the taste of a memory, and red-braised tofu

Noah is having a Cocktail Moment, and as a result has been doing a lot of reading about tiki cocktails recently, and in particular the many efforts that food historians are putting in to try to re-create the original mai tai. When he told me about how hard people were trying to figure out exactly what the rum that was used in the original mai tai tasted like, I laughed. I thought (and might have said) “what a ridiculous waste of time!” We had a long argument about it. I still don’t think we agree.

This is a picture of this week’s recipe.

To me, there is no point to trying to re-create the original mai tai. Food is a time-based art. Food is contextual (I can’t stop writing about that), and so even following the same recipe, using the same ingredients, the final result will taste different and feel different every time. Why is the soft serve you eat out of a little plastic hat at a minor league baseball game so good? Why is the snack that that you eat on your way home from the grocery store so satisfying? Why does bottom of the barrel champagne still taste like joy to me? The environment, the hunger, the history that you associate with a taste, those all matter so much more than the thing itself.

Trying to re-create the original is in line with the sort of obsession with the past that causes people to say that living cultures are dead things, ready to be wrapped up and preserved. There can never be a “definitive” version of any food, because that means it will not be improved upon in the future. The only way food cannot be improved upon is if no one is alive to make it. Similarly, if we think that the “original” version of something is, in some way, superior, well, it’s easy to flippantly say “nostalgia is a disease,” but the idea of getting “back” to a true thing has been the cause of many evils in the world. Even if, as Noah tells me, it isn’t about the original being better, well, I still don’t see the point.

Noah’s argument was that it isn’t about the original mai tai being “better” than the ones that came after it, but rather, wanting to taste the drink that started the tiki cocktail revolution. To that I say… did it? Cocktail obsessives might want to attribute this to the drink, but I think that it is much more about the place of the tiki bar rather than the mai tai itself. What did the mai tai signify? Was it the mai tai that people wanted, or was it something beyond that? I don’t think it’s controversial to say that Trader Vic’s popularity… it wasn’t about the mai tai.

The taste of a memory can never be retrieved. While I think there’s a lot to be said for eating things that remind us of other times, other people, other places, the food is a vessel for our own remembrance. Focusing too much on trying to get the food to be exactly the way you remember it will only lead you to disappointment. Whatever you ate on that wonderful trip with your friends will taste worse at home. It will taste worse at home because you have work in the morning, and your kitchen gets dirty when you make it. You might prepare the food better than the restaurant where you first tried it, but trying to replicate the fish and chips you had by the sea in a small town in England isn’t worth the effort, you aren’t at the beach anymore.

Here’s a snapchat my dad sent me of, idk, Georgia. I think he must have been visiting the fam, but I really don’t remember. It looks kind of like my great grandma’s house but tbh I don’t remember really.

My dad made pan dressing every year when I was growing up. There was a huge (huge, unspeakably massive, like, 80 person) thanksgiving that we went to with his side of the family near his hometown every year. And every year he made pan dressing, and was bitterly disappointed by it. He was trying to make his mother’s pan dressing (or maybe it was his grandmother’s? I forget) and he never could. The thing that he made could never satisfy him, but he did it every year and felt bitter disappointment. Every year he said “maybe it was a cornbread dressing, maybe it was a biscuick dressing, maybe it was…”

Maybe it was the disappointment of failure that he was looking for. Perhaps what he wanted was not the taste of his mom’s dressing, but rather the sense of closeness that you get from trying, or even the very familial feeling of having disappointed your parents (even from beyond the grave). But I think that if he had tried to make dressing, instead of trying, every year, to make her dressing he would have been happier with the result. Noah recently has been making these scones on the weekend. They’re really good, but they’re a lot of work, you have to like, grind up oats or something. I asked him recently why he didn’t just make biscuits, since biscuits are the easiest thing in the world, and he said that he can’t make biscuits because they wouldn’t be mine. Of course, this was flattering to hear, but it also made me think about all the things that we give up on making because someone else made it so much better that there’s no point in trying. That seems sort of sad. Of course, Noah’s biscuits will never be mine, but they would be his, just as my dad could have made his pan dressing, instead of not-hers.

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Anyway, this is my collection of recipes, and so, as tempting as it would be for me to wrap this up with a recipe for a mai tai… I don’t make them, and I’m not particularly wild about them. I am, however, wild about red-braised pork belly, at least in theory. In the vein of “there’s no such thing as the ultimate version of something” I’m taking the classic, much beloved, recipe for red braised pork belly and making it with tofu. I don’t claim that this version is “better” than the original, merely that this one is vegetarian.

