Adjusting to a Second Setup

 I recently configured my desktop for some streaming (my current setup comes via my laptop for positioning/teaching in the kitchen). My plan for a desktop streaming is related in many ways, but also offers a completely different side of my skillset. This way, I've got easy access to screen capture, so I can do real-time analysis and critique of, for example, food and cooking video clips that have been posted elsewhere. Now, being just another 'reacts' is going to get lost in the shuffle, so the plan is to widen my approach. Food, cooking, book and media reviews, plus desktop gaming of all genres, the goal is to display as much of my broad spectrum knowledge as I can, in a way that's a little more difficult when it's purely in front of a stove.

My last stream was, in fact, a gaming one. I'm replaying my way through the Main Storyline of the Critically Acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV. Currently in the Stormblood expansion, which spends most of its time in Fantasy Asia, there's a lot for me to talk about even if I were ignoring the primary cast of characters themselves. Now, I'm not as aggressively well-versed as some friends of mine (looking at you, Nyri), but am nonetheless more than sufficient to offer informed commentary on the Asiatic analogues the game is (not subtly) drawing from the 18th through mid-20th century. It's fun!

(Potential spoilers in the following examples)- 

Punning In Stormblood

Yotsuyu's Accent

These are just off the top of my head, but you see where I'm coming from. Asian language patterns, cultural norms, accents, voiceover work, acting principles, dramatic character development, and the list goes on.

So that might be a good bit of fun in the future.

"Cookbook" Review: 'Japanese Women Don't Get Old Or Fat', by Naomi Moriyama

 

Every so often, and more often than it ought, the world handles surges of interest in fad diets. From Atkins to grapefruit to paleo, GF, or whatever else, there always seems to be something new and kitschy to try in the search for a foolproof weight loss technique. This one's got a good tagline with a faint ring of truth. It's “Japanese Women Don't Get Old Or Fat”, by Naomi Moriyama.

This is the tale of the author, her husband, and their joint desire to share their experiences with Japanese home cooking. It made them feel healthier, happier, and more energetic, as well as giving them something to research- the reasons why it might have done so, and the history behind its development.

Opening with a wave of statistics about the Japanese lifestyle, the book touts their long lifespan, low rates of obesity and heart disease, low healthcare spending, and many other things. Always be suspicious when statistics are used as primers, because you can use said statistics to say virtually anything you want. 78% of statistics are made up on the spot because they sound so effective!

Obligatory attempt at Logos aside, the next pages turn to Pathos. First comes a dramatic monologue in honor of the culinary skill, creativity, and devotion of the author's mother. As any mother should, she gives all for her children, even if they don't always appreciate it at the time. After that comes a stern diatribe centering on how devoted the Japanese are to freshness- foods not only dated, but *timed* at the supermarkets, and even 7-11s stocking tasty, nutritious composed bento instead of prefab salads and suspect sandwiches. Then came a detour to detail the lifestyle of the glorious and rustic countryside, how everything is so vibrantly flavored, fresh, and full of life!

It all felt so transparent, so obviously fabricated- but I couldn't put my finger on why. Understanding came later.

While the “How to Start Your Tokyo Kitchen” chapter is potentially handy for the novice, the truth is that a good cook already knows what equipment they need to cook dinner, and if they don't have it, improvising isn't hard. Some of the later recipes call for Japanese-exclusive cooking gear, and the author tells you how to jury-rig one. Why not add those to the starting list of equipment in the early chapter- perhaps as a closer? That's a much more suitable time to detail where to get things a bit tougher to find.

Time and pages aplenty are spent emphasizing the importance of at-table garnishes and individual seasoning, in accordance with the Japanese tendency not to individually plate, but rather allow self-service from platters- a technique borrowed from China, just one of many.

It grows quite tedious when a portion of every recipe's ingredient list has 'to use at the table' as a caveat. Such a concept needs explaining one time. After that's done, make a separate section within the recipe for the garnishes and table condiments. It's entirely too easy to confuse an inexperienced cook by piling all the ingredients in one column without adequate direction. Considering the prospective readership, I find this to be a massive, glaring error.

A full third of the book is devoted to what's termed “The Seven Pillars of Japanese Home Cooking”. Fish, Vegetables, Rice, Soy, Noodles, Tea, and Fruit are the vaunted pillars, and while each subsection has several anecdotes and a handful of recipes, most of them are rather banal. For a book that centers around what they term 'healthy eating', the number of recipes that use, say, refined sugar as a fairly prominent ingredient is more than a little bothersome when looked at with a more professional eye.

