Buttermilk graffiti
Buttermilk graffiti
Buttermilk graffiti
Ratings1
Average rating5
15
Buttermilk graffiti
Buttermilk graffiti
Ratings1
Average rating5
American food is the story of mash-ups. Immigrants arrive, cultures collide, and out of the push-pull come exciting new dishes and flavors. But for Edward Lee, who, like Anthony Bourdain or Gabrielle Hamilton, is as much a writer as he is a chef, that first surprising bite is just the beginning. What about the people behind the food? What about the traditions, the innovations, the memories?
A natural-born storyteller, Lee decided to hit the road and spent two years uncovering fascinating narratives from every corner of the country. There’s a Cambodian couple in Lowell, Massachusetts, and their efforts to re-create the flavors of their lost country. A Uyghur café in New York’s Brighton Beach serves a noodle soup that seems so very familiar and yet so very exotic—one unexpected ingredient opens a window onto an entirely unique culture. A beignet from Café du Monde in New Orleans, as potent as Proust’s madeleine, inspires a narrative that tunnels through time, back to the first Creole cooks, then forward to a Korean rice-flour hoedduck and a beignet dusted with matcha.
Sixteen adventures, sixteen vibrant new chapters in the great evolving story of American cuisine. And forty recipes, created by Lee, that bring these new dishes into our own kitchens.
Reviews with the most likes.
Part travelogue, a smattering of memoir, a handful of recipes, but mostly an immigrant story anthology told through food.
Gorgeous ambience, serious nostalgia, taken through the author's past as we're taken through different people's pasts, different group's and town's histories, and different cuisine.
Striving for understanding, the author is conflicted, ever-questioning about straddling a divide of preserving cultural cuisine and revolutionizing it, at the risk of appropriating and/or eventually wiping out tradition, while acknowledging that no culture's cuisine stays the same throughout time.
Despite the subtitle, this narrative champions less the ‘melting pot' model of assimilation where everything blends together and becomes unrecognizable in its origins; a better metaphor would be a dish where different cultural influences combined together, help bring out the distinct flavours in each, rather than one overwhelming the other or both surrendering to a pre-established ‘taste'.
Lee seems like a friendly, inquisitive guy who both experiences/has experienced racism/prejudice/suspicion as a Korean-American, and recognizes where he needs to interrogate his own preconceptions/possible racism when it comes to other ethnicities encountered in his epicurean explorations.
Surprised how many times I burst out into delighted giggles, in large part thanks to the author's self-effacing humour, humble non-sequitors.
⚠️ Fellow vegans beware: while there are vegetables, fruits, breads, pasta/noodles and pastries described with relish, this an omnivorous account including many animal parts, and a chicken meeting an untimely end. 🫣
