A Common Table: 80 Recipes and Stories from My Shared Cultures: A Cookbook
288A Common Table: 80 Recipes and Stories from My Shared Cultures: A Cookbook
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Overview
In A Common Table, Two Red Bowls blogger Cynthia Chen McTernan shares more than 80 Asian-inspired, modern recipes that marry food from her Chinese roots, Southern upbringing, and Korean mother-in-law’s table. The book chronicles Cynthia’s story alongside the recipes she and her family eat every day—beginning when she met her husband at law school and ate out of two battered red bowls, through the first years of her legal career in New York, to when she moved to Los Angeles to start a family.
As Cynthia’s life has changed, her cooking has become more diverse. She shares recipes that celebrate both the commonalities and the diversity of cultures: her mother-in-law’s spicy Korean-inspired take on Hawaiian poke, a sticky sesame peanut pie that combines Chinese peanut sesame brittle with the decadence of a Southern pecan pie, and a grilled cheese topped with a crisp fried egg and fiery kimchi. And of course, she shares the basics: how to make soft, pillowy steamed buns, savory pork dumplings, and a simple fried rice that can form the base of any meal. Asian food may have a reputation for having long ingredient lists and complicated instructions, but Cynthia makes it relatable, avoiding hard-to-find ingredients or equipment, and breaking down how to bring Asian flavors home into your own kitchen.
Above all, Cynthia believes that food can bring us together around the same table, no matter where we are from. The message at the heart of A Common Table is that the food we make and eat is rarely the product of one culture or moment, but is richly interwoven—and though some dishes might seem new or different, they are often more alike than they appear.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781635650020 |
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Publisher: | Harmony/Rodale |
Publication date: | 10/23/2018 |
Pages: | 288 |
Sales rank: | 841,326 |
Product dimensions: | 8.10(w) x 10.10(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Introduction
Around the time that I first began thinking about this book, my husband, Andrew, and I were in the middle of a cross-country move from Brooklyn, New York, to Los Angeles, California. We were junior attorneys partway through our third years at law firms in Manhattan, expecting our first baby, and, with our little guy on the way, trying to figure out where it was that we wanted him to arrive.
I grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, a city big enough for an airport but small enough that the airport only had two terminals, friendly and slow-moving and comfortable. After going to college three hours away in North Carolina, I trekked north to snowy Cambridge, Massachusetts, for law school, which led to my first gainful employment as an attorney in New York. In the five-and-a-half frigid winters since I’d left the Carolinas, my family had moved to Southern California; my husband’s family, by turn, had always been in Hawaii. Neither of them were very close to New York. Even though we’d never spent more than a week in California, we decided to move to Los Angeles for family—because we wanted to live closer to our siblings and parents, and because we hoped sunny LA would be where the story of our own family began. (Of course, the warm weather didn’t hurt.)
So, when I was about four months pregnant, an apartment in a little duplex on the west side of LA became our home. It was bright and airy and filled to the brim with California sunshine. We started that thing called “nesting,” fawning over (and then cursing while assembling) cribs and baby swings. With five months to go until our son arrived, we talked endlessly about what life would be like with him. What did we want to pass down to him? What would being a family mean for us, and for him? And—because for me, it always comes back to food—what would he eat?
A few months later Luke arrived, and with him the answers to our questions. Family meant hazy early mornings, bleary-eyed midnight diaper changes, and sunny Saturday afternoons crawling around on all fours. It meant visits from his Chinese grandparents on my side of the family, with stuffed monkeys for his Chinese zodiac year in tow, and, on my husband’s side, weekly Skype sessions with Luke’s Irish grandpa and his Korean halmuni in Honolulu, who dove into planning Luke’s first birthday party, his dol, with gusto. Our baby’s first purées were jook (or congee, page 24, depending on who you ask!), the purple sweet potato familiar to my Hawaii-born husband, the bright orange yam familiar to me; his first finger foods were my mother’s soy-glazed salmon (page 118) and little bites of pork and vegetable dumplings (page 157).
