Welcome to the first edition of soy! And Happy Lunar New Year if you’re celebrating.
First off, a little about the name:
As a child, I was a really picky eater. One of my favorite childhood foods—in fact, one of the few dishes I deigned to eat for an embarrassingly long portion of my toddlerhood—was stir-fried doufugan1 and edamame, seasoned with soy sauce and a touch of oyster sauce.
What I recently realized is that my favorite childhood dish is actually three iterations of the same thing: the soybean. Doufugan is a seasoned, firmer version of tofu, which is made from soy milk, which is made from soybeans. Soy sauce is made from a fermented paste of soybeans. And edamame, or maodou as we call it in my Chinese family, is the young soybean harvested before it has ripened.
Beyond being the building block of so many delicious and distinct foods, soy encompasses much of what this newsletter will explore. Many of the environmental and ethical issues around food production and consumption can be found in this one crop. Only about 6% of the world’s soybean crop is consumed directly by humans in the form of recognizable human food, like tofu and miso. The bulk of it is fed directly to livestock2, and the rest is converted into soybean oil which, similar to corn syrup, has slipped its way into the diets of so many people around the world.
Despite its ubiquity in our food chain, the humble soybean doesn’t get the attention it deserves. I was reminded of this when, searching for a recipe for my favorite childhood dish, stir-fried maodou and doufugan, I stumbled upon a variation of it in a 2013 NPR article profiling popular food writer, Fuchsia Dunlop, and her book on Chinese home cooking, “Every Grain of Rice.” It starts:
What comes to mind when you think of Chinese food? Is it takeout, thick sauces or deep-fried meat? Cookbook author Fuchsia Dunlop wants to change that.
It’s an otherwise pleasant article, including a nice recipe for xuecai maodou, or edamame stir fried with snow vegetable. But that opener made me cringe.3 Takeout, thick sauces and deep-fried meat are none of the things that come to my mind when I think of Chinese food.
Which begs the question: who is the “you” in that opening sentence? My guess is that it’s the same “you” in most of the sentences I read about food. It’s the “you” who eats cereal for breakfast and loves peanut butter on toast and whose idea of flavor is salt and pepper and maybe a few dried green herbs “you” call “spice.”
If that “you” is as far away from you as it is from me—if you love food and flavor, and if food to you is more than just sustenance and nutrition, but also memory, identity and a whole range of emotions from shame to pride, not to mention a dash of secondhand nostalgia passed down to you from your uprooted mothers and fathers—then soy is for you.
soy is my response to the question of why it is that I know more about the difference between Morton and Diamond Crystal kosher salt4 than I do about soy sauce. Or why every time I read a reference to laoganma or mapo this or that, I feel a visceral thrill followed by a pang of regret for even caring about what Sam Sifton thinks about something I already know and love. I’m reminded of the term “boba liberal” and the politics of belonging that Jiayang Fan unpacked in her New Yorker piece, “Chronicles of a Bubble-Tea Addict,” as well as the complicated trope of the lunchbox moment that Jaya Saxena wrote so eloquently about for Eater. No matter how misguided or flattening our grasps at connection and identity are, we all want to feel like we belong. Some of us are just still working through it.
I haven’t made stir-fried maodou and doufugan in a minute, but maybe I’ll give it a shot this week. Like a lot of Chinese home cooking, the actual cooking takes less than five minutes after chopping and assembling the ingredients. The harder part is schlepping myself to Chinatown to buy doufugan, which is much more difficult to find in Western supermarkets than regular tofu. FYI, it’s commonly labeled as “five-spice tofu,” “savory baked tofu,” or, the most awkward translation, “dried bean curd.” If you happen to find some, here’s a simple recipe worth trying from Cathy Erway. You can sub in edamame for the grean beans and add a dash of oyster sauce for sweetness and depth.
I’m curious: what’s your favorite childhood dish? Have you attempted to make it recently?
A bit about me, the writer behind this newsletter:
My name is Michelle Ma, and I’m a writer and journalist based in New York, raised in southern California (east of the SGV, home to the best Chinese food in the U.S. imo) and born in China. I’m currently an editor at The Wall Street Journal, where I work on live journalism. My job is challenging at times and very much dominated by the never-ending news cycle. Cooking is how I de-stress and unwind. As a journalist, I’ve always been drawn to documenting power: who has access to it, who doesn’t and how that’s changing over time. Food is one of the most pervasive yet underestimated signifiers of power—of cultural norms and what’s accepted and what’s not (and who gets to decide on both)—and this corner of the internet will contend with that.
What to expect:
I’m new to the newsletter game, so if you enjoy this, please share and subscribe. soy will be a monthly newsletter about food and how it intersects with things like community, identity, labor and history. Coming up in future issues: interviews with and reported pieces on people who grow, make, deliver, serve and appreciate food; essays on trends and diaspora; and a few dispatches from my kitchen experiments and foraging expeditions.
This week in food:
What I’ve been eating: I received my first order from Asian Veggies this week, and it was a good experience! One thing I like is that they link you to the delivery drivers’ Venmos and Zelles for contactless tipping, which you know goes directly to them. If anyone has good recipes for a pound of ube, please share. I also enjoyed this article from Resy on Uyghur food in the U.S. There are several Uyghur restaurants in New York: one in lower Manhattan, two in Flushing, and another in Brighton Beach, and they are next on my takeout list.
