Miscellaneous

Comfort Food

An essay I originally wrote at a workshop and gave to my mother.

I consider myself a fairly good cook. I am very proud of my ability to steam trout, smothered with crushed black beans and garlic. When the flesh is white and tender, I sprinkle the fish with chopped scallions and ginger, and sear it with hot oil. When the oil is drizzled over the scallions they sizzle and crackle, and the kitchen is filled with the piquant fragrance of ginger and onion. It smells like dinner at home: four bowls and four pairs of chopsticks, and my mother puts the fish on the table.

I congratulate myself for successfully recreating that fish. In fact, sometimes I secretly think that my fish is better than my mother’s. I’ve copied some of her other simple dishes as well — green beans stir-fried soft with chunks of garlic; broccoli and red peppers crisply sautéed with oyster sauce; tender eggs sweetened with bright ripe tomatoes. But there is one dish I have never been able to copy.

When I was a child growing up in a Chinese American family, I mostly hated eating Chinese food. I wanted to eat the food my classmates talked about: meatloaf and mashed potatoes; roast chicken and tuna casserole. The only Chinese dish I always ate without complaint was my mother’s beef stew. Later on, after I studied Chinese in college, I learned that it was properly referred to as hongshao rou, or red-cooked meat. But when I was a child all I knew was that I loved to eat that stew.

Even though my mother made it relatively often, I never observed her putting together the ingredients. Instead, tucked away in my bedroom where I read fairy stories and Nancy Drew, I would smell the stew cooking, spicy and salty and rich. When I came downstairs for dinner, my father would put a bowl of rice in front of me, and my mother would hand me the spoon from the pot of stew on the table. I spooned out cubes of meat, dark and glistening. I added chunks of potatoes, browned from the sauce. If it was a really good stew day, when you bit into the potatoes the inside would be juicy and salty, the flavor embedded into the mealy core. My mother put carrots in the stew as well, but as a child I hated cooked carrots and avoided them, skirting around the orange pieces to scoop up the sauce and pour it over my rice. Then I would pick up my chopsticks in my right hand, the bowl in my left, and dig in.

Later, as I pored through Chinese cookbooks searching for the recipe, I realized that my mother had altered tradition. Her version used less soy sauce and sometimes included garlic. I think she sometimes did not add star anise, the pungent, star-shaped spice that smells like Chinese grocery stores, sharp and redolent of the old world. When I finally asked her for the recipe, her imprecise instructions surprisingly included Lee Kum Kee chicken marinade. On the Internet I found a recipe posted by another Chinese American, similarly frustrated by her inability to copy her father’s recipe. Her recipe cheated by cooking the beef in canned beef broth.

Nowadays, when I’m feeling especially homesick for my mother’s cooking, I think about making the stew. I’ve tried several times now, but each time something goes wrong. Because she no longer cooks from a book and never measures her ingredients, her instructions to me never quite add up. The pork or beef I buy just never tastes as good; it’s too tough or too lean. The potatoes are either overcooked or undercooked. I don’t understand how she measures out the chicken marinade, and I can’t figure out how much soy sauce to put in. She tells me, “add soy sauce until it covers the meat‚” but a year later she says, “only put in two or three tablespoons of soy sauce.” Sometimes she tells me, “you can add one or two tablespoons of chicken marinade just after the meat is brown‚” and “don’t add any water!” But when I follow those instructions, the stew turns out too dry. Adding water or soy sauce, the balance is lost. Finding the right blend of ingredients, I fear, will take years.

The last time I went home my mother asked if I wanted her to cook anything special, and I asked her to cook the stew. But again, I somehow missed the cooking process — I had gone out, I think, and by the time I got back I could smell the fragrance of the stew, simmering. Now I have grown to enjoy the taste of carrots, so as I added them to my bowl of rice, I looked at the sauce. It was dark brown, thin, and glistened in places with traces of fat from the meat. It was salty and slightly sweet, and possessed that elusive flavor I will always associate with my mother’s cooking. Perhaps the secret ingredient is not in the food, but in my mother. Somehow the scent and texture of her skin has entered the stew. As she peels the potatoes, cubes the meat, and chops the carrots, part of my mother is absorbed by the food. I can never replicate that.