It’s always all about the dumplings.
They’re flashier. Cuter. They are more naturally abundant
and connote fun.
But for me, the food of my childhood—and culture—is far more
mundane. It’s the food of peasants. In Cantonese, it’s called jook: a rice
porridge not unlike oatmeal, but more watery. If jook were an item of clothing,
it would be a giant, fluffy, terrycloth robe—totally unsexy and shapeless.
Something for late nights, something for home.
But for me, jook has the capacity to comfort like nothing
else. And when I went to China for my first and only visit twenty years ago, it
was the jook that nearly brought me to my knees, a rapturous homecoming to a
place I’d never been before.
But first, the backstory.
I grew up in Amish country, Ohio. The only other Chinese
family in town actually ran a hand laundry, and the nearest Asian grocery was
an hour away by car, in Cleveland. So I grew up eating a kind of Chinese
American food made by my mother—a steady but unenthused cook—that reflected the
world we lived in: pork chops with rice, stir-fried chicken with vegetables,
spaghetti with bottled Ragu sauce, eaten with chopsticks.
At Thanksgiving, we had turkey, just the three of us, with
all the leftover meat carefully sliced and saved for sandwiches. But the best
part—the part that we waited for with even more anticipation than the
Thanksgiving meal itself—was the jook the day after.
So, to whit:
Take the turkey carcass, and throw it in a big stock pot.
Fill pot with water. Add a cup of raw rice. Bring the pot to boil, then turn
the heat to simmer, stirring every now and then so the rice doesn’t stick. Keep
this up for at least an hour. As the minutes pass, the rice will bloom and
expand until it starts breaking down. The starch will start thickening the
water, and the bones will gradually loosen, until the whole pot becomes a
steaming, silken pool.
If we had been Jewish, this would have been our motzah ball
soup.
We ladled the jook into the big, cheap Chinese bowls we’d
bought in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the ones with orange and black roosters
painted on the sides, the ones my parents still use. The first bowl could be
slurped down, but the subsequent ones had to be eaten with more care, on the
alert for the stray bone. But all was savory and soft and comfort.
Jook—by a number of names—is eaten all over Asia, with
variations: seasoned with spices in India, crispy fried shallots in Indonesia,
salmon roe in Japan, kimchi in Korea, pig tongue or brains in the Philippines,
or spicy pickled radishes or salted dried pork in Thailand. In southern China
or Hong Kong, jook is often eaten with sliced scallions and a long, unsweetened
deep-fried cruller. In nearly all cases, it’s considered antidote for the
unwell—perfect for the fevered, the convalescent from dental surgery—and
perfect for a late-night snack after journeys, whether overland or by sea.
But in East Asia, jook is eaten for breakfast. And this
brings me back to the part of when I was in China more than twenty years ago on
a five-week tour sponsored by the geology department of the University of
Hawaii.
We landed in Beijing and then transited across the landscape
of the unexpected, visiting not so much the usual tourist spots as those
geologically significant—we went to the plains of Inner Mongolia and took a
night train far into the Western mountains, where we went to look at a dam. We
traveled through central China, into the belching cities powered by the
black-sooted coal industry. At every stop, there seemed to be a visit to a
university where we listed to a colleague of our professor lecture
about…sediment.
In the early part of the trip, when I was still eager and energetic,
I would get up to run before the worst of the pollution had set in. In the
moments just after dawn, people would be standing outside the front doors of
their modest homes, brushing their teeth out of tin cups painted with red
flowers. And on every street corner would be carts with vendors selling
steaming bowls of jook.
Because in China, jook is the breakfast of champions, ladled
out in huge steaming bowls and served with scallions or peanuts. Back at the
hotels, we could get the Western breakfast, with the overly oily fried eggs, or
the Chinese breakfast, with jook. It’s easy to guess which one I opted for
morning after morning, a familiar taste that spoke of all I really knew of
China, a homeland to which I’d never been before.
Six years after that trip to China, I moved to New York to
write a novel, living the artist’s life of ramen and boiled eggs. I went to
orphans’ Thanksgivings hosted by married friends in Jersey and, as we packed up
the leftovers into Ziploc bags, I would ask, “Are you going to eat that turkey carcass?”
The hosts were always more than happy to get rid of the thing, wrapping up the
bones—with plenty of meat and stuffing still clinging to the sides—in layers of
aluminum foil. I carried the carcass in a Duane Reade shopping bag across state
lines and, the next day, would take out my stock pot for what was, for me,
still the best part of Thanksgiving.
I was in my mid-twenties before I learned how to make
dumplings. I was on a fellowship at the University of Hawaii, and my group
befriended a class of Chinese journalists who were at the East West Center. It
was 1991, and the participants were chosen not only because they were the
brightest but also because they were married, their spouses left in China as
hostages, after a fashion, to help ensure that they would all go home after
their semesters at UH were done.
I was on a fellowship for American journalists, and our two
groups would hang out together all the time. We’d gather at my friend’s
Leslie’s apartment, and it was there that the Chinese students taught us how to
make dumplings, or jiaozie, with ground pork, shrimp, scallions, napa cabbage,
and ginger, seasoned with soy sauce and sesame oil. They taught us how to mix
everything together in a big bowl and then spoon the filling into the store-bought
round wrappers, pinching the edges shut with a precision not unlike origami.
Pan fried or boiled, the dumplings were always a crowd pleaser.
Later, when I moved to New York in the early ’90s, I’d have
dumpling parties, when I’d teach my friends to fold dozens of them en mass,
making a pound of ground pork stretch on that artist’s life salary by adding a
lot more cabbage and skipping the shrimp, spiking the soy dipping sauce with
chili paste and rice vinegar.
I love dumplings. I make them still, now that I have somehow
become a suburban Long Island matron and so-called stepmother and the director
of a grassroots arts nonprofit. I put less cabbage in the filling and have
added back the shrimp.
But what still brings me comfort beyond all else is to make
a pot of jook. Sometimes it’s with a leftover baked chicken carcass, but more
often than not I’ll buy whole fresh chicken parts. I make it for my partner’s
sons, now 18 and 22, when they are sick or have had their tonsils removed. I
slice up a whole piece of ginger for its healing properties. I know that all
these white boys won’t know how to deal with all the bones, so I’ll pull out
the chicken pieces, let them cool, then shred the meat and put it all back,
completely danger free, adding fresh chopped scallions and cilantro on top. The
boys will eat it all, quite gratefully, the jook going down their sore throats
with no trouble at all.
I know these boys did not grow up with this, that it will
not remind them of their young childhoods the way that their Austrian
grandmother’s streudel and spaetzel will. But I make it for them and their
father because I turn to it out of a deep, maternal instinct that I know is in
my bones, steeped in a culture and land across a faraway sea and that somehow
was transmitted to me, in part, by that pot of rice porridge.
Jook will not answer all of life’s challenges, but it will
make things better, just for a while. It comes from thousands of years of best
intentions and of making due, of feeding families during hardship when you had a
pot of water and not much else. It speaks of early mornings and new beginnings,
of a baby’s first solid food, and of late nights out with probably too much to
drink.
Dumplings may be sexier, a food of celebrations, but for me,
the humble rice porridge is what paces the every day, the true center of all
that we are.