This recipe is pulled together from a few different sources: The Woks of Life (and their chicken version), Omnivore’s Cookbook, and Red Spice House, with additional inspiration from Florence Lin’s great Chinese Vegetarian Cookbook.

For this recipe I’m using frozen tofu because it has a different texture than regular tofu, and it absorbs sauce differently. Idk a word to use other than “different” here. Twice frozen tofu in this application has more of the “gentle chewiness” that you associate with, for example, a well cooked pork belly. Since recipes for red braised pork call for blanching it first, and because I forgot to thaw my frozen tofu, this recipe starts with thawing your frozen tofu in an aromatic broth. This will both thaw and flavor your tofu, hopefully.

The next step in red braised pork is to brown the pork in rock sugar. Instead, looking at the Woks of Life chicken version (linked above) I’m coating the tofu in corn starch, water, and a bit of oil before browning it with the melted sugar. I’m also cooking it with more oil than you would for meat, both to help prevent sticking, and because it needs extra fat. Something that I do that I don’t always see in tofu recipes is just using a ton of oil as I cook it. I guess you don’t need to, but especially with recipes like this where the sauce gets its body from both the reduction with the pork fat, you have to use a lot of oil if you want to get any sort of unctuousness. Anyway, you could pour the oil off after you fry your tofu, but I’d suggest… don’t?

I’m also using a mixture of rock sugar and maltose in this recipe. Maltose has a terrific body, and is less sweet than sugar. It’s used to give char siu its shine. If you don’t have maltose at home you could just use all rock sugar, I’m sure that would be fine.

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Red Braised Tofu

Ingredients:

• 1 block medium firm tofu, frozen (one or twice, but at LEAST once. I can’t remember if this one has been frozen twice or not, that’s on me)

• A few slices of ginger

• 2 scallions, gently smashed (whatever) and cut into a few big pieces

• 1 tablespoon corn starch

• 2 tablespoons water

• 2 tablespoons oil

• 4 tbs oil

• 1 scant tbs rock sugar (if you aren’t adding maltose, use an un-scant tablespoon)

• 1/4 cup shaoxing (or: 2tbs shaoxhing and 2 tbs dry sherry if your shaoxhing is particularly salty. Mine was.)

• 1.5 tbs light soy sauce

• 1 tbs dark soy sauce (Chinese dark soy sauce, quite different from Japanese dark soy sauce)

• 1 star anise pod

• 3/4 cup broth from earlier

• ginger slices

• 1 tsp maltose

Loosen tofu from the container by running it under hot water, then free the block of tofu and ice, and rinse the ice off.

Put tofu in a pot with sliced ginger, and the sliced scallion. Cover the tofu with water, and bring to a boil. Cook until a chopstick can go all the way through it. About half an hour.

Gently remove the tofu from the water. (Don’t dump the boiling water, you will use it later.)

Once tofu is cool enough to handle slice it into cubes.

Make the sauce: Add the shaoxhing, soy sauces, star anise, 3/4 cup of reserved broth, and ginger slices. Set aside.

Add 4 tbs oil and the rock sugar to your wok or whatever you’re cooking in. Melt the rock sugar slowly over low heat. It will caramelize all at once. As soon as it does, dump in your tofu, carefully, as you will get splattered with oil. Sorry. I also poured in the marinating liquid, which has a bit of corn starch in it. Unsure if this makes a difference.

The tofu will stick, try to keep it moving as it browns. You aren’t aiming for crispy, just slightly browned. Once the sticking becomes too much to bear, pour in the sauce. Pour it slowly down the side of the wok, I’ve found that this makes the splattering less wild sometimes? Once it is boiling, add the teaspoon of maltose.

Cook, covered and a low heat for a long time, or uncovered at a high heat for a pretty short time. (Usually this is cooked covered for an hour or longer, in this case there’s no need for all that. Cooking it uncovered will speed things up, and the tofu is already cooked.) It’s done when everything is cooked down well, but it won’t taste worse if you let it go for longer. (Basically, I cooked it for about 15 minutes uncovered, and then was like “well my rice isn’t done yet” so I covered it and lowered the heat. I’m sure that cooking it longer helps the flavor, but also like, if you want to eat it sooner you can. I’m saying it’s flexible.)

I had this with rice and stir fried baby bok choy.