Lee - The art of escapism cooking: a survival story, with intensely good flavors

Beijing, ChinaDecember 31, 2015

By Lintao Zhang/Getty Images

One hazy Beijing afternoon, one no more particularly dreadful than the others, I stood behind my closed kitchen window, stone cold, as I dragged a serrated knife through the body of a sandwich. I felt the unforgiving blade lacerate the wobbly stack of steaming pastrami short ribs tucked under a runny egg fried in browned butter and mustard seeds, watching its blood-like fluid weep into a layer of charred and pickled shishito peppers on top of still-warm rye bread anointed with mustard. I exhaled, tilting my head, as a cold rush of solace eased through my veins. Through the window a neighboring building disappeared, swallowed in the thickening soot outside. I knew I was next.

Yet there was a sense of calm in watching the heap of meat wiggle, an unstable formation of rendered fat and loosened muscle; I felt delight in the dark pink coloring of its flesh, a successful result of its silent four-day immersion in a meticulously constructed brine. My head lowered along with my breaths as I listened to the soothing sound of my fingernails dragging across the crusty, goose-bumped skin of my homemade rye bread. With its body laid open and hollow, sacrificial, I counted the air bubbles in a cross section freckled with caraway seeds, an act that tenderly overran my urge to scream. For a second it felt strange, but nothing was out of the ordinary: neither the constant current of my bubbling discontent nor my surgical infatuation with a sandwich. It was just me making lunch, with each and every component composed from scratch, on a Tuesday.

This is not a moment of boasting.

Instead, this is the moment when I tell you that right then and therethat second, as if I were waking up from a deep neurotic trancewas when it hit me. Not how wonderfully the yolks lubricated the spice-encrusted sticky meat, nor how the sandwich sang in a savory, spicy, and smoky symphony. But how... sick this thing had become. When and how had I gone from a moderately motivated home cook who hovered in the aisles of frozen pizzas and dumplings over the edge into an obsessive kitchen extremist? When and how had I stopped making meals but, instead, begun making fantasies? When and how did I no longer cook, but escape? Why did I spend six years of my life buried in a little corner that most people would call a kitchen, but that for me was a sanctuary?

I stared impassively at the hellish cityscape of Beijing outside, then down at the nirvanic pink meat sparkling with fat as the mustard-stained yolk bled slowly onto my pristinely white kitchen counter....

I knew the exact answer to that.

But lets make one thing clear. Thats not why youve picked up this book, to talk about me, an angry food blogger. Well, at least not entirely. The story of how cooking, my once harmless hobby, mutated into a recreational addiction after I moved from New York City to Beijing; how I crawled out of my expat limbo by splashing my rage with pain-inflicting chile sauces and ducked my head into a bucket of butter frosting to cope; or even how I became what I call an escapist cookthat will all be clear by the end of the book.

But first things firstwere here to cook. Not for necessity, not as a chore or responsibility, not for convenience. This book is written for those who share the same perverse tendency to engage in cooking as a loner spends time with his Xbox or a teenager with pornultimately as a delicious evasion of unpalatable realities.

Escapism cooking.

Its not a passion; its a drug. Im not selling you a lifestyle; Im telling you how I evaded one. If you need to know how to cook a chicken breast with one hand while you hold a baby in the other, sorry, Im not about solving your problems. But I can show you how I cooked mine. This book is a memoir of recipes and stories that I documented during a desperately unpleasant time of my life, the delicious aftermath of how I cooked my way out of six miserable years in Beijing, my lemons and lemonade.

If youre still not sure that this book is right for you, then let me say this. Escapism cooking is about neither simplicity nor complication. I find equal rapture in nurturing a hunk of meat that is four days in the making as in cooking in only minutes. When it comes to cooking, as far as Im concerned, theres no hard or easy, new or old, real or fake. There is only good or bad. Its about orchestrating an idea, mapping the most sensible way to get there, chasing the high.

In fact, to me, cooking isnt even about love. As much as I would like to say that I cook to make other people happy, I dont. Truth is, I cook largely to make myself happy, as medication, as therapy. I cooked in Beijing because it was the one positive thing I could harvest from a place abundant with negativity. In life, I guess, were all after some sort of abstraction of happiness. Cooking, whether by choice or not, just turned out to be my medium. If you ask me, the most important thing in learning how to cook is not the techniques but how to harness curiosity and fulfillment from the process, the puzzles and the answers, the failures and the triumphs, the hunt. Its a deeply personal, ever-evolving, solitary sport.

The food that comes as a resultwhich Im told has made a lot of others happy, toois the pleasant byproduct, the overspilled muffin top. So, if youre experiencing thoughts of suicide along with the midnight urge to butcher a chicken, this book may be right for you, my friendsthose of you who find yourselves, likewise, cooking for one reason and one reason only.

Happiness.

Hey, look, were all scared of the unfamiliar. We all huddle inside our comfort zones, passive, waiting for someone else to break the mold first. In some aspects of life, this may even be considered smart, safe, a vital animal instinct for survival. Nobody wants to be that moron in the movie who goes, Theres a curiously dark tunnel behind this tombstone. Lets check it out. He dies.

But when it comes to unfamiliar ingredients in cooking, come on, what have we got to lose?

One of the hardest things about writing recipes that use possibly unfamiliar ingredients is convincing people that the future of their happinessor even the worldsdepends on their using them. Just think what kind of a joyless world it would be if the Japanese hadnt convinced us to gnaw on raw fish? Or if the Koreans didnt make a good case for keeping a bag of stinking cabbage in our fridge? Or what if a few hundred years ago, the good people in what is now the Sichuan region of China hadnt embraced the chilies brought in by the Spanish conquistadors? Or if the Italians hadnt welcomed the tomatoes brought in by the Spanish conquistadors? Or if the Europeans had shied away from chocolate brought back... by the Spanish conquistadors. Okay, you get my point. Spanish conquistadors were the founding fathers of many things we eat today, and also,