no. 119: a month
This is another chapter of the first book I wrote. It’s never going to see light of day, but there were some good bits. I think this is one.
Food in Singapore isn’t exactly ingredient-driven, not the way American restaurants use the phrase today. I used to think this was because seasonality requires seasons, but I’m no longer sure that’s true. What’s certainly true is that there are almost no farms in Singapore, and agriculture seems to have been excised from the Singaporean sense of self.
Farming and fishing, we were told, is what our ancestors did because they were poor, uneducated, and had no fucking choice. Growing up, I didn’t know which was worse: to be a farmer or a cook, but they were both pretty close to the bottom of the professional barrel. Both were fates to be suffered through so your offspring could study hard and become accountants.
The kitchens where I staged sometimes received ingredients from France, smuggled in carry-ons in First Class, or ferried in the baggage of the long-suffering assistants to the chefs on the posters. We got poulet de bresse, a season’s worth of game, Belon oysters, live scallops, John Dory, red mullet, and sacks of dried beans that we had to hull (AOC Coco de Paimpol). The vegetables we served alongside came from Malaysia and China in cellophane packs and styrofoam. Ken told me once that it took a really good cook to make first class food out of second class ingredients, and he said it with pride, because it was what he did every day. It was revealing, and true.
I started grad school in New York in the fall of 2004. Every day I got off the subway in Union Square, so four days a week, I emerged into a sea of produce. It may have been the first farmer’s market I saw. It’s certainly the first farmer’s market I remember. A land of firsts: the first time I saw a head of lettuce that cost $5, the first time I saw a puntarelle, the first apple I actually enjoyed – a Gingergold, eaten out of hand among the stalls.
Grad school itself seemed to me a months long exercise in the suspension of disbelief. If I closed an eye and the light was right, I could pretend that after two years of butter and crabs and quenelles, of scrubbing trash cans and service stairways and full banquet carts of dirty dishes, I could still take the phrase “design gesture” seriously. I spent much of my first year chafing at the unreality of it all, so I decided to go and shovel cow shit for a month.