Over the course of his first year, I came to realize that, in many ways, Luke embodied the spirit of the book I wanted to write. He is, after all, a combination of “shared cultures.” His mom is a Chinese girl who grew up in South Carolina, eating mapo tofu alongside cornbread (page 213) and washing it down with sweet tea. His dad is a Korean-Irish boy who grew up halfway around the world in Hawaii, toting Spam musubi (page 87) to school and coming home to kimchi fried rice (page 113). In my little guy, I see a mix of cultures that is both incredibly diverse and utterly American. And those cultures, the food he eats, the traditions we’re building together with him, all have so much more in common than first meets the eye.
As I wrote this book over the course of Luke’s first year, A Common Table became a chronicle of all of these things. These recipes are a journal of the food that I make for our little family, reflecting the myriad cultures and influences that make us who we are. There are Chinese dishes that my mother taught me when I first moved away from home and, missing her cooking terribly, emailed and called her incessantly to learn how to make her spicy braised lamb (page 164) and Ginger Shrimp & Green Peas (page 191), thousands of miles away from home. Alongside those are recipes from the American South, pimento cheese (page 207) and flaky biscuits (page 52), food that makes me nostalgic for my childhood and the baking-hot summers of South Carolina, and the Sweet Tea (page 258) that accompanied every meal growing up.
And then there are the Korean dishes that my husband introduced to me when we began dating as law students in Boston, and that I later learned to cook from my mother-in-law, peering over her shoulder in her apartment in downtown Honolulu. You can also find a few homemade takes on the Hawaii staples that my husband misses most when he’s on the mainland, cobbled together from my trials and his taste-tests until they reminded him most of home.
Importantly, putting all these recipes in one place revealed that they had far more in common than I’d realized—for instance, that the dumplings in kimchi sujebi (page 82) are the same as the flat dumplings in familiar Southern chicken and dumplings (see page 79), and even the same as the wrappers for the Potstickers (page 157) that I ate when I was a child, or that char siu pork (page 76), traditionally roasted on hooks, can be made just as easily in the oven as baby-back ribs can, even though they are traditionally smoked.
Finally, sprinkled between these are recipes that don’t fit neatly within any of these categories. There are recipes for foods we’ve loved in places we’ve traveled and that I’ve sought to re-create at home. Matcha-Glazed Swirl Bread (page 232) that we had in a basement food hall in Japan on our honeymoon, for instance, or soft, savory ham and egg buns (page 35) that I loved while studying abroad in Hong Kong. There are playful explorations of all of the above, dishes that are a little bit unconventional but still so familiar, like Milk Tea Rice Pudding (page 248) or Sweet Sesame Skillet Cornbread (page 213). If the traditional dishes in this book represent where we come from—my family, my husband’s family, and the traditions that were passed down to us—I like to think of these “new” dishes as the quirky emblem of where we are going.
Ultimately, I wrote A Common Table because I know food can bridge all kinds of distances, geographical or cultural, to bring us all around the same table. It represents the traditions and loved ones from our past and present, and it can represent things that are totally new to us, too. Food is what connects us, a common denominator that sustains all of us, both physically andemotionally—and I hope this book will serve to make that only more true.
