A Fork In The Road: Tales of Food, Pleasure and Discovery On The Road (Lonely Planet Travel Literature)

by Lonely Planet

  I have been lucky enough to experience and enjoy many of the rarer and more costly foods on the planet: I have hunted for white truffles in Alba, stalked stags for a saddle or a haunch of venison, visited dairies in Provence whose rare Roves goats feed on wild thyme and are milked for little fresh cheeses rolled in sariette—summer savory—and the Franche-Comte for Vacherin Mont d’Or, barely contained in its hoop of cedarwood and tasting earthy, nutty, buttery, bacony in November, farm-yardy, silagey in late March.

  I have eaten the bottled, preserved, dried and fresh vegetarian cuisine of Rajasthan, and saddle of hare in a garlicky aillade from a mad March hare that I scooped off the road in the west of Ireland and slung over my handlebars.

  I have grown quince, fig, damson, mulberry and crabapple trees, bottled, curded, jammed and jellied accordingly.

  I have roasted longhorn cattle and succulent, snowy fatted Middle White pig at home in Somerset; maiale al latte and porchetta in Tuscany and Piemonte.

  I have caught spiny lobsters off Inis Turk in Ireland and eaten brown trout from Doo Lough. I have ventured snake and snake wine in Hong Kong, though I drew the line at the blood being squeezed into a bowl after the snake’s head had been chopped off for ‘potency and stamina’. Said with a knowing wink.

  I have poached the first wild sea trout to swim up the rivers Dart and Tamar in spring and picked warm cherries from orchards high in the Luberon hills in early summer.

  But Robert Frost’s poem ‘The Road Not Taken’ probably sums up best where I stand now, looking out across life’s hilly climb in search of a new, or rediscovered, landscape for the eye and the heart.

  The road less travelled has always been the one that has lured me, though I have often fallen off it for not quite daring to stay its course. We are led astray and against our better instincts, we rush down ravines without always sensing danger or impasse. As in our cooking lives, we learn most from going off-road if we pay attention and understand, try to make sense of these unexplored, un-signposted corners we were drawn to.

  I would no longer choose the king of the river fish, sea trout, or tender, pale Italian veal if I was forced to choose a singular luxury.

  Last summer I boarded my friend John K’s boat off Old Head in County Mayo, the great horseshoe of Clew Bay edged with lavender mountains as we chugged out to sea. We left the bay and its calm waters for the open sea. No pitching and rolling, no white horses, the swell was a gently rhythmed undulation.

  The west of Ireland coast that I look out over from my summer house is a landscape I always see afresh and am invigorated by. The strands are long, silver-white emptinesses and when the wind blows, the grains of sand whip across them like a desert storm. Nature is wilder, more dangerous, more exposed and exposing here. The horizon is abbreviated by a few little islands that we sail to, Clare, Inis Turk, Inis Bofin, then it is open sea all the way to America.

  It was a clear blue day with everything reflecting and reflected in everything else, sun, cloud, blue sky on water, mountain, light.

  Julia had her three children on board, I had my younger daughter, Charissa; Merci, John K’s wife, one of my oldest friends, was with us. We didn’t go too far out to the choppier waters of the open sea; we followed the coastline’s contour and let the boat drift, let out our lines and waited.

  There is something about the slapping of water on wood, the gentle rock and sway, the communion as you look down into the indigo depths, the sea salt and sun on skin, the jigging of a line with five or six feathered hooks on it that stops time in its tracks. It stops all sense of urgency and fret and disproportion. You are subservient to the task, the sea, the fish.

  A shoal arrived and suddenly we were all reeling in like it was a lottery: more, faster, large, small, petrolly sea-blue-green mackerel with their herringbone black stripes and silver underbellies.

  I knocked them on the head as fast as John unhooked each line. The children screamed with pleasure and excitement. I gutted and soaked the fish in a bucket I’d thrown out on a rope and hauled up slopping with chill seawater. My hands reeked of fish blood, I was spattered all over. No matter. My skin and jeans stuck with sequins of fish scales, my face rimed with salt spray.

