste)

  2 tablespoons toasted sesame oil

  2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

  2 teaspoons fish sauce

  1 tablespoon gochugaru (Korean chile powder) or other ground chile

  5 garlic cloves, minced

  1 tablespoon sugar

  One 1½- to 2-pound octopus, cleaned

  3 tablespoons vegetable oil

  1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil

  1 garlic clove, minced

  1 carrot, thinly sliced

  ½ medium onion, thinly sliced

  2 jalapeño peppers, seeded and thinly sliced

  1 red bell pepper, seeded and cut into thin strips

  4 shiitake mushrooms, stemmed and thinly sliced

  1 tablespoon toasted sesame seeds, for garnish

  2 scallions, thinly sliced, for garnish

  To make the sauce: In a small bowl, combine the soy sauce, gochujang, sesame oil, lemon juice, fish sauce, gochugaru, garlic, and sugar and mix well. Set aside.

  Run the octopus under cold running water. Cut the tentacles away from the head and slice into 2-inch pieces. Slice the head into small pieces. Pat the octopus dry with paper towels.

  Heat a large skillet or wok over high heat and add half the vegetable oil. When the oil is screaming hot, add the octopus and stir-fry for 1 minute. Remove from the pan and set aside on a plate.

  Add the remaining vegetable oil to the pan, along with the sesame oil, and heat until very hot. Add the garlic, carrot, onion, peppers, and mushrooms and stir-fry for 4 to 5 minutes, until the vegetables are softened and lightly browned but not caramelized. Add the octopus and the sauce to the pan and cook for 2 to 3 minutes more, mixing well. If the sauce is too thick, add 1 tablespoon water to loosen it.

  Transfer the octopus to a platter and garnish with the sesame seeds and scallions. Serve immediately.

  Salt-Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Kalbi Butter and Gochujang Sauce

  The sweet potato is a root vegetable beloved equally by Korean and soul food cooks. I love to find the intersection of two cultures by blending techniques and flavors, and to me, this recipe is the best of both worlds: buttery roasted sweet potatoes meet Korean flavors.

  This dish uses the stir-fry sauce from the Octopus Stir-Fry. Kalbi is a Korean marinade for beef, but here it’s used to make a compound butter. Make the kalbi butter ahead of time, even the day before, to allow the flavors to blend.

  Serves 4 as a first course or side

  4 sweet potatoes, scrubbed

  ¼ cup corn oil

  Sea salt

  ¼ cup Gochujang Sauce

  About 6 tablespoons Kalbi Butter, softened

  Chopped scallions, for garnish

  Preheat the oven to 375°F.

  Put the potatoes on a plate and rub generously with the corn oil, then roll in the sea salt.

  Wrap each potato in aluminum foil and put on an oven rack. Bake for 1 hour, or until the potatoes are soft to the touch. Remove from the oven and let cool for about 5 minutes.

  Unwrap the potatoes and transfer to a platter. Split each potato open with a paring knife. With your fingers, gently press on the ends of the potato so the split widens. Add a small spoonful of the gochujang sauce to each sweet potato, then add a large spoonful of the kalbi butter. Sprinkle the scallions over the butter and serve immediately, as the butter will start to melt into the sweet potatoes (which is a good thing).

  Kalbi Butter | Makes 4 cups

  ¾ cup soy sauce

  ¼ cup granulated sugar

  2 tablespoons packed brown sugar

  2 tablespoons toasted sesame oil

  6 garlic cloves, chopped

  3 tablespoons minced fresh ginger

  3 scallions, finely chopped

  2 teaspoons gochugaru (Korean chile powder) or other ground chile powder

  2 pounds (8 sticks) unsalted butter, softened

  In a medium saucepan, combine the soy sauce, both sugars, and the sesame oil and bring to a boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar, then boil for 3 minutes. Let cool until room temperature but not cold.

  Put the garlic, ginger, scallions, and gochugaru in a food processor and pulse until thoroughly blended into a paste. With the machine running, add the softened butter and process until fully combined. Drizzle in the warm soy sauce mixture, processing until fully combined.

  Transfer the compound butter to a covered container and refrigerate until thoroughly chilled, at least 1 hour. You can make the butter up to a day ahead.

  Chapter 9

  A Lesson in Smen

  I dream of white clam pizza. Tiny pebbles of garlic, dried oregano, freshly chopped littleneck clams, and a child-size fistful of grated pecorino on a warm crust of charred, puffed dough. The briny steam is the first thing that hits your nose; a light drizzle of olive oil makes the entire pie shimmer. Whenever I’m in Connecticut, I eat my weight in clam pizza.

