'FLOATING ISLAND"

 

I am writing about my food-as-lifestyle muse, the lovely British chef Rachel Khoo, reminiscing her shows at her little “home restaurant” in Paris and making a beautiful living out of cooking. Certainly, I have written about her before on these pages, perhaps a year or so back, I have followed her on BBC since my New York days, and I am revisiting/binge-watching this weekend just so to be transported to the streets and vibrant culinary markets in France, to feel inspired, and to woo the cook in me. The title of this piece is a dessert she was making in her tiny kitchen with a view for herb-growing window: Classic crème anglaise (chilled custard) topped with a dollop of puffed meringue (the “floating island”) and on the island cute pieces of sweet pralines (a brittle candy using almond slivers stiffened in simple syrup) — and all these pure confections made from scratch, of course. Trained chefs have something personally visible you don’t otherwise see in a restaurant setting, a peculiar something that’s inside-out of them, like wearing a heart on their sleeves, in their ways around the kitchen when they're home. Home-style — the warmth of this — cooking is the ethos of what a formal dining experience hopes to transcend as traditional quality and comfort in reservations-only food. When chefs are home cooking for you, well, that’s the real deal magnified yet humble, you are six degrees special to his heart, at home he pervades in the ambience of welcome, his real self you see as the true romantic to cooking (handed down by family lineage), and that is the very essence and element in the creation of supper in his hands (not from the sous chef or assembled by the rank and file cooks), but through his magic touch favored by ingredients and old recipes.       

I watch Ms. Khoo “to see myself” — a vicarious nostalgia of the old cook I was in New York, a dutiful one I must say, in the name of love: for home food as celebration, for warm gatherings, for bringing out the excitement and seasons in eating. In another episode Rachel, by train, took a half-day trip to wintry Normandy coast and visited her favorite seafood monger to check out what’s delicious in his fresh-catch of the day. Her relationship to the vendor was intimate; she even cooked something quick for his family while waiting for her scheduled train back to Paris; she made mussels braised in fried fennel and dill fronds and liquified in strong apple cider wine, a “soupable" rich-salty-woodsy-decadent glaze coating the seafood using the shell and slurping good! To come up with something perfect and mindful to draw in the beauty of the local quay and the market in rainy weather yet in the grey clouds will be beautiful memories to make; and to achieve a superbly delicious on-the-fly food, not to mention a face of beauty and the beauty of her food— is a distinct gift given by the universe to only a few handful souls. And that is why she’s my muse. She gives food their total credence. And she’s like feeding me, as I have fed my old love, at the table of her heart.         

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FOOD BIOME

 

“Darwin discovered that evolution is not merely about the survival of the fittest but also about charm and sensory delight in individual subjective experience. The implications of this idea for scientists and observers are profound, requiring us to acknowledge that the many wondrous sights and sounds of the natural world are not merely delightful to us; they are products of a long history of subjective evaluations made by the animals themselves.” — Richard O. Prum, Evolution of Beauty 

    I had spent a good chunk of my afternoon bird-watching from my upstairs living window. There was a fledgeling in the corner of the rain gutter waiting for parent food. The tree across the house was the outpost where mom or dad provisionally rest a few minutes hearing their chick sing and knowing it’s still there on the eaves, before darting to its nest and deliver the food that's in their beak-to-baby beak eager to eat. (It was a fast move, the exchange, the morsel could be anything edible and digestible, a dead insect, a crumb, a berry, I don’t know, but the hungry baby was satisfied upon swallowing and stopped tweeting.) The parents (common brown swallows species) repeated the cycle of feeding roughly at fifteen minutes interval of flying out to forage food and returning to deliver dinner. It was a success each time and I was happy for the family birds, not to mention entertained and time well-spent for writing it. 

    So what does this almost ornithological activity have to do with human food blogging? A great deal. Let me explain. One “scientific” interesting observation I made that afternoon: Of the nearby homes in my neighborhood, it appeared that only my blue house where I rent a second floor flat was an aviary niche. It could be that through the years of “adaptation” and “choice,” wild birds (which by the way the book where I derived the above quote-epigraph argues a theory that subjective/arbitrary mate choice for quality of personalities and distinctive styles of cooperation and building were favorable traits that influenced aesthetic evolution, which could be understood as the direct biological reason for the manifestation of beauty) had made an ecological catchment for nesting and storing food of my house because of its functionally and its reproductively optimal presence to raise a brood. All around my house burst all day long (with the exception at night when I can only hear minimal scratches in the walls) restless activities of finches, peckers and swallows communicating diversely, I don’t ever listen to electrically-plugged music during the day when I have wild avian songs easing and wonderful to my heart. The birds have chosen my home as a natural birdhouse where they're free to be homemakers; it seems the soul of this house is a forest subjective to them. It provides. It creates harmony.