  When we had caught as many silver darting devils as we thought we could eat, and extra for all our neighbours, we stopped.

  Don’t take advantage of nature and never, ever waste it.

  I lit the primus in the tiny sheltered wheelhouse.

  I placed whole fish on the black grill and watched as the blue flames spat and leapt at them, charring their skin to uneven crispness and forcing their oily flesh to release its yellow liquid into the tinfoil below.

  I flipped the fish over, watching the eyes sadden glaucomically as they cooked to a trembling white. Merci and I laid out homemade brown bread, dark with blackstrap molasses and thickly spread salty butter and cut lemons.

  I splayed the fish out onto a plate, pulling the rakes of spine away from the flesh.

  We dabbed hot sweet flesh onto bread and poured over the oily juices. An omega ocean of goodness.

  There is no luxury like poverty.

  There is no more luxury than the bounty of the sea and of catching it for yourself and your family.

  Day-old mackerel isn’t even the same fish, the flesh dulls, the silver tarnishes, the oil begins to lose its life and go rancid.

  There is no fish like a poor man’s fish caught and eaten in an Atlantic breeze with those you love and it takes the practice of luxury to shy you away from it.

  I would catch mackerel here from the quay with my brother Dan or out on my friend Alec’s lobster potting boat, Eileen, all August and sell them for a penny a piece when we were children. I felt rich and brave and special.

  I feel rich and brave and special again.

  The gulls wheel and snap behind the boat as we chuck heads and spines overboard.

  The fish we’re taking home trail in netted bags through the water as we motor back to Old Head pier.

  There is nothing finer.

  MARTIN YAN is the host of the Yan Can Cook television show, author of more than 30 cookbooks and the Chef/Partner of M.Y. China restaurant in San Francisco. When he isn’t traveling the world, he is tending his garden and koi pond at his Bay Area home.

  IN MY MOTHER’S KITCHEN

  Martin Yan

  Through my travel and participations in food events all over the world, I have been privileged to meet with many famous culinary icons and talented cooking professionals. Not surprising, our conversations often gravitate toward the topic of food, namely, how we all got started, and what were some of those pivotal moments in our careers. To be honest, I have been quite envious of some of the stories I’d heard. Apparently quite a number of my colleagues received their epiphany in some of the most exotic locales in the world, and under the most charming sets of circumstances.

  Me? I had my moment, my earliest moment anyway, on a bare floor, under a rickety kitchen table. I was four years old and the spot under our kitchen table was my private sanctuary.

  Home was a humble two-room house on the edge of the Southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. Of course this was a million years ago so Guangzhou was not quite the industrial juggernaut that it is today. Back then it was more rural than urban, and our house sat alongside a winding canal, with a muddy path lying outside our front door, paving the way to civilization.

  From my domain under the table I could survey our entire kitchen, which was nothing more than a four-foot by six alcove. The ‘stove’ was a single wood-burning contraption; on top sat a huge (at least to the eyes of a four year old) cast iron wok. It was black and shiny like a lacquered tray. My mother was the chief cook, domestic goddess and number one dish washer, and being a family of simple means, we weren’t exactly well-stocked in the utensils department. Luckily, my mother was gifted and skilled, and she made the best out of what we had: an all-purpose cleaver, a bamboo steamer, and the most basic sets of pots and bowls. Years later I would make jokes a
bout those days. We were too poor to afford shelves. Funny yes, but true nevertheless.

  One thing about our style of ‘country’ living, we were fairly self-sufficient when it came to food. This means that we actually grew most of what we consumed. You can say that we never had any food that was out of season. If it wasn’t in season, we didn’t have it in our little garden and on our rickety table at supper. Everything was fresh, naturally fresh, since we didn’t have a refrigerator. It is ironic that in today’s high-tech society the average family, with all the advance gadgets, is struggling more to eat fresh and healthy food. Perhaps they need to take a lesson from us poor folks back in rural China.

  Back to the kitchen table and my special ‘ah-ha’ moment.

