Cooking my way around the world, dish by dish: Week Six

Saturday 6 February: Japan 🇯🇵 : Miso Soup and Chicken Katsu Don

Japan… The first time that I went there was on a business trip for my organisation’s annual conference. On my first evening, sluggish with jetlag, a Japanese colleague took me from the hotel to the central train station in Tokyo for a light supper in a small restaurant: two simple bowls of food, fish and chicken, both beamingly fresh, especially the fish.  I was transported… That first visit to Tokyo was a wonder of fresh fish in all kinds of ways, but also walking along streets with garish plastic food in plastic bowls.

Years later, in early September 2018, I spent two weeks on a J Pass, travelling around southern Japan by train. The food was always memorable even if it involved dealing with a few not so discreet racist comments or attitudes along the way. Chicken, fish of all kinds, and lotus root and other unusual vegetables.

A quiet delight was staying on the coast not far out of Tokyo and finding a Japanese bakery that did takeaway coffee and pastries filled with sweet red beans in one and sweetly salty seaweed in another. I had breakfast on a bench looking over the sea full of surfers in wet suits.

So for a first course, I opt for that most basic starter, a miso soup with tofu and seaweed.  For seconds, a chicken katsudon: chicken in a soy sauce and breadcrumbs mix on top of a bed of rice. My Googled recipes get the thumbs up from my friend E’s Japanese wife, though they also involve a few queries at my local Japanese / Korean supermarket. I walk out not entirely convinced that I have got the right type of dashi stock…

The miso involves vegetable broth in which I cook some sliced chard, and spring onion with some yellow miso paste, dried seaweed and silken tofu worked in.

The chicken comes from Just One Cookbook. I take some thinly sliced chicken breast, season them with salt and pepper, coat them with flour, beaten egg and some ready-made panko breadcrumbs that I should have scrunched up beforehand.  I then fry until golden brown and remove.  I then take some red onion and a marvellously gooey sauce made of the sludgy dashi, sake, mirin, Japanese soy and sugar, cooking until the onions are soft.  Finally, I add the chicken back in and then beaten egg, whisking vigorously before laying the whole thing on top of a bed of rice and adding some curly parsley (in the absence of mitsuba).

I serve the whole lot with some chilled sake. For purely medicinal purposes.

The effect?  The soup should be soft but turns out rather salty, probably because I used the wrong type of stock, indeed too salty to be pleasant.  It is better the next day when I add much more water.  The seaweed is lovely though and the other ingredients rather lost.

The chicken looks like a mess and I see that I had added too little beaten egg at the end, but tastes delicious: crunchy and chewy.  What little there is of the egg is lovely and helps bind the rice. The sauce might be rich but is delightful and sweet. The addition of parsley really cranks it up as does the subtle kick provided by Japanese ichuban pepper. The rice completes the lot, gently absorbing the rich sauce and holding it all together.

And the sake is terrific.

All in all, not worthy of a Japanese chef, but a mighty delicious meal. 

After my travels in the East, I feel sad to be retreating to more Western forms of cooking and am not greatly looking forward to a Russian meal.

Sunday 7 February: Russia 🇷🇺 : борщ/ borscht

Again I Google the options and it comes down to a solid choice between kotlety: meat patties, and borscht: beetroot soup. I opt for the latter and find a recipe again by the great Felicity Cloake in The Guardian. It is true that the recipe is not 100% Russian and probably closer to Polish barszcz, but who cares?

Despite being nervous about the stains from peeling and using raw beetroot, I go ahead, wearing a pair of latex gloves.  I start by frying onion in some melted butter, add diced beetroot, carrot and celery, and sliced leek all with some allspice berries and bay leaves until soft before adding chopped potato and a whopping 1.5 litres of beef stock, simmering for 15 minutes and then adding chopped cabbage, crushed garlic and more diced beetroot. Finally I add some cider vinegar, sugar, pepper and a good pinch of salt.

In these latter stages, I depart from the recipe because the green cabbage looks too much for my deep red soup and the cooked soup is too lumpy.  So I gently plunge in a blender and give the whole lot a bit of pureeing, until I have a mixture that is half smooth, half chunky bits of beetroot, carrot and celery. 

I serve the whole lot with some sour cream and chopped dill. And some chilled vodka. For purely medicinal purposes.

The effect?  Even before plunging my spoon in, I marvel at the wonderful colour: not just the beautiful redness of the soup but the white cream and the green dill.

And when I do taste?  Oh man, that is one lovely soup… The beetroot is magnificent, so wonderfully fresh yet warming. The lovely mix of the pureed soup and the chunks of beetroot. The dill works fabulously as a counterpoint, with the sour cream adding depth. And the carrot, celery and potato are all there in the background, adding a bit of heft.

It is stupendous. It is healthy. It is delicate. It is perfect for a snowy winter evening. It makes me yearn to go to Russia. 

And it is even better for lunch and dinner during the rest of the week.

Monday 8 February: United States 🇺🇸 : Burger and fries

The first time that I lived in Washington, DC, it was as an EU diplomat. I remember another diplomat saying to me “The problem with DC is that it has no middle”. He meant that it was extremes of poverty – in the Southeast quadrant – and wealth – in the Northwest.

To my mind, he was more accurate about the food than the people.  And not just in DC.  In my first stint in the US, I managed to visit all 50 states. I discovered the amazing beauty of the country and – despite all the prejudices that people might have from recent events – the kindness of the people.

