the food of ravaged places

I’ve been in final edits for the book, hence the long silence. It won’t be much more than a pamphlet, which feels right to me — a stiletto to slide between the glossy bulk of the proper cookbooks on your shelf. My long-suffering publisher and I have agreed on a title, and one day soon a cover will emerge.

Elsewhere, I’ve started writing a series on reliability, one of those bottomless, unheralded concepts which occasionally seize my attention. It grows in equal parts from writing about palm oil, one of those invisible drivers which makes the world turn, and from my other job. In a way it all comes from the same place. The food systems of the first world are above all reliable, created to provide anything we could want at any time, at any cost.

A couple of snippets while normal service is restored.

I started scoring my loaves again.

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I’ve been reading Michael Zee’s Zao Fan: Breakfast of China, a few pages at a time. That’s all I can take, before I start missing Asia too much.

We had a very American breakfast today, casting around Falls Church for a pre-market breakfast. The places that were open all had suburban names, those of men confident in the American century. Harvey’s. Godfrey’s. Lazy Mike’s. They all offered American breakfasts, undertakings, dishes for a large plate, a fork and knife, a sit down in a dining room and a conquering purpose afterwards. We wandered on, pedestrians in a land of drive-thrus.

Eventually we got a sandwich in the market, and ate standing in the mizzle. A glorified mcmuffin, oversize, oversweet, thoroughly rubbery. It was warm and calorific — modern yuppie luxe, ethical, unchallenging, somehow burdensome. Harvey might have enjoyed it, Godfrey too. It left us unfulfilled. We sought a second breakfast, an egg patty on a biscuit. This was tasty but overbuilt, muscular but leaden. It shed cherry tomatoes and cheese rinds as we tackled it.

It was a day for missing bak chor mee and ham chim peng, chee cheong fun from a plastic box, soon kueh sticking to the plate. I can’t countenance making any of the dishes in Zao Fan at home. More than expertise, they require specialization and context — the three of course are inseparable. Mine would lack the sprezzatura that a specialist brings, and the sprezzatura is all. I have yet to find an American breakfast with that kind of grace.

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Speaking of reliability and things we take for granted, Nicola Twilley’s Frostbite, on the cold chain that brings us so much of our food, is an absolute romp. Highly recommended.

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We’ve been eating the food of ravaged places. The mountains of the Kush, the wastelands of the Soviet dream, the unconquered viridian hills of Southeast Asia. Places that people have fled, dandelion seeds on the wing.

The grocers are more interesting than the restaurants. The restaurants are introductions. The grocers carry what people refuse to leave behind. A Russian lady in Herndon presides over yards of smoked fish. The Palestinian butcher has open bins of olives, and two shop cats, and shelves too close to for us pass one another. An old Baghdadi gentleman held court in a Falls Church basement, over a case of Cadbury’s shipped from the Middle East. His sleepy eyes, behind his glasses, reflect Baghdad. A Thai market carries 8 or 9 kinds of coconut milk, a detail that matters a great deal to me, and very little to almost anyone else in Arlington county.

Exile makes strange neighbors. There’s one branch of a Korean supermarket chain that’s mostly devoted to imports from India and Pakistan: bottle gourd, bitter gourd, and moringa, entire aisles of dal. The Latin American market next to it includes a shelf straight from Accra, Ghanaian beans, packaged fufu, cold-pressed palm oil glowing like sunset. Turn around, and you’re facing a pallet bin of nixtamal, and beyond that, a produce case with fresh banana leaves, crystallized figs, cassava, three kinds of chayote. The halal grocers all carry goods from Southern India, partition undone. Jars of bayildi from Armenia, cashews from Vietnam by way of Kabul, a convocation of dried fruit.

There are a couple of lone proprietors, like the Shirazi guy who used to pull up outside my office in a van, to sell dried fruit and nuts he imports from Iran. I haven’t seen him in months, and hope he’s OK. But everywhere else, the staff is latinx. The shelf-stockers facing bottles of Manchurian sauce, the women trimming and bundling yu choy and pea shoots, the fishmongers slicing and sluicing pomfret in their peeling monster gloves.

Here’s a map of places we’ve been. Inclusion isn’t recommendation, but I’ll make recs if you ask.

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The food of ravaged places: Yemeni fish qulaba, at Saba in Fairfax. Miraculous.