Edward Lee - Smoke and Pickles: Recipes and Stories from a New Southern Kitchen

Artisan
New York

What do you cook?

Its a question I get all the time. Theres the short answer and theres the long answer. The short ones easy: I reach for labels like Farm to Table, Field to Fork, Soil to Mouth, Local-Global, New Asian, New Southern, New Anything.... I might show photos of my garden in full bloom, woven baskets of fruits and vegetables with a smattering of soil still clinging to the edges, or a handful of the heirloom seeds Ive collected over the years. I offer a belabored speech about local farms and ingredients at the peak of freshness. Its not insincere, but it sure is rehearsed. The simplest questions are the most difficult to answer, because lurking just behind those innocent words is a more complex response. This book is the long answer.

What I Cook Is Who I Am

My grandmother cooked every day. Her entire life. In our tiny windowless Brooklyn kitchen with just a few pots, mismatching lids, a plastic colander or two, and a fake Ginsu knife, she re-created all the Korean dishes she had learned before she immigrated to America. My grandmother never questioned her identity, culinary or otherwise. She was a Korean widow yearning for a homeland that had been destroyed before her eyes. Her daily rituals of cooking and Bible reading were her last links to an agrarian Korea that no longer existed, a place that had risen from its ashes into a megametropolis, a place that did not need her. Her food was indelibly linked to that identity. But this is true for most of us, isnt it? Can you separate a Bolognese sauce from the Italian arm that stirs the simmering pot?

Funny thing about my grandmother, thoughshe refused to make American food. We always had peanut butter and jelly in the cupboard, but if I wanted a PB&J sandwich, I had to make it myself. Im not sure whether she was offended by it or if she was quietly, in her own grandmotherly way, guiding me to forge a culinary identity of my own, reflective of the life I would lead as a Korean-American kid. Or I could be reading way too much into it. But its true that my identity (crisis) would soon enough manifest itself in my language (foulmouthed), my clothes (ripped jeans), my hair (long and messy), and, of course, my food, which started with the PB&J but then wove itself all the way to Kentucky.

The great thing about Americans is not the identity were born with but our reinvention of it. We start with one family and then, magically, we are allowed to reinvent ourselves into whoever we want to be. As a kid, Id go to my friend Marcuss house for a meal of Puerto Rican plantains over rice with ketchup and honey. The apartment was loud, the radio always on (we didnt even own one), with people talking over each other. And for that night, I was a Puerto Rican son of a festive family where every meal was a party. Our downstairs neighbors were Jewish, and sometimes theyd watch me when my parents were both working nights. Their food smelled like a hospital, and so did their furniture and their antiseptic gray tabby. But they conveyed love through everything they did. They sat with me and warned me about life, talking to me about being honest and keeping out of trouble. They insisted I read books and learn to play the piano. They were parental and stern and warm all at the same time. It isnt their overcooked string beans I remember most, but their words of nourishment. I felt as though if anything ever happened to my parents, they would have taken me in without a second thought. And, in an odd way, they kind of did.

Graffiti Was My First Cuisine

All the truants in my junior high were into graffiti, but most of us just scribbled in notebooks. None of us had dared to tag a wall yet. But there was this one mysterious kid, forever in the eighth grade, who was rumored to be a wall artist. He had a shadowy past and facial hair like someone ten years older than us. He smoked, he cursed, he cut school, and it was rumored that he lived alone. Eric (lets call him that) was the coolest kid in a school full of derelicts. We became friends.

There are a million reasons kids deface public property: rebellion, for notoriety, as a cry for attention, boredom. I wanted/needed an identity to call my own, and what was cooler at the time than dark hoodies, backpacks full of Krylons, late-night bombs of hopping fences and scaling exteriors? Mostly I was Erics lookout, his apprentice. He taught me techniqueto use skinny caps for the outline and fat caps to fill in, and to spray without drippingand he taught me to find my own style, and to write without getting caught. I became someone else overnight, with every stroke of the cold nozzle tracking the city walls. I was a lawbreaker; I was a legend in my own mind. I was anything but that bored Korean kid, good at math, terrible at basketball.

The irony of graffiti is that the permanence of spray paint and china markers lasts only until the next guy decides to write over you. Your tag may survive for a week or a night, or sometimes just a few hours, but inevitably, it is reduced to a memory under the fresh layer of someone elses paint. And most street artists would agree thats the way it should be. Graffitis never supposed to last. How many remember the art on the L train or a mural on 145th Street? The hardest things to hold on to in life are the ones that want to disappear.

So here I am, twenty years later, far from my Brooklyn childhood, at John Shieldss restaurant in Chilhowie, Virginia, with my sous-chef, silent and ruminative, having the meal of a lifetime and wanting it to last more than the few paltry hours I have. Pictures and tweets dont do it justice. This night, too, will become a memory, soon to be painted over by another meal.

I Seek Impermanence

I moved to Louisville in 2003. I had to reinvent my identity, both culinary and personal, through the lens of tobacco and bourbon and sorghum and horse racing and country ham. The first time I tried buttermilk, I threw it out because I thought it was sour. It was a revelation to learn that you use it because it is sour. And that it tastes nothing like butter. Over time, Louisville, and, by extension, the American South, embraced me as an adopted son. I was not surprised by that. It was effortless. What I didnt expect was how I would come full circle and rediscover myself as a child of Korean immigrants. That all the lovely and resourceful traditions of the Southern landscape would propel me back to the kitchen of my grandmothers spicy, garlicky foods: Soft grits remind me of congee; jerky of cuttlefish; chowchow of kimchi. My Korean forefathers love of pickling is rivaled only by Southerners love of pickling. BBQ, with its intricate techniques of marinades and rubs, is the backbone of both cuisines. Buttermilk has become my miso, ubiquitous and endearing. It shows up in everything from dressings to marinades to desserts, but never in the foreground, always as a platform to let other ingredients shine. I found my culinary voice here in Louisville. I found a culture so different and yet not very different at all from the one in which I was raised. I learned to be comfortable in my own skin and to cook the food that flows naturally from my fingers. At the same time, I continue to be astonished by the flavors that surround me. Theres an endless history to uncover, and with each lesson I learn, I find myself becoming not only the chef I want to be but also the person Ive always wanted to grow into.