But it has to be said that the food was rarely average.  I had some fantastic meals – often, it must be confessed paid for by others on expense accounts – oysters, steaks, seared tuna, grilled fish and the like. I have a great fondness for Low Country/ Louisianan cooking: shrimp n’ grits, jumbo, creole sausage and the like. Then there were the ethnic foods: Mexican, Salvadoreno, and the like.  I used to live ten minutes from a Salvadorian restaurant that served lomo saltado: steak, peppers and chips in gravy.  Bliss.  I enjoyed Jewish and Yiddish cooking: whitefish sandwiches wrapped with gherkins and crisps in a local deli.

But I also had some really dire food: meat cooked so hard it was dry, overboiled vegetables, a Philly steak that nearly gave me a heart attack, and worst of all the chefs mostly in ski resorts or upmarket destinations who got it into their heads to do fusion cooking: ahi tuna in a ginger-agave glaze and the like. The worst meal I remember eating was in a hotel restaurant in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania – it was either that or a takeaway from KFC – a lunk of watery ham in a sickly raisin sauce.

But obviously it is the burger and fries that mostly captures American cooking, usually served with coleslaw. On the one hand, it is incredibly basic and simple. On the other, try to make it in isolation and you risk a chaotic mess as happened to me the first few times I tried last summer, frustrated at having to wait an hour for one from my local bistro.  Why? Because like Chinese cooking, so many ingredients have to come together at once and the cooking has to be pretty much to-the-second on both the burger and the fries.

The burger bun needs to be just toasted and quickly spread with the relish: so simple on the surface yet so difficult to get right.  Tomato sauce on its own will not do: too bland to hold it all together.  Other concoctions that I tried similarly came out wrong, though a mix of one part ketchup, one part American mustard and two parts mayo will do as a quick fix. I end up with a recipe from Lidia’s Commonsense Italian Cooking by Lidia Bastianich which I cook over Christmas and reheat in the microwave.

The lettuce, tomato, onion, cheese and gherkin need to be cut and lined up. Any coleslaw or salad lined up.

The chips should be peeled, thinly sliced, and double cooked and served at exactly the same time as burger, which itself is right to the second. It can only be cooked when the pan is steamingly hot, instantly searing its base, cooking for two to three minutes, flipping and cooking for two or so more. Here, the timing is tricky as it is difficult to see exactly what is going on without disturbing the burger.  I have been told that for a medium-rare burger, you should watch the red line in the middle of the burger and cook until very thin. In practice, I cook about 20 seconds more and find it to be just right. In theory, you should put the cheese slice on top for the last minute to melt it, but I opt for a quick softening in the microwave.

And then all assembled on the plate as quick as you can. An exercise in the virtues of mass production and spatial layout that would make Henry Ford beam.

And eaten. 

Without shame. With aplomb. With your fingers.

Washed down with a cold and iced Coke or watery Budweiser.

The effect?

It is a symphony of nothing. It is perfect.

It is nothing to linger over. It sits with you.

It is sinful. It is indulgent. It is… gone.  Already.

A small perfect moment of burger juices, bun, cheese, relish, gherkin and frankly who cares about the lettuce, tomato and onion?  They are there somewhere. Slightly removing the total guilt trip.

The fries are overdone and yet also perfect, dipped in a good dollop of ketchup.

It is a dish that you want to make sit on the naughty chair in the naughty corner, while quietly winking at it to keep doing the same thing.

It takes me back to good times in the US: to smashing crabs on the Eastern Shore, to eating massive steaks in Iowa, to a lunchtime visit to Chez Panisse in Berkley, California, to a Manhattan steak joint dressed like a bordello where I was already done with the steak and fries before a cheesecake arrived that was so big that I had to concede defeat after a few mouthfuls. It takes me back to long lost friends and long done road trips, to the majesty of the red rocks of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, to driving through the Californian sequoia in the thick of night with two friends, to arriving in Anchorage, Alaska, just before midnight and driving for four hours through empty roads, pine trees all round, my friend asleep in the passenger seat, to driving round Georgia and the Carolinas in a blue convertible with my parents, my mother gamely sitting in the back as the wind rushed through her hair.

Wednesday 10 February: Canada 🇨🇦 : Poutine

Canada… I’ve travelled around quite a bit of it – or at least the Eastern part – including one absurd episode where I had to exit the US by car to renew my American work visa at the American Embassy in Ottawa, reassuring a resolutely unconvinced Canadian border guard that I had every intention and likelihood of exiting his country as quickly as possible.

And yet, ask me to describe the food and it largely defeats me, beyond maple syrup and… poutine… It is the only Canadian dish that I can at all remember eating and even there, I might have had it in New Hampshire or Vermont…

But poutine it has to be, and the sheer simplicity also commends it: fat fries, gravy, cheese curds. The only problem being that cheddar cheese curds are kind of hard to come by… so my recipe – taken from www.seasonsandsuppers.ca – recommends substituting a ball of mozzarella.

The recipe calls for a gravy made from a mix of beef and chicken stocks, 2 parts beef to one part chicken, thickened with some flour and cornflour and then seasoned with fresh pepper to taste. Once the chips are ready, you ladle over the gravy, mixing it with the chips, and then toss in some strips of the curds/ mozzarella.

I add some parsley at the end and give the gravy quite a bit of pepper to the point where it is closer to a sauce au poivre.

The effect?  Without the authentic cheddar cheese curds, it is not as I remember it: a thick cheesy crust melting over the chips and gravy and imparting a smart tang. And it is utterly wrong: the parsley the only remotely healthy thing in it.

So why do I find myself scooping it all up?  Why do I want more?  The stringiness of the cheese, the peppery and sinful thick gravy, the soggy chips. Wrong, wrong, wrong, but please a second serving just to check on how wrong it is… Just to be sure.

I have sinned. Spank me. It was worth it.