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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

In every mouthful of food lie hints of history — personal and global. This book is a collection of those stories and recipes. It provides a window onto world cuisine from a contemporary American perspective; it's also a portrait of my life as a working chef. I have always been and remain a chef who cooks. Most nights of the week I can still be found behind the line at annisa, expediting, cooking, and plating: It is where I am most at home.

I was brought up in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan, with parents who had both emigrated from Asia. My father was from Shanghai and walked out of China at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. My mother was from Malaysia; her family was part of a large population of people from the Fujian province who had immigrated to Kuala Lumpur and who, both linguistically and nationally, continue to define themselves as Chinese. When she arrived in the United States, her first stop was Tennessee, where she received her premed degree. My parents met in San Francisco — she was interning at the same hospital where my father was a doctor. They both worked long hours as practicing physicians.

Our household was international. My father died when I was three and I grew up mostly with my stepfather, who came from Denver, Colorado, but spent much of his life in New England, teaching at both Harvard and the Rhode Island School of Design. His extended family had emigrated from Germany, and my siblings and I were raised on German nursery rhymes and visits to our tanta ancien in the Fatherland. My parents' long work hours both afforded and required the presence of a nanny. Over the years, a variety of women lived in our home, and brought the tastes of their ancestry with them. The food smells of the American South, Mexico, and Eastern Europe all broadened my family's appetites.

A Hungarian Catholic nun, Sister Elizabeth Angel, stayed with us longest and had the most influence on me emotionally. She also left her mark culinarily. Growing up, my favorite meal was her chicken paprikash, a rich stew made with plenty of fragrant sweet paprika and sour cream and served with her handmade dumplings.

For me, family time together was defined by our moments at the table, where my parents shared their heritage through the meals they provided. My mother would work a full twelve- to fourteen-hour day at the hospital, then come home and often put five or six dishes on the table for us to eat. She was a great cook who imparted her love of food to all three of her children. And like my own cuisine, my mother's cooking came from all over the planet. She would labor with the same intensity over crisp Southern fried chicken as she would over a New England lobster dinner or Malaysian laksa — a spicy coconut broth made with shrimp paste, lemongrass, and ginger, filled with noodles.

We were also lucky enough to take family vacations back to China, where the food tasted familiar because we regularly experienced its flavors in Michigan. My parents loved foreign travel. As a toddler, I journeyed to Malaysia and Tokyo. At the age of seven, I was pulled out of school — along with my brother and sister — for a few months of roaming the world. Everywhere we went, we had to try the local ingredients and explore the scope of that country's cuisine. In Iran, I remember drinking mouth-puckering sour yogurt, so cold it was crunchy with ice particles. In China, which we visited pre-Nixon (earning FBI files as a result) my uncles and aunts — my father's brothers and their wives — treated us to elaborate banquets. In Belgium, my sister and I snuck off to get cones of frites between meals of mussels and stewed rabbit. There were dinners of reindeer in Copenhagen, and a boat trip in Sweden that had us facing daily smorgasbords filled with Scandinavian delicacies. The fact that all this tasting took place during my formative years was a vital building block for the success I've found as a chef.

My first solo voyage took place when I was sent to high school in Concord, Massachusetts. Now, boarding-school food is nothing to write home about, but trips into Boston and visits to the homes of friends who came from far and wide allowed me to indulge my appetite and curiosity even further. The first time I had chilled sake was with a classmate from Japan (no, the school didn't allow this; we were nowhere near our parents and having a good time). My first fresh sugar-snap peas were eaten while staying at a classmate's home on Long Island. We ate them raw during an afternoon picnic, with cold fried chicken; they were chilled, crunchy, and sweet, and when we popped them on our tongues, a little salt would travel up our noses as we caught whiffs of the neighboring beach. Just after graduation, a high school friend, who had grown up in France and whose mother was a food writer for the New York Times, introduced me to fried zucchini blossoms and roasted squab.

When I'm standing at the stove, it is these bites that make the kitchen feel like home to me. Traveling the world, going to boarding school in New England, attending college in New York City, and, during that time, taking semesters abroad gave me a sense that my life had no borders. In the kitchen, I apply that mind-set to my cuisine.

In the 1980s, while I was in high school and college, American chefs became increasingly curious, and the term fusion made its appearance on the U.S. food scene. To me, the word described an emboldening of the American palate that was catalyzed by a collective embracing of other cuisines. Because of my multicultural upbringing, as far as I was concerned, fusion meant that my very identity finally had a name.

Eventually, perhaps due to some less-skilled chefs being overly creative, the word fusion came to have negative connotations; it began to signify a diluting of clarity within flavor profiles. Now we need another word to describe what is, in essence, all cuisine. There are no true borders in food. Each cuisine has been affected by another, be it Vietnamese with its French and Chinese influences; French Alsatian with its German influences; or South African with its Dutch and Indonesian influences. And food, like language, is constantly evolving. It is a living entity that grows and changes at each individual stovetop, at the hands of cooks across the globe.

Although I often think of myