A rendering of food through the memories of family and of home: over ninety plant-based recipes from George Lee, the creator of Chez Jorge, with Laurent Hsia''s images of Taiwan. George Lee grew up with his A-Gong (grandfather) in the quiet refuge of Tamsui, Taiwan. He took part in the myriad Taiwanese food traditions his A-Gong nurtured, until he was seventeen, when his A-Gong passed. In observation of the death, he and his family undertook a set of Buddhist funeral customs and abstained from eating meat. For a hundred days, they ate at the monastery and the nuns there taught him to cook. Years later, he revisited the lessons and pieced them into the story of his family’s cooking. Some recipes he shares here are directly from childhood: Han-tsî-bê, an everyday breakfast congee floating with fist-size chunks of golden sweet potatoes, and the quintessential preserve Tshài-póo, crunchy strips of sun-dried daikon radish that salt in the air for a few days in January. Others tread the boundaries between old and new, such as Sòo-lóo-pn&#772;g, a meatless rendition of the hand-cut pork bits his mom braised in soy sauce and ladled over rice. While writing this book, George wandered all over Taiwan with his friend Laurent Hsia, who took photos along the way. Together, they sought out the foods and places tied to their memories growing up. Like the grandpa who slung a bag of apples along the zebra crossing to exit the morning market, or the old couple on the bus in black and white, sitting side by side and peering forward, the two found themselves . . . always afoot, traveling. <A-Gong<’s <Table< follows the rhythm of their footsteps: a pulse that takes you quietly through the book and through Taiwan, from morning to night.

Autorentext
George Lee is a cook and writer based in Taipei and raised in Tamsui, Taiwan. He shares his food and stories on his blog Chez Jorge.

Leseprobe
Introduction

A-Gong, my paternal grandpa, was an architect. After my mom had my brother and me, he built a wooden house for us to grow up in. The house nestled at the foot of a mountain near Tamsui River, on the outskirts of Taipei, where trees were black in the night and our whispers hid behind deciduous leaves. With most of Taipei facing the seismic shifts that came with modernization, Tamsui seemed frozen in time, free from the noises of the city. Something very raw and real remained at that little township we called home.

Many nights, A-Gong sat at his slanted drafting desk in the living room. The room would be completely dark, save for the skirt of light on a single incandescent lamp. He was always drawing something or building something. When he noticed me looking, he invited me to watch him work. I propped myself on a wooden stool next to him, close enough to pick up a faint odor of sweat and sawdust. He aligned his fountain pen to a steel ruler under the light, its luminous halo and the shadows extending from his thick calloused fingers warped with each decisive stroke. He was like a conductor when he drew. In the silence of the room, the smooth zips from his pen tip took turns with the symphony of frogs and cicadas outside. The arch on his right rear shoulder moved up and down.

A-Gong didn’t grow up with a lot, so he wanted to give us everything. He hand-sawed every wooden tile in the flooring of our house and polished every inflection on the walls. He put together everything from desks and closets to child-size cars and rocking chairs for us to play with. He spent years building, plowing, and tilling the backyard to make a mini farm and grow fresh fruits and vegetables for us to eat. At the height of summer, papayas grew so full and sweet, they snapped the branches and fell to our feet. Sweet potatoes’ cordate leaves poked through the soil, and heads of green cabbage bloomed like roses. Meals took place at the round table he built and consisted mostly of what he grew, simply cooked and seasoned to accentuate their natural flavors.

Ten-year-old me wouldn’t be telling you about how great A-Gong and this all was. I was afraid of him. Often, I hated him. He coughed up dense phlegm from forty years of smoking and strode with fingers interlocked behind his back like a mob boss. He hardly ever smiled, let alone cried or uttered any affirmations of love. His expectations of everyone in the household were so high and insurmountable that you were better off keeping quiet around him, lest you say something that made him frown.

I would, instead, be telling you about the times we shared at the dining table. He didn’t bring his sternness there. He was too busy gnawing on pork ribs, vacuuming rice with pendulum-like chopstick swipes, and taking sips of broth. He was particular about the way each dish should look and taste. He would throw a tantrum if the fish he liked to eat wasn’t the correct size; but if it were, he became so chirpy, you could talk him into agreeing with pretty much anything. He spoke endlessly about which street vendor sold the best sugar-fried chestnuts and the nuances in a bowl of sesame oil chicken soup. Listening to him made me want to experience everything as he did, to imprint his flavors on my palate completely. I studied his gesture as he dusted sweet potato fries so liberally in plum powder that they almost turned pink. I added hefty dashes of white pepper the same way he did to rice noodle soup. Steam carried the pepper into our nostrils and made us sneeze. We laughed until our eyes watered and slurped the noodles like it was our first.

I was seventeen when A-Gong died. It was raining outside that morning. Or maybe it wasn’t. Something else diluted the colors of the spring breeze. He lay on a bed in the middle of the living room under a white blanket. A group of Buddhist&#160;nuns in gray robes circled him, each with their eyes closed and palms clasped. They hummed the Buddha’s mantra to the tempo of a handbell. The body’s separation from the soul takes eight hours, they said. It is an enormously painful process, like a thousand needles. They chanted to soothe his pain. I observed as strands of smoke from their incense sticks strung together above us into one threadbare gauze. It grew larger and larger, rose higher and higher, then disappeared. Don’t cry near him, they said, for he can still hear us.

That night, the kitchen was noticeably quieter. The clatter of pots and ladles was no more. Our family had dinner at the round table and saved his seat, the one under the window. We sat and ate together and there was no conversation, no sound but the tinkling of cutlery. My chest suddenly sank into a kind of emptiness. I wondered if dinner was ever going to feel normal again. I wondered if a new normal would mean we forgot about A-Gong. Were those once familiar feelings, smells, and tastes about to dim as our memories do?

My parents and I started going to the monastery where the nuns lived, Taipei’s Dizang Temple. I had no idea what to expect there. I wasn’t Buddhist myself, neither was A-Gong, nor was my family. To us, Buddhism likens to the rhythms of the Earth. We don’t necessarily subscribe to it or notice it. It’s always there, steeped into the background noises, occasionally surfacing to give us the guidance we need. We met Huìshàn shifu, a senior nun, at the monastery. We followed her in single file through an aisle that led from the front prayer room to the back kitchen. The aisle is long and narrow enough&#160;that you couldn’t see the other end, where it led to. Turning her head slightly, shifu told us that the soul of the deceased stayed around for forty-nine days. It is at least for that time we, the immediate family, practice Buddhist precepts and accumulate gongdé (&#21151;&#24503;), “virtue from kindness.” …