    When I prepare my daily meals, I am aware of my well-being and health in accordance to a biological lineage that food coming from the green earth is a source of beauty, if not the origin of all beauty and biodiversity in life. I have mountain apples and mango salad and toasted sunflower bread for lunch, chamomile-coconut tea for drinks. I was raised by a mother from love fed by good home-cooked food, and by the influences of a poetic grandfather who had built an ancestral farm teeming with provisions and victuals from fruit trees and cultivated vegetables and herbs and edible flowers from gourds and squash vines (a favorite salad garnish of mine), and above all a "biome" where I, as a kid, would be connected and ever so, and still am, to the frontiers of the natural world of food.          

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SEEDS AND TEA

    I was watching a film biography of Jack Kerouac on VHS tape Saturday night, and a clip from a late 1950's TV show featured him being interviewed and later reading an excerpt from his masterpiece novel On The Road — at the chapter when he finishes his travel story and thinks about his friend responsible for showing him the world. The poignancy in their journey at last were the layers of distance left behind when all was said and done, and there's no meeting again; for when old age or death couldn't take it back. Kerouac defined his generation as sympathetic: "beat" out the poet in you; you who had suffered much and had come this far.

    The relevance of poetry to this blog is an inevitable seed. Approaching ten years history in writing about food sublimated by literary musings embodies the cook and the poet as one. Eating is beside the point of writing. And it takes me places other than alone. I make a simple syrup of pineapple sugar and spring ginger. The pumpkin seeds were sun-dried first (next to the seashells outside) and then roasted the next day in the pan. Between prepping and plating, I am the kitchen bard planting these sonorous letters to myself when I've come home. And a refreshment poured in an iced highball glass can blossom again, like a gathering. But Ovid said that love is like a garden in the heart. I had painted our small wine country farm in watercolor on a sketchbook because I knew the gatherings would end someday. It’s been years since and behind us now, when I had left that piece of love in New York on our dinning table.   

    In the city I cooked well, especially on winter nights and mornings. Green papaya soup for the soul; grapefruit sourdough pancake in cast-iron steaming of maple. Home-spun ramen (Shinobi-style) bowl in miso and scallions shoyu broth; and dense-thick challah French toast charred perfectly in Beurre D’Isigny. Remembering the Christmas eve before we hit the road to spend the holidays with good friends in France, I took a last look at the candle by the window in our bedroom (a Yuletide symbol to illuminate our home while we're gone) facing the East River. Our train finally arriving at the platform in Brive-la-Gaillarde, Anne was already waiting outside with her family to welcome us — and what would be an unforgettable feasting and vacation with them in our past life.       

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Gâteau d’Hélène (Coconut Cake)

(Recipe from Simone Beck, adapted by Dorie Greenspan, with photo credit in the New York Times.)

 

    "A white cake filled and iced with coconut cream and apricot; published in Ms. Beck’s 1972 book, 'Simca’s Cuisine.'" Filled and iced with coconut cream and apricot. And the cake was brushed with orange-rum liqueur flambé to soak. After reading Sam Sifton's cooking column, I immediately went to my kitchen and made chrysanthemums-chamomile, with chunks of strawberries, iced tea — and dreamt of past summers in Paris with my cousin living there. In this old little world I’m reminiscing, at the river Seine (across the steps from the Jardin du Plantes in the 5th arr.) was our meeting place whenever I arrive independently from New York, and we called it our home at the crossroads of travel. At Le Pure Café (11th arr.) was our sidewalk oasis for catching up, more importantly for our kindred time as artist souls, and I imagine this tea and coconut cake on our table and us, les duex cousins, painting the town. Poetry was inevitably our core subject. It has been since we were young teenagers discovering our twin callings. Even if we are both much older now, everything is still palpable and alive “in that realm.” It is our language, and poetry is still speaking through us. She loves collecting fallen leaves along our walks (in my bedside journal is tucked an oak, June 9, 2017). One of our favorite books that “guide” us around Paris is “The Light We Don’t See.” Feeling a turn on the road and closing our eyes as we held hands, we knew we were there at the very spot when the book transcended its page. 

    There are beautiful reasons to visit the past, especially when a spoon at a time the memories and conversations are as sweet as cake. Sometimes I would arrive Paris without notice and I would call my cousin when I was already at the Seine. She knew well that randomness about me. Half an hour later, her hand would touch my shoulder from behind. There were months when she wouldn't hear from me, yet we sought each other out when the holidays or anniversaries were up; we would, like telepathy, email each other from different parts of the world at exactly the same time hitting send on the keyboard, and we were converged (I was at Siam Reap, Cambodia once, on Christmas, the time difference was blurry as I recalled counting the days, yet we managed to meet half way and not forget). She loves heart-shaped leaves. Anywhere I am, either walking on Waihe'e Coastal Dunes & Wetlands Refuge trail, or at the Bellevue Botanical Garden outside Seattle, this piece of crumb ...  I will always find, her back to me.      

       

    

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