What I’ve been cooking: Indian is in the rotation this month, and I’ve been making ample use of my Instant Pot, which really lends itself to Indian recipes of the beany, soupy, stewy variety. Archana Mundhe’s book has been a great guide. On that note, paneer is surprisingly hard to find in grocery stores, so I’ve been thinking about making some Instant Pot paneer. It seems like a pretty unintimidating entry into cheesemaking. Will report back. I’ve also been cooking out of the iconic Madhur Jaffrey’s “Quick & Easy Indian,” and each recipe is actually simple and actually delicious. Lastly, I’ve spent a lot of time this month paging through “Five Morsels of Love,” which has the best title of any cookbook ever and also a sweet backstory. I’m waiting for the snow to clear before I venture back to the best place for spices in New York to get some jaggery and tamarind that a lot of her Andhra recipes call for.
PSA: If you’re based in the New York area, the Choy Division CSA is open for sign-ups for the 2021 season. You can learn more about what a CSA is—as well as more about Choy Division itself, which specializes in Asian heritage crops—here on the farm’s website. I was a member last year and thoroughly enjoyed every bit of it. It even achieved the incredible feat of teaching me to enjoy the taste of bitter melon for the first time. The farmer behind Choy Division, Christina Chan, is also really great about sharing recipe ideas and some behind-the-scenes tidbits on the day-to-day realities of small-scale farming.
If you enjoyed any part of this, please consider sharing soy with your friends, family and white roommates who complain about the smell of kimchi in your fridge.
If you’ve made it this far, join me for hot pot! Hot pot is one of my favorite activities and, in my opinion, unrivaled in its ability to nourish and bring people together. One day when we’re able, I’ll be gathering friends and thinkers for monthly hot pot salons in my home. Fill out this form if you’re interested.
Lastly, the recent surge in violent attacks against Asian Americans, and specifically our elders, on the eve of what’s supposed to be one of our community’s biggest times of celebration and joy, has left me feeling pretty hopeless. Especially now, when we’re all separated and this virus rages on, I found myself grasping at things to do. For now, I’ve donated to Stop AAPI Hate, a reporting center that tracks and responds to these types of hate crimes. Please join me if you’re able.
The Woks of Life has a good explanation for the difference between doufugan and other types of tofu. This doesn’t need to be said, but tofu is as varied as cheese.
I was raised a meat eater in a family and culture where eating meat was considered a marker of wealth and opportunity and something to be celebrated. I know that choosing to eat less meat is also a privilege afforded to people who have the time, money and cultural context to make that kind of transition. Reducing my meat consumption has been an evolution for me, but it’s one that I know a lot of people are going through with good intention. I also believe shame is less motivating than encouragement, so my aim is to promote more interesting vegetable-focused food and caveating meat dishes with the context around sourcing ethically, if it’s within your means.
To be clear, I actually don’t take issue with Fuchsia Dunlop, perhaps the most famous expert in Sichuan cooking in the West. There’s just something bittersweet and so diasporic about a white British lady being the person who introduced me, someone who was born in mainland China and whose first language was Mandarin, to the food of my homeland.
Part of it is that there simply isn’t much good English documentation of Chinese recipes. I myself turn most often to Dunlop’s recipes for Sichuan dishes, as well as the mother-daughter duo behind The Mala Market blog. For other Chinese recipes, I often rely on The Woks of Life, run by a sweet Chinese American family, or New York-based blogger, Maggie Zhu of Omnivore’s Cookbook. If you have other sources, please let me know in the comments or by replying to this email.
To me, Dunlop is actually a model of one way to approach inhabiting and sharing a culture that isn’t your own. She appreciates and gives credit to the Sichuan chefs who taught her. She is careful about learning the terminology and ingredients and treating the practices with respect and care. Take this from a blog post she wrote on how she wrestles with language and translation when it comes to writing recipes for Chinese dishes in English:
Personally, I still find it a little weird calling it tofu because I’m used to saying dou fu in Chinese, so tofu doesn’t feel quite right. And as someone writing about Chinese food and culinary culture, shouldn’t I be advocating a Chinese-derived term when describing a foodstuff that has its origins in China? I suddenly noticed how many of the terms used by English speakers for Asian foods are derived from the Japanese: edamame rather than mao dou 毛豆 for green soybeans in the pod; daikon for luo bo 萝卜 white radishes; umami rather than xian 鲜 for delicious savouriness…
One thing that Dunlop does in that post that I won’t be doing here is italicizing terms in other languages. I don’t see why I should italicize maodou and doufugan if Bon Appétit isn’t italicizing harissa or bucatini.
Western chefs are very picky about their kosher salts. Morton is apparently much saltier-tasting than Diamond Crystal, so most go for Diamond Crystal, which is in the red box. If you’re going to use Morton in a recipe that calls for Diamond Crystal (as most implicitly or explicitly do), use a bit less.
Loved this - thank you Michelle!
I recently listened to--and then gave up on listening to--an old episode of Good Food LA. I generally love this podcast. In this episode however, a white guest proceeded to explain how the SGV is a great place for the "authentic" and "weird" regional dishes and also recommended Yelp as a great resource for those that don't speak Chinese. Had this segment been framed as how to approach Chinese restaurants in the SGV as an outsider, I might have found her comments problematic but understandable. Instead, it does what you speak to in your article, assume the audience is the same as the speaker. Who is she to say it's authentic or not? (On a side note, white people claiming something is "authentic" gives me hives.) For whom is the food weird to? Later in the podcast, they had Sang Yoon, a Korean American restaurateur, speak about Burmese food. I'm not saying Korean people can only speak about Korean food...because most of my food knowledge as a Chinese adoptee is sadly not about Chinese food. Clearly thought, this guy knew very little about Burmese food. Certainly less than an actual Burmese person. It felt like the thought process was, "He was Asian, so he must know about other Asian food." Most of the conversation was on contextualizing the food for it to feel approachable (ie. comfortable) for white people. And that is where I gave up on the podcast episode. The Codeswitch podcast did a great episode on the explanatory comma that similarly addresses the assumptions made about the audience. Love what you're doing; can't wait to see what your write on next.