To counteract that, there are stories aplenty that seek to emphasize the healthy, life-giving qualities of the other ingredients. There's an entire tale that centers around brown rice- the barest film of historical reference is given to the fantastic tale of Tomoe Gozen, then used to create a veneer of confidence in the nutritional superiority of brown rice. I agree with the sentiment entirely, but the method is shifty at best. Fiber isn't a miracle cure.

I admit, I wanted to like this book, but I just can't bring myself to. It's trying to be a cookbook and reference text, but it doesn't have enough recipes to be reasonable as the former, or enough hard nutrition facts to shore up the latter. Mostly it reads like a slapdash memoir, bereft of the aura of legitimacy and believability that often feels so necessary when creating a suitable referential work. It's a collection of vignettes, loosely tied together around the common theme of Japanese home cooking being healthy and happiness inducing. Likewise, the book seems to hedge its bet, making the premise sound like something a person has to try for themselves to see if it works as advertised, rather than to try it and expect results.

If you're willing to trust the book and the author's message, feel free to trust the recipes. Some of the 40-odd recipes sprinkled throughout the book might serve you well, and there is a recipe index in the back. I will not, however, offer any recommendations on which ones are worth trying. 

As for me though, I'm not going to bother. This goes straight back to the library- ideally in the fiction section where it belongs.

Cookbook Review: "Classic Chinese Cuisine", by Nina Simonds

 

I've spent a good bit of my life loving Asian cuisine of all shapes and sizes, and I'll always say the most proportionally undervalued of them all here in America is actual Chinese cuisine. The history of its evolution here in America is intriguing but tragic, in that it's been stripped down, marginalized, and cheapened till it's nearly unrecognizable. I've researched long to find what might have been accurate attempts to preserve 'the real deal' in English-language literature through the latter half of the 20th century, and have managed to collect superb examples from the 60s and 70s. Next up- the 80s.

Nina Simonds' “Classic Chinese Cuisine” follows in the form and function of the volumes I've come across before- Lee Su Jan's 1962 masterpiece “The Fine Art of Chinese Cooking” and Madam Wong's 1977 “Long Life Chinese Cookbook”. Ms Simonds had been a writer for Gourmet magazine, and spent years of her youth training in professional kitchens in Taiwan, under master chefs that found mainland China both restrictive and dangerous. (All things considered, I don't blame them.)

As I read through the book, I couldn't help but pull my earlier reads of Dr. Lee and Madam Wong from my shelves and check some of the recipes I recognized against the equivalents in the other volumes. I wasn't disappointed, but instead intrigued. Many of them are virtually identical, some down to idiosyncrasies in language that led me to wonder if a translation or two might have been borrowed.

However, that's not the important part. Most vital is that the recipes don't change over multiple decades, and the historical citations are likewise the same. All three manuscripts are quite clearly drawn from the same core playbook, millennia old and held in deference enough not to be messed with.

The recipes themselves are laid out in a neat and organized manner, with the ingredients listed on the edges of the pages, split up by their purpose within the dish. The method of preparation is detailed in short paragraphs nearer the spine. Be warned, these require careful reading- not every dish has the necessary steps in an effective, efficient order.

I suspect that's a quirk of the extant Chinese culinary lexicon and ingredient prep priorities, though. That small quirk aside, I very much approve of the book's layout. There's a conversion chart at the end just before the index (American, British, and Metric), and each section of the book has any necessary tutorials either right at the beginning or beside the relevant recipe. Likewise, the historical elements that must compliment any serious book of  Chinese cookery are vibrant reading wherever they appear- and many of them are once again referencing the same people, times, and places as other books I've known in the past.

A well-researched manuscript, “Classic Chinese Cuisine” has earned a place on my shelf. It's a bit less worn out and much easier to read than the stalwarts of previous decades, but I feel safe and secure in referencing it just as readily for the quotes and stories as the recipes. Hunt this one down at your local library or used bookstore- you won't regret it one bit.

Cookbook Review: "The Fine Art of Chinese Cooking", by Dr. Lee Su Jan

 

Modern cookbooks are a marvel of marketing and engineering. Awash with elegantly placed photos and pathos-steeped stories, all punctuated by just enough recipes to attempt at justifying the expense. They all too often see service as coffee table books or shelf decor, and little more besides. A shame.

