no. 97: perfected, like humanity
My office sits between two ramen joints, one where the cooks are Chinese and one where the cooks are Thai (the kitchen porters at both are Latin American). Tucked among the miso and shio and thick broth and thin, the first has 牛肉汤面 (beef noodle soup) on the menu, the second has “Thai curry chicken ramen” – khao soi. There are worlds to write about the choices these restaurants have made, about immigration and identity and assimilation and customer expectations, but that’s not today’s essay.
I’d been thinking about that khao soi since I learned they make the paste themselves, but last night I was immediately sidetracked by an offer of khao man gai, the Thai version of Hainanese chicken rice. The plate was absolutely textbook, transporting, a ticket to a place far away.
My favorite thing about chicken rice might be the indirection. That cup of broth in the top right, the one that looks like daikon in dishwater – it’s what holds the dish together, the drummer in the band. In Singapore the sauce is what matters, and the sauce itself matters less than the diversity thereof, the way the balance of garlic and chili and ginger changes at each stall. This sauce was classic Thai, or really Thai-Chinese, based on taucheo – earth and salt, spikes of piquancy. It had the makings of a sauce for everything.
Beneath the chicken (an American portion here, twice over),1 the rice was fragrant and in fragments. I was ruminating more than eating, because it was election night, the world was ending, and I didn’t have anywhere to be. I had time to admire the rubble on my tongue.
In Singapore, you’d be defenestrated for serving chicken rice like that – the grains are meant to be perfectly intact.
To care about this seems like an aesthetic from a poorer world, until you realize how close it is. Until the 1970s, most of Indonesia’s rice was milled by pestling in a mortar. Literally all of Thailand’s rice was reaped and threshed by hand. The first mechanical harvester in Thailand appeared within my lifetime. In 1990, rice mills fractured almost half the rice they processed. The ratio is better today, but not by much. The green revolution isn’t done yet, and neither is subsistence farming.
Swee Kee, the undisputed heavyweight of Singapore’s chicken rice wars, started in 1949, in that harder world.2 Cooking rice involved charcoal, inconsistent cookware, ill fitting lids, and a lot more attention. If their rice was whole and pearlescent, it probably was a triumph – of logistics, of purchasing power, of care and technique.
Now electric rice cookers come with silicone gaskets and non-stick bowls, and more processing power than the first supercomputers. We have better milling, automated graders, agricultural institutes, and fertilizer, so maybe we’re just past the time when grains of rice were that important. Like the availability of vaccines and primary education, this is a sign of progress.
I sent a friend a photo of my dinner, and we sighed about how broken the rice was, how broken the world. It was 9 pm, the map was red, and the kitchen was winding down. They’d dredged my plate from the bottom of the cooker, the rice no cook can afford to throw away. You scrape this up and try to remind it of its potential, then you feed it to the staff, or the last orders of the night. The cook had berated my rice with a metal spoon, chopping by way of persuasion. The edges were clean, without the softness and grip of rice shattered in the mill.
That kind of rice looks like coarse sand, and is called cóm tâm in Vietnam.3 It’s feathery in the mouth, pillowy in a way intact rice never is, with an aroma between deep cellar and new mown field. Cóm tâm used to be a symbol of necessity, but now mills crack rice on purpose to meet demand. The best I’ve had came from a cubbyhole in Eden Center, where an old Vietnamese couple cooked cóm tâm that felt like compromise and longing.
Like all aesthetic standards, intact rice is a perversion, an insistence on an impossibility. Raw rice is graded on length, consistency, and luster. We pay more for longer grains, but also for whiter ones.4 Gentler milling keeps more of the grain but leaves the slightest tint. Batches are priced according to how uniform the grains are. Rice looks like something that can be perfected, like humanity.
In Singapore, the rice in hawker centers is getting noticeably worse, even as official statistics tell us life is getting better. My last plate of curry rice might have been bulgur, beaten to fragments, cooked until it pilled. Elsewhere, the rice smelled like damp burlap sack. More and more, rice comes in hillocks, as though warding off inflation, or apologizing for the carelessness of the cooking. It still has calories.
On the same trip I ate heirloom rice of the sort the green revolution was supposed to make irrelevant, tiny grains still partially husked, pampered with spices and coconut milk, presented in earthenware pots in hushed dining rooms, with scoops of polished coconut shell. Did we treat it better because it cost more, or did it cost more because we treated it better?
Fortunately most rice isn’t thrust upon us this way. It’s the white background to the rest of your food, there to be overlooked. If we give it our attention, we do so freely.
My broken khao man gai was actually a great texture. The gravel was distinct, brushed with oil but not slick, assertive on my tongue. The realization made me laugh.
Maybe rice is only beautiful when we have to struggle for it. Maybe it was only beautiful because we had so little to distract us. Maybe today the closest we can come today is when we eat rice slowly, seasoned with sorrow.
Fried chicken is often an option with khao man gai but not traditional with Hainanese chicken rice, though you see it more and more in Singapore.
It closed in 1997, and but for its closing being unannounced or possibly even unplanned, would have received a state funeral.
Some Thai cooks apparently prefer broken rice for khao man gai, though that’s not what was happening here.
It’s primarily East Asia that wants rice to be brilliant, bleached white. In South Asia, for instance, where parboiling is the norm, various off-white shades are valued.