RICE AGAIN

I toggle between Francis Lam and Sam Sifton for cooking inspiration, and this week’s cultural attributions to their story-recipes where particularly lovely: it’s about Tet. Tet is the Lunar New Year celebrated in Vietnam, and it’s fast approaching (Feb. 12), and this means food preparation— and prolific and abundant and colorful and shiny they should be, custom dictates. I was impressed on the pickling emphasis using allium vegetables like pearl shallots and the rhizomes of green onions (very decorative condiments); and wow to their braised-once-grilled dishes achieving a “caramel coconut sauce” (the technique is beautiful). I imagine the family kitchen in anticipation of the event to be headstrong, generous, parochially communal busy (and proudly this is a very typical dynamic in SE Asian cultures where major events are times home cooks and traditional banquets take center stage). I am an inveterate eater of anything smothered over rice, say a thick but soluble gravy like the Japanese curry robust with carrots and smoked peppers. But give/cook me that coconut caramel sauce topped with pickled shallots and maybe some crisp leaves of scallions sprinkled on top— I’m in heaven for that rice again.       

(Flashback: Visiting Hue, Vietnam, circa 2009, resting in a covered wooden bridge/sleeping station with painted flowers motif and dragon carvings around the eaves stretching over a rice field, I solemnly take all my “food” voyages to heart. And poetry is like a small harvest I thank the world for.) 

Silk squash, a.k.a sponge gourd, braised in broiled tomatoes, and through reduction finishing it off with a fresh-cut sprig of oregano (from a coworker) to perfume my red-green sauce, and soon will be ready for ladling over you know what. I have moringa flowers, yes, and they will smile on top of my bowl. Lam had a recipe for Sichuan pepper sauce with garlic and ginger, maple syrup and lime juice, I’m on a menu roll for the next couple of days, truly from inspiration to food on the table. Thanks to my splendid guides.  

(Another flashback: I found a few vintage photos this morning of my field work as grad student at the Ifugao Rice Terraces, Philippines, around the same time I visited Hue. I will transcribe for you a hand-written caption in my journal signifying the phenomenal event any ethnographer researcher would boast. In the related literature segment of my thesis, I remember the theorem “non-locality consciousness” adopted by Quantum Holography science arguing that perception evolving from the cosmic process is reciprocal to a reality that was once a sublime. Indigenous Knowledge… the work of poetry… what I saw there rising towards the sky… was real.)   

From my journal: I really wondered about the rice terraces the wondrous Ifugao had built – of their awareness of its stupendous natural beauty. I had also lived – in Hungduan (inset)– at this most amazing mountain summit of cultivated rice fields and waterfalls. No electricity has touched this place though it’s the 21st century already, but my host, an Ifugao native and winemaker (rice wine), Mary- her “English” name, had an even dignity in the hardscrabble, duty-bound expression on her face, unswept by the forest and rice culture oasis where she lives, near the sky. And why is that? I honestly didn’t ask her, though I should’ve when appropriately recoverable from our conversations. During my time with her, she never once marveled about the beauty of her environment as much as it had imbued me and my research. Instead, in her mythic eyes conjured the work to be done in the "high fields.”