As someone who takes cooking fairly seriously, what I look for in a cookbook is honestly quite simple. I want recipes, and I want the foundations from which they are built. The latter often includes solid amounts of context, be it from other recipes, the industry itself, or just history in general. I suppose you could get away with calling it 'flavor text'. Ahem.

The classic, best-known example is Julia Child's 1961 compilation, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking". Full to the brim with hundreds of recipes that have been deftly sectioned, each with a foreword to add background and useful bits of information about how to combine or modify the recipes for your audience of choice.

A book much more modern that does similar things is Tom Collichio's "Think Like A Chef". One of the cornerstones of my personal collection -when I had room to keep it, at least-, it teaches a home cook how to think about and prepare food in a manner akin to that of a professional while still imparting large amounts of useful information. These include flavor combinations, seasonality, and alternative or unconventional ways to use ingredients, all of which are fundamentals in a chef's arsenal.

But. We must return to the past, to make a vital note. There is another book. One that did everything Julia's book did for French food... but for China. This is "The Fine Art of Chinese Cooking", by Dr. Lee Su Jan. Published in 1963, it takes a no-nonsense approach to outlining the fundamentals of what has come to be thought of as contemporary Chinese-American cuisine. Realizing that the Kennedy-era American cook would never be able to find the wealth of authentic ingredients Chinese food needed, the author turned to recipes that used the basics. In doing so, he taught not only ways to prepare dinner, but the fundamentals of Chinese cooking technique, and the philosophy behind those techniques.

Seeing the pattern here?

There is virtually nothing of the author itself in the book, which tells strongly of his academic leanings. Most all modern cookbooks are heavy with anecdotes and vignettes to fill space and keep the casual buyer interested. The first third of this book has no recipes at all! But it lays the foundation of thousands of years of Chinese history, and reads most engagingly, each chapter discussing a new and vitally important part of Chinese cooking while providing background and encouraging further independent research.

Brilliantly informative even today, the book has upwards of two hundred recipes, a worthy note on its own considering the manuscript has all of 234 pages. Admittedly many of them are derivative, but that was almost certainly intentional. The underlying purpose was to show versatility- that a simple preparation can be nudged in many directions to please many audiences without harming flavor or legitimacy (I do try to avoid using 'authenticity', it being a painfully loaded word these days). Doing this would have given readers confidence to experiment and improve their recipes- something many cooks of the era would have hesitated to consider. Some of the recipes might be intimidating. Don't let them scare you. Everything I've tried works.

The primary drawback to this book is that it's A: hard to find, and B: dated. At many points the author makes substitutions for authentic ingredients, citing their inaccessibility- things like scallions, ginger, and sesame oil. Don't laugh! The modern cook has access to more ingredients than the author would ever have imagined.

Where I live in California, I have my pick of half a dozen Asian or Indian specialty grocery stores within a ten minute drive. in 1963's California, I would likely have had to drive from here to San Francisco's Chinatown to procure those same things! And that's in a state that's had a massive Asian population since the days of the intercontinental railroad. Imagine what a Midwestern housewife would have had to go through!

I recommend finding this book if you can. Try your libraries first- I haven't found it online except for a handful of secondhand copies. Really, though- any serious cook, anyone with an academic bent or a love of food, anyone who wants to learn how to cook Chinese style, and anyone who wants to appreciate how far the world has come in embracing other cultures will find this book a precious gem.

It's Teppanyaki, not Hibachi

     A question asked of me recently prompted a slightly deeper dig into a popular but misnamed restaurant concept. Specifically that of Teppanyaki, often mistakenly referred to as Hibachi in most of North America. I've distilled the basics here.

    The word hibachi (火鉢) meaning 'fire bowl' originally refers to a type of heating device of Japanese origin. Designed to hold charcoal and heat rooms while creating minimal danger of fire, it functioned rather like a western brazier. Though due to its mostly indoor usage, most were clay, porcelain, or other fired material as opposed to the metalwork of many Western environments. 

An antique Hibachi brazier

    When used in English, however, hibachi sometimes also refers to small cooking grills. Hibachi grills are often quite small, and most often see use as a form of portable barbecue. They're something of a middle ground between the proper Japanese hibachi and traditional Japanese charcoal-heated cooking vessels called shichirin. 