  Up until that point, my relation with food was, shall we say, all ‘above the table’, as in what was on the plates my mother had prepared for supper. My younger brother and I were treated to mostly traditional Cantonese food—mildly seasoned, light and clean sauces, steamed dishes, lots of rice, and most importantly an abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables. Unlike the moms in the West, ours never had to tell us to clean our plates (or bowls), or tell us to remember the starving children elsewhere. Sitting in front of our nightly feast we would waste little time gobbling up everything. Afterwards we would lick our little chopsticks and wonder what was for dinner the following night. Little did we worry, or wonder, how our mother managed to make all those delicious dishes in that tiny kitchen of ours.

  Then one day I crawled underneath our table, and everything changed.

  My mother was a tiny woman, never reached five feet in height. She was, in today’s language, a single mom, being widowed at an early age. Imagine her life back in those days, and with two toddlers to provide for, to make sure that they eat properly every day. It must have been a real struggle. Yet, those who knew my mother would all tell you that she was the most positive woman anyone would ever meet. She was the prime example of self-reliance. ‘Do it yourself,’ she would tell us, ‘Nobody is going to do it for you!’ Whatever ‘it’ was, she certainly set a fine example, and my brother and I have followed that our entire lives.

  She never received any formal training as a cook. Everything she did she learned on her own, by her intuition and keen observation of others. She was a quick learner and I am privileged to have inherited that wonderful gift from her.

  Back in those days professional chefs (more commonly referred to as those who cooked for a living) took their profession less for love and passion for cooking and more for opportunity and necessity. My mother became a cook, first in her own tiny restaurant, and later, after the Communist takeover, in a government-run eatery. Back then, you did what you needed to do to survive, especially when you were a widow with two sons.

  Watching my mother in action in our own small kitchen had transformed me, her four year old son, from a pint-sized foodie to one who aspired to, one day, do all that chopping, stirring, steaming, and fussing over pots of winter melon soups and stews of tasty beef tendons. I wanted to do the magic that she did, taking a few basic ingredients and in no time transforming them into dishes that my brother and I would pine for day after day.

  From beneath the kitchen table I could more than see what my mother was doing, I could also hear all that wonderful sounds, of her scraping the large wok, stirring the various pots, chopping on the old wooden chopping block. I learned most of my knife-cutting skills while I was an apprentice in a Hong Kong restaurant but I was first inspired by the ‘chop chop chop’ of my mom’s cleaver.

  But more than the sound I could also smell the wonderful aroma as each dish she was making was nearing its completion. I could smell the fresh garlic and ginger in the wok, then the browning of stocks of long beans and green onion, then the sweet smell of dark soy. On special occasions my mother would steam pork and duck sausages in the rice pot, and that incredible aroma would permeate not just the kitchen but the entire house and my nose and mouth would be watering the entire time.

  To this day, whenever I came across that same wonderful smell of sausages steaming over plain white rice, I would always think of home. And I would be four years old all over again. Indeed, I would trade that precious spot underneath our wobbly kitchen table for any exotic destination far, far away. It was from that very spot that I first opened my eyes, ears and nose to the world of culinary art. There was where a four-year-old boy would one day emerge, taking the advice from his mother, to do things for himself because nobody else would do it for him. To take that muddy path that laid outside the two-room house, and to begin his culinary journey of a lifetime.

  MICHAEL POLLAN is the author of seven books, including The Omnivore’s Dilemma and, most recently, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation.

  MADE BY HAND

  Michael Pollan

  A couple of years ago, I traveled to Seoul to learn all I could about kimchi and how to make it. I was doing research on fermented foods for my book Cooked, and my education had already taken me to Iceland to sample hakarl (shark that has been buried for weeks—nasty) and to Shanghai for the accurately named stinky tofu. Fermented foods are often strongly—okay, offputtingly—flavored and often prized for that very reason. The Chinese relish their stinky tofu—blocks of tofu steeped for weeks in a slurry of rotten vegetables—but regard a washed-rind cheese with disgust. Sandor Katz, the great fermento and one of my mentors in the smellier culinary arts, has put the matter memorably: ‘Between fresh and rotten there is a creative space where some of the most compelling flavors arise.’

