no. 79: electric immigration
Hullo to readers old and new, and I hope 2024 is treating you well. Some bits and pieces to start the year.
1.
It was only in 2019 that I decided to really learn to cook Singaporean food, to teach my hands how the dishes should feel. We’d closed the restaurant two years ago, and it felt like time to try something new. Skills can stagnate like people and water.
Naturally, the first thing I did was to commit to cooking a pop-up for 60.
This was obviously an insane idea – to start by cooking in public, making dozens of portions of dishes I knew how to taste but not to make. But it was a great commitment mechanism, and we did four turns on a Tuesday night and ran out of food.
One of my goals this year is to cook in public more, so I’m doing some pop-ups over the next few weeks. If you’re in Camberville, come and eat.
Char Kway Teow | Sunday 2024-01-28, 5pm-late | Backbar
Kueh and CNY goodies | Sunday 2024-02-11 | Location tbd, reply to this email if you’d like some
Hokkien Mee | Sunday 2024-02-18, 5pm-late | Backbar
2.
The first thing I published this year was this piece on beef tallow, the history of margarine, and the mutability of edible fats.
It’s part of a series about palm oil – the most commonly consumed edible fat in the world – that I’m writing for Scope of Work. I don’t think palm oil explains modernity, but it certainly illuminates it, and I hope you’ll follow along!
3.
When I did that first pop-up in 2019, I was living in a 650 square foot apartment in a high rise in NYC. One night, I toasted so much belacan that some neighbors came to ask if I knew what that awful smell was. I didn’t recognize them, which meant they didn’t live on our floor, and had navigated to our door by smell. I told them I didn’t smell anything, which by that point was actually true.
I’d brought buah keluak and belacan from Singapore, but I had to find the other ingredients in New York, which was a trial. The one Indonesian market in town was worth patronizing only for the takeout, and the supermarkets in Chinatown didn’t have much of what I needed. Eventually, I found the Bangkok Center Grocery, a cubbyhole on Mosco Street, just off crematorium row. It smelt of many pounds of raw rice in a tiny space, cold green herbs, incense and dust. Naturally, the proprietor was Thai. He had a platypus smile and explained happily that their supply chain included expats’ suitcases while he bagged chilis behind the counter. His delight at my finding candlenuts was that of a true innocent.
I badly missed the Bangkok Centre Grocery last weekend, when I spent 5 hours failing to buy belacan and red chili, two ingredients I’d find at literally any grocer in Singapore.
This quest led me down every aisle of two Chinese supermarkets, and H-Mart. Twice. I felt like I’d walked an entire museum, a Smithsonian of Asian ingredients. Cans of Spam imported from the Philippines. Frozen fish paste products from six countries, I assume with focus-grouped levels of MSG. Countless flavors of hotpot base from China. An entire catalogue of idli mix. Beef penis. Yards of jars from Thailand: salted gouramy, whole limes, three sizes of garlic, stalks of green peppercorns in rasping brine, and at least four brands of shrimp paste in jars, so close to belacan and yet so wrong.
Can a reminder of one country inspire alienation from another? The encyclopedia of Thai pickles is forever associated in my mind with Mosco Street, the smell not of home but of empathy and recognition.
4.
One of the unexpected joys of driving an EV is being forced to leave the interstate. Fast chargers live not by the highway, but in strip mall country.
Sometimes this means we have lunch at chain restaurants we’ve never set foot in before, Applebee’s as cultural experience. But most of the time, within walking distance of the charger, there’s a small restaurant or grocery that caters to immigrants like us, nestled in a strip mall.
We found zedoary (labeled “white ginger”) while wandering around an Indian grocer next to an equestrian supply store in Manchester, waiting for our car to charge. On New Year’s day we ate lunch in a combination buffet/grocery/community-centre-for-the-Indian-community-of-suburban-Albany. Idli like cirrus clouds, astringent sambhar, and chai delirious with cardamom, sweetened just to tenderness.
On Sunday we plugged in next to a hotpot/Korean BBQ restaurant which looked and sounded like a nightclub with a buffet at one in the afternoon. The host quoted an hour’s wait, so we crossed Route 1 – this was the kind of strip mall country with neither sidewalks nor crosswalks – and walked into a combinatoric noodle joint where the default noodle was mixian, thick rice noodles originally from the landlocked hillsides where China meets Myanmar and Laos and Vietnam.
This dining room was as airy and anodyne as a Home Depot, and the staff, who may or may not have been related, spoke mainland Mandarin while in Brownian motion. Headlining the menu, a clear soup of mixian with chicken and fish maw, which isn’t the kind of dish I associate with suburban Connecticut. The place also sold pho and tonkotsu ramen, and, like the hotpot joint across the street, “Szechuan spicy”, tomato, and “Thai tom yum” broths for your noodles. The menu felt a little adolescent, which I attributed to the “Grand Opening” banner covering most of the facade.
The real explanation turned out to be that the noodle house was a franchise, teleported in fully formed from Suzhou. So was the hotpot nightclub, an all-conquering concept started in Flushing. Perhaps they got their soups from the same factory.
There’s a story about immigration in here somewhere, about Mott Street tenements and suburbia and the eddies of immigration law.