An example of a Shichirin

    Considering the similarity of purposes and visuals, I can see why the concept might get garbled in translation. But really, I think it's just because hibachi is the easiest of all the terms to say, read, and write in English.

    None of these terms, however, are for what you're going to get when you sit down in front of a flattop griddle with a dozen other people for dinner and a show. The rise in popularity of Teppanyaki (鉄板焼き) or “iron plate cooking” was pioneered by a Japanese restaurant called Misono (http://www.misono.org) in the Kobe region of Hyogo prefecture starting in 1945. It took the very Japanese idea of good, simple food prepared face to face, centered it around an emphasis on western-style steak, used what would become the legendary Kobe beef for said steaks, and created an icon that stands tall in Japan even now.

    In the United States, the Teppanyaki method didn't quite kick off until ~1964, when a Japanese native named Hiroaki “Rocky” Aoki gave the concept a clever theatrical bent, opening Benihana on West 65th Street in New York. With the meals to be theatrically prepared by a dexterous, knife-wielding, joke-telling chef, the equal measure of flash and flavor brought rave reviews and huge popularity. Over the next few decades, the Benihana name spread over the country and other parts of the world, even online at http://www.benihana.com/. I must admit though, seeing their brand name in supermarket frozen food sections worries me. Such things always do.

So yes. When next you're craving that flash of flame from an onion volcano, or a deft-handed chef to flip a shrimp into your mouth, remember: it's Teppanyaki you want, not Hibachi.

And yes I can do it. But no, I won't do it for you.

Why Representation Has Requirements: Screw You Uncle Roger

    Rapid improvement in international and global communication has led to all manner of improvements in understanding between people, places, and cultures otherwise far apart and dissimilar. However, the rapid spread of information and ideas also brings its inevitable baggage along: misinformation, stereotype, and caricature. 

    Which brings us to my memetic headache of the moment: Uncle Roger. His comedic gimmick is pretty simple- leaning into the middle aged Asian Uncle who behaves like a FOB despite being far from 'home' for many years. Take this, turn the accent up to 11, add gratuitous overreactions to a variety of situations, including many video clips of Asian cooking by non-Asians, and you pretty much have it down.

    The enterprise is not wholly without merit. Some of the examples used in his videos are legitimately appalling, and the reactions would be the same from just about anyone, irrespective of their background.  (Making 'fried rice' with raw, uncooked rice? Yikes.)

    When he turns the clowning on professionals though, it gets rather more bothersome. His targets sometimes seem cherry-picked. Influential, largely wealthy veterans of the food media world occasionally publicize things far outside their area of expertise. 

    The former part of that is Uncle's armor- any angry response would come across as ego driven and 'punching down', so the latter part's often valid criticism has time to sink in. There are occasional counter-reactions from those targeted by the dramatic 'Aiyah!', but it feels like there's a lot of smiling done with clenched jaws and gritted teeth.

    That in itself isn't even so bad, but what's underneath is a more subtle kind of damage that bothers me very much indeed. 

Consider: 

I am the Whitest Dude You Probably Know- I look like a mix of Daniel Radcliffe and Peter Parker. I'd probably be a prime target for a Fried Rice Reaction Video if my media presence were larger. 

But you know what? 

(admiral_ackbar_its_a_trap.jpg)

I'm a chef that specializes in the food culture of Asia and Southeast Asia. I know everything Uncle Roger talks about when it comes to food- what's true, what's exaggerated, and what's outright nonsense. I've spent years living and working alongside both the people he mimics and the ones he griefs.

    

    The stereotype shorthand used by Uncle Roger to influence believability and legitimacy takes away from those who have the expertise, but not the look. Seen most commonly in 'ethnic' restaurants here in the West, hiring practices are geared to give customers what they expect to see. While far fewer than in years past, plenty of people still want to see their very own Uncle Roger when they go out for Chinese- and that's simply not a good thing. 

    Well-meaning as the entertainment might be, it inadvertently causes backsliding of the gains made in Asian media representation, and it undermines the more universal effort to move past stereotypes and preconceptions of knowledge or experience. 

    The days of Short Round and Yan Can Cook are decades gone by, and the Asian communities around the world are better for it. Why draw from a manufactured subculture proven to be harmful, and that's in the process of being deliberately phased out? Uncle Roger feels firmly in the territory of "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.".

    The goal should be to judge the content of the craftsmanship, not the color of the culinarian.

-Awoo.