Table of Contents
Introduction 11
Notes on Ingredients & Equipment 16
Breakfast
Simple Congee 24
Cooking in the land of peking ravioli 26
Sesame-Soy Savory Oatmeal 29
Basics: Our Favorite Enriched Bread 30
Ham & Egg Baked Buns 35
An HK-Style Breakfast: Condensed Milk Toast & Yuanyang 37
Kimchi-Brined Spicy Chicken Biscuits 40
Black Sesame-Stuffed French Toast 43
Buttermilk Mochi Pancakes 46
Spiced Kabocha Muffins 49
Spicy Gochujang Eggs in Purgatory 50
Cheddar-Scallion Biscuits, Plus a Few Variations 52
Kimchi Egg & Cheese 57
Lunch & Small Eats
Blank Canvas Chinese Fried Rice 60
Basics: Steamed Buns 64
Steamed Scallion Buns (Xiang Cong Hua Juan) 68
Char Siu Barbecue Pork Buns, Two Ways 71
Char Siu Pork 76
Basics: Dumpling Dough 78
Ginger-Scallion Chicken & Dumplings 79
Spicy Kimchi Hand-Torn Noodle Soup (Kimchi Sujebi) 82
An ode to spam 84
Barter-Worthy Spam Musubi 87
Spicy Ahi Poke 90
My Mother-in-Law's Korean Spicy Shoyu Poke 93
Korean Mixed Fish & Rice Bowl (Hwedupbap) 94
Gochujang Buffalo Chicken Wraps 97
Date Night In
Korean Spicy Barbecue Pork (Pork Bulgogi) 100
Skillet "Dolsot" Bibimbap 103
Basics: Gochujang Sauce 106
Korean Barbecue Beef (Beef Bulgogi) 109
Two red bowls, and a basement on irving street 110
Friday Night Kimchi Fried Rice 113
Sesame Salt & Pepper Steak (with Gireumjang) 115
Korean Salt & Pepper Sesame Sauce (Gireumjang) 116
Garlic, Ginger & Soy Salmon en Papillate 118
Pappardelle with Lamb Ragù 122
Bulgogi Burgers 125
Crispy Fried Shallots 126
Kimchi Chicken Quesadillas 129
Celebrations & Gatherings
The universal language of dish-washing 132
Almost Grandma Ha's Kimchi Pancakes (Bindaetteok) 135
Slow-Simmered Soy & Black Pepper Beef (Jangjorim) 139
Chinese "Russian" Soup (Luo Song Tang) 141
Korean Fritters, Three Ways (Jeon) 145
Jeon Dipping Sauce 148
Red-Cooked Pork (Hong Shao Ron) 149
My Great-Grandmother's Lion's Head Meatballs (Shi Zi Tou) 152
Potstickers (Guo Tie) 157
Shanghai-Style Sweet & Sour Baby-Back Ribs 161
Spicy Braised Lamb with Radishes & Noodles 164
Collard Wontons 166
A Good Make-Ahead Chili 170
Chinese Cola Chicken Wings 175
On the Side
Shanghainese Cucumber Salad, Two Ways 179
Easiest Sesame-Soy Salad 183
Tea Eggs 184
Green Beans & Minced Pork 188
Ginger Shrimp & Green Peas 191
Garlicky Bok Choy 192
Chinese Scrambled Eggs & Tomatoes 195
Easy Braised Kabocha Squash 196
Fried Kimchi 199
Quick Sweet & Sour Cucumber Kimchi 200
Korean Cheesy Corn 203
Creamed Corn 204
Pimento Cheese Macaroni Salad 207
Sesame-Miso Potato Salad 208
Weeknight Asparagus 211
Sweet Sesame Skillet Cornbread 213
Sweet
Asian Pear & Jasmine Crumble 217
Black Sesame Chocolate Loaf 219
The only way out is through (cooking) 222
Egg Custard Steamed Buns 225
Sticky Sesame Peanut Pie 227
Basics: Pie Crust 231
Matcha-Glazed Swirl Bread 232
A Black Sesame (Literal) Twist 238
My Favorite Cinnamon Rolls 241
White Peach & Lychee Cake 243
Chilled Mango Sweet Soup with Almond Jelly 246
Milk Tea Rice Pudding (& Regular, Too) 248
Peanut Butter Mochi Cake 253
Drinks
Ginger-Cinnamon Punch (Sujeonggwa) 257
Sweet Tea 258
White Peach Green Tea 261
Milk Tea, Two Ways 262
Hong Kong Coffee Tea (Yuanyang) 265
Honeydew Bubble Tea 267
Matcha Hot Chocolate 268
Almond Whipped Cream 268
Conversions 271
Resources 272
Thank You 274
Index 279