  Indeed. This is precisely what we mean by an ‘acquired taste’, and in Seoul I got to observe the process of acquisition in action. In Seoul I visited the kimchi museum on the south side of town: one of two kimchi museums in Seoul, I learned, and six in the country. Kimchi is a national dish of which Koreans are justly proud, but six museums dedicated to fermented cabbage seemed like a lot. At the museum I visited, I spent a morning watching class after class of kindergarteners troop through the displays, each uniformed child carrying an identical yellow backpack. The children studied dioramas depicting women rubbing bright red paste into cabbage leaves, passed by tableaux of ancient urns, cases with plastic peppers of every size and shade of red, piles of spice, etc. The children were well behaved but clearly bored, so I asked a docent why a field trip to a kimchi museum was part of the kindergarten curriculum. She replied with the sort of measured patience one reserves for a visitor exhibiting an inability to grasp the obvious.

  ‘Children are not born liking kimchi.’

  They have to learn. Why? Because an acquired taste like the one for kimchi is how cultures help knit themselves together. We are the people who like this stuff. Easy and universal tastes—for sweet things, for example—will never help delineate a culture in the way a polarizing food can. The taste of fermented foods is, I came to understand, the taste of us and them.

  That is the first thing I learned in Seoul, and this was the thing I came there expecting to learn. But the wonder of reporting is always the thing you don’t come expecting to learn, the lessons not on the syllabus. In the course of researching Cooked, I worked with many memorable cooking teachers, but in some ways the most memorable was Hyeon Hee Lee, a Korean woman who worked with the local Slow Food chapter, and had offered to teach me how to make traditional kimchi in a village an hour’s drive outside of Seoul. It was a fairly brief encounter, no more than a few hours, but in retrospect it did as much as any other to help me understand what cooking was all about, or could be, in the right hands.

  Before we began, Hyeon Hee made sure, through our translator, that I understood that there are a hundred different ways of making kimchi; what she was going to teach me was just one way, the way of her mother and grandmother before that.

  Hyeon Hee had done most of the prep before I arrived, brining the Napa cabbages overnight and pounding the red peppers, garlic and ginger into a thick paste. What remained was for us to carefully rub the brilliant red paste into the leaves
of the cabbages, which remain intact, one leaf at a time. The process was painstaking, almost absurdly so. You had to make sure that every internal and external square inch of every leaf of every head of cabbage received its own spice massage. Then you folded the leaves back on themselves and wrapped them around so that the whole thing vaguely resembled a pretzel, before gently placing the bright-scarlet knot at the bottom of an urn. Once the urn was full, it would be buried outside in the earth, beneath a little lean-to in the backyard.

  While we worked together through that wintry November afternoon, kneeling side by side on straw mats, Hyeon Hee mentioned that Koreans traditionally made a distinction between the ‘tongue taste’ and the ‘hand taste’ of a food. Hand taste? I was beginning to have my doubts about the translator. But as Hyeon Hee elaborated on the distinction, while the two of us gently and methodically massaged spice into leaf, the distinction began to come into a rough focus.

  Tongue taste is the straightforward chemical interaction that occurs whenever certain molecules make contact with tastebuds on the tongue, something that happens with all foods as a matter of course. Tongue taste is the kind of easy, accessible flavor that any food scientist or manufacturer can reliably produce in order to make food appealing. ‘McDonald’s has tongue taste,’ Hyeon Hee explained.

  Hand taste, however, involves something much greater than mere flavor. It is the infinitely more complex experience of a food that bears the unmistakable signature of the individual who made it—the care and thought and idiosyncrasy that that person has put into the work of preparing it. Hand taste cannot be simulated, Hyeon Hee insisted, and hand taste is the reason we go to all this trouble, massaging the individual leaves of each cabbage, and then folding them and packing them in the urn just so. What hand taste is, I understood all at once, is the taste of love—immediately recognizable, and impossible to fake.