  It’s snowing today, a dense, silent snowfall that makes the world seem hushed. I’m driving to Westport, a tony suburban town known more for its quiet family life than its cuisine. But there is a Frank Pepe pizzeria in nearby Fairfield, and while everyone says it’s not as good as the original, in New Haven, I’m sure it’ll do just fine. People always say the sequel is never as good as the original. The snow is wet and thick, and has slowed traffic to a dismal forty miles per hour on the highway. My windshield is frosted around the edges. I’m dreaming of pizza, but I’m thinking of Morocco. I’m here for the smen.

  Smen, a long-fermented butter, technically illegal to sell commercially in the United States, is not something you can buy at your local gourmet shop. I’ve searched in vain for a black market in smen dealers. I’ve winked at waitresses at Moroccan restaurants, hinting that I would be willing to pay a hefty sum for a taste of it. I’ve tried to make it at home, but there is scant literature on the subject. Recently, a blogger friend of mine connected me to someone who had
attended a dinner party in Westport thrown by a young Moroccan woman who had recently moved to America. A few e-mails later, I was introduced to Amal. She’s from Marrakesh. She’s been here for six months and is living with her brother. She is said to possess great cooking talent. A few more e-mails, and I secure an invitation to her home. She promises to show me how to make smen. It is an ancient tradition in every Moroccan home, she tells me. I knew that. I worked with a Moroccan chef once, and I’ve been obsessed with the idea of smen ever since.

  One of my first jobs in a professional kitchen was at a trendy French Moroccan restaurant in New York City’s East Village. Frank Crispo was my boss. He’s a no-nonsense blue-collar chef from Philadelphia. His mind is an encyclopedia of Western cooking: French, Italian, Spanish, and even some German classics. He would cook with the angry intensity of a bull and the delicacy of a ballerina. Frank taught me how to compete for my place on the line. He taught me how to win with nothing more than the willingness to work harder than the guy next to me. “Come an hour before anyone else does, and stay an hour late.” Frank would say things like that to me all the time.

  Before the grand opening, the owners hired a husband-and-wife team from Morocco to teach us their cuisine. They were chefs from Fez, handsome and fashionable. They fought night and day. A kitchen is loud enough anyway, but the noise level in ours was magnified by their vibrating arguments. It would start with a whispered comment from her; then he would cut back with a sharp retort. Things would quickly escalate into a shouting match, her upraised fingers jerking with every pronounced insult while he shrugged his shoulders, letting out a nasal moan of exasperation. The husband went by the name Ben; I don’t remember his wife’s name. Sometimes, in the middle of their heated arguments, he would look at me and smirk. None of us in the kitchen understood a word they were saying, so we never knew how serious the arguments were. “It is just passion,” Ben would say to me later. “I love her, but she is so strong.”

  I was the young commis, or junior chef, so it was my job to entertain them on Sundays, my only day off. I would take them sightseeing, shopping, whatever they wanted. We walked to the Twin Towers one morning only to find out that Ben had a moral disdain for paying to see the top of any building. “I can buy a postcard,” he kept saying. We walked back to the restaurant while his wife berated him for thirty blocks.

  Ben and I muddled through in broken English, and became friends. I started to look forward to our Sundays together. One Sunday, while his wife was out shopping, he and I went for a walk. He loved walks. He was a tall, gentle man with graying hair that made him look wise. But he was always quiet—too timid, I thought, to talk to me much when his wife was nearby. I took him to Katz’s Deli and Russ and Daughters, places where his wife would not want him to eat. We sat in a nearby playground and unwrapped our corned beef sandwich, pastrami salmon on a bagel with scallion cream cheese, and two different kinds of rugelach. Ben liked watching the children run around us screaming. Their high-pitched shrieks didn’t bother him. He never had children, and I think that saddened him more than anything else in the world. He told me that the food he was teaching me was for tourists. It wasn’t the real food of Morocco. It was what the owners wanted. My jaw dropped. Every day, for the past month, I had been diligently rolling braewats and bisteeyas, pureeing sundry versions of chermoula, and tending to a five-gallon tub of harissa, which went on everything. I thought I was learning something authentic. I felt betrayed. How could he be so nonchalant about it? And why would he bother telling me this? He could easily have finished out his time here without breaking a young cook’s spirit.

  “You need real spices, you need ras el hanout,” he said to me quietly, as if we were trading secrets. “And you need smen.”

  As we ate lunch that day, he told me tales of this enigmatic butter that magically improved everything it touched. You can keep for it many years, he said. He had a jar of it at home that was five years old. It is the smell of Morocco, he said. I had never heard of anything like this. In between bites of pastrami salmon, he told me how to make it. He would speak a little, then take a bite of the salmon, close his eyes, and lose his train of thought. After every bite, I’d have to remind him where he’d left off. I wrote everything down on the back of a receipt. I asked him to show me later how to make it, in the kitchen. He shook his head as if to say it’s better that no one know about this conversation. He wrapped up the remaining half of his corned beef sandwich and put it in his apron pocket. He didn’t talk to me much after that afternoon. At the end of the month, he and his wife returned to Morocco. We vowed to keep in touch but never did. I lost the receipt, and for years I couldn’t remember the name of that butter we spoke of that day in the safety of a crowd of screaming children in the East Village.

