The worst dessert ever made
The closest I have come to breaking up with my wife without actually breaking up with my wife was when she tried orh ngee (芋泥) for the the first (and last) time. This is usually translated as “yam paste” though I prefer the literal translation of “mud, sludge, mire, or sluggard” for the second character. It is possibly the least photogenic dessert on the planet, despite which there are not one but several instagram hashtags devoted to it. It’s a distinctly Teochew dessert, not quite a staple but a defining pleasure. We literally had more family gatherings without rice than without orh ngee. So it was a problem when Diana declared this the worst dessert ever made, and that she never wanted to try it again.
A rough guide to making a classic version:
Peel a large taro root and cut it into thick slices (the translation of “yam paste” results from an etymological difference between the US and Southeast Asia). Steam them till they surrender, then mash them with a cleaver, first by chopping, then by dragging the minced taro across your cutting board with your cleaver. Mix in a large bowl with either sugar or syrup. The paste should be like velvet. Slice some shallots and deep fry them in lard until the shallots are brown and crisp. Strain, reserving the shallots for another use and the lard for this dish. Steam some slabs of pumpkin till tender (some recipes have you mash the pumpkin coarsely after steaming). Cook some peeled gingko nuts in syrup. Place the yam paste in a large serving bowl, arrange the gingko nuts and pumpkin on top, then pour a generous film of shallot-flavored lard and the gingko nut syrup over. Steam till the whole thing is hot, then serve.
The gingko nuts add texture - they have a firm bite, like a really dense comte. Their bitterness and aromatic lift are useful punctuation for the earth and sweetness. Pumpkin, in this context, is revealed to be a fruit. The contrast with the backdrop of taro makes its flavor positively high toned. It should be served neither al dente nor falling apart. Rather, you should just about notice that it’s not puree when you bite into a piece.
In Singapore it’s not uncommon to see the lard replaced with vegetable oil, since Southeast Asia is heavily Muslim, but using oil that isn’t flavored with shallots is plain wrong, as is omitting the oil altogether, as an increasing number of places do in the name of “health”. (As though a dessert made from a vegetable isn’t healthy enough.) The shallot oil adds confidence and complexity to a dish that is otherwise a bit shy and awkward. Especially if lard is used, the touch of animal fragrance helps the taro speak, not quite in a growl, but certainly in a movie announcer voice. If any dessert could be said to have umami, this does.
Other than omitting the shallot oil, the other cardinal sin is using a food processor. Be that as it may, my uncle is the only person I have ever known actually to make orh ngee with a cleaver, and he hasn’t done this in 30 years. It’s unclear whether the disdain for food processors is anything more than grumpy traditionalism because unlike with mashed potatoes, you can’t really overwork this. You actually want the paste slightly sticky. The real reason one might insist on a cleaver and board is that this method forestalls the addition of liquid to the mash, whereas using a food processor (or worse a blender) invites it. The platonic ideal is for the paste to be completely smooth, with a certain gravitas.
I love orh ngee partly because it is the taste of my childhood, but also because it is a brilliant exemplar of the southern Chinese culinary aesthetic. It defies the usual image of a poised and delicate cuisine. It is not texturally complex, but texture is vital. Without the right smoothness and weight, it isn’t worth the taro used to make it. The ingredients are simple and simply prepared, with no attempt to intensify or concentrate their flavors. Instead, better kitchens purchase carefully - a specific type of taro, harvested at a certain age, this one kind of pumpkin, gingko nuts bought raw in shell rather than blanched and peeled. Even grey mush is ingredient-driven.
When we’re all living in a future dystopia, eating nothing but bio-engineered nutrient sludge, I hope mine will taste like orh ngee.
A couple of follow ups to my previous rant about shrimp made from algae. There are now two startups in Asia trying to get in on this game. One is in Singapore, and their first product is… headless, shell-less shrimp.
The other is in Hong Kong, and they are trying to grow fish maw. As this article notes, this is actually a really smart strategy enabled by the particular demands of the Chinese market, since fish maw is a single cell type, and incredibly expensive. To contextualize the attention-grabbing price: fish maw is always sold dried, so each piece weighs very little and you get more portions by weight of fish maw than you do of say, truffles.
How many comedians does it take to turn history from tragedy into farce?
A group of Hollywood celebrities has been lobbying to raise the minimum wage for tipped waitstaff in NYC to $15, only to run into fierce resistance from the servers themselves.
I have two further questions:
Why the fuck does it matter what a bunch of showbiz celebrities think about this, when the tens of thousands of workers in the industry have no voice? (The calls to eliminate the lower minimum wage for tipped workers are also backed by at least one organization representing restaurant workers.)
What exactly do we call the economic trap in which demand is so elastic that any rise in price causes revenue to fall so much that everyone involved is worse off than they were before?
I tried to find a video of an ingenious orh ngee production line, but sadly there is still opportunity in this internet video niche. Instead, have a video of a machine making taro balls (just one of dozens of possible uses!)
And an oddly soothing demonstration of industrial scale taro peeling.
Thank you for reading a beta issue of let them eat cake, a weekly newsletter about food systems and food. As always, a super-special thank you to my pre-release readers, Jen Thompson and Diana Kudayarova.
best,
tw
p.s. I’d love to buy you a coffee. Or just have you ask me to find a video of a particular kind of food processing machine on the internet. Drop me a line!