  Amal’s house is at the end of a cul-de-sac on a plain-looking street. Westport is a serene, wealthy family town. The houses here are mostly Colonials with two-car garages and pristine driveways. The snow makes every house look like a postcard of a perfect New England suburb. Amal answers the door quickly. She is vibrant and talkative, eager to show me her recipes. Although she already has a degree in economics, she wants to go to an American university. She wants to go to New York City. Westport is a little slow for her, she tells me. She’s twenty-six and a modest, religious woman. She doesn’t want to disappoint her parents, who worry about her back home in Marrakesh. She has a kind voice and tells me all this in near-perfect English. I ask her how she learned English so quickly. From movies, she says. As a child, she watched Hollywood movies over and over again until she could repeat every word of dialogue.

  I ask her to tell me about her life in Marrakesh.

  “Every day, you gather with families and friends for meals. You stroll through the markets and smell spices. Everywhere you look, you see colors that remind you of nature. You drink mint tea in cafés and talk all day till the sun goes down. Meals are celebrations, enjoyed in large groups. In America, everyone eats alone. It seems so lonely.” She smiles as if to soften the negative remark.

  I remind her that Westport is not representative of all of America.

  “In Morocco,” she tells me, “you are never alone. You are never far from the sound of laughter.” Amal is the youngest of nine children. She is the adventurous one. As she’s telling me this, I look out the window behind her, at trees covered in snow, at the yard devoid of any human activity. For a moment, we gaze at the lonely scene together, then she lets out a frustrated yelp. “I miss Marrakesh,” she tells me. Then she quickly snaps back to her lively demeanor and tells me that, for now, being an American is most important for her.

  The first step of any learning process is mimicry. It is how Amal learned English. It is how I learned to cook. With the Internet and cookbooks, it seems that we can learn everything from reading and observing. But there are still mysteries in the kitchen, like sourdough, or croissants you can’t master through a set of instructions. Smen falls into this category. It is impossible to explain all the nuances in words. The process of making smen is simple, but it is all in the hands. There is a rhythm to it, a movement learned through repetition. But not everyone has a Moroccan friend they can learn from.

  The following is a description of Amal making smen. It is an attempt to put into words something that is, at its core, ineffable.

  Amal reaches for a small pot and fills it with about three cups of tap water without measuring. She brings this to a simmer over a gas burner that hisses gently. She opens a glass jar of dried thyme leaves and spoons about three tablespoons into the pot. She then contemplates the ratio and adds another immodest pinch. It is a lot of thyme. As the water simmers, the kitchen fills with the herbaceous smell of wet, fecund earth. Thyme is delicate in small amounts; it is light and green to the nose. This amount of thyme is aggressive and tannic. I feel as if I’m smelling thyme for the first time.

  After fifteen minutes, she strains the liquid into a shallow bowl and discards th
e spent leaves. She spoons a little into her mouth, to approve of the flavor. She moves this bowl off to the side. She wants it to cool so she can work it into the butter without melting it. But it can’t be too cold, either, or it’ll chill the butter to a stiffness that would feel “discourteous” to her hands.

  In a large ceramic bowl, she rests six sticks of unsalted butter that have been waiting all morning to be touched. She pours two cups of cold water into the bowl and, with both hands, begins to knead together the butter and water. She calls this process “washing.” Slowly and methodically, she squeezes the butter through her fingers. The idea is to clean the butter by removing the milky residue that the butter-making process leaves behind. As she kneads the butter with her hands, the water turns cloudy. Her hands clench and relax in a motion that seems as rehearsed as an ancient dance. When the water turns cloudy enough that we can’t see the bottom of the bowl, she drains the water into the sink. She then adds a little more clean water and repeats the process.

  Amal is telling me about life in Marrakesh, about her cousins and friends. When a memory makes her laugh, she stops to enjoy the moment. The water turns cloudy again. She repeats this washing process three times, until the water remains clear, then drains the bowl. Next, she adds half the thyme water, which has cooled to room temperature. She uses the balls of her hands to press and smear the butter against the bottom of the bowl. The thyme water is mingling with the surface area of the butter but not emulsifying into it. Watching Amal’s hands is like watching a baker knead bread dough, but in slow motion. It is circular, soothing, and sensual. After about ten minutes of this kneading, she drains the thyme water. She adds the salt now. It looks to me to be about three tablespoons; it looks like too much. She pushes it gently but firmly into the amenable butter. We taste it. The smen tastes oversalted, but Amal says it’s perfect. She then adds the remaining thyme water to the butter. She presses the butter flat and covers it with plastic wrap. She tells me to let it rest at room temperature for four hours at least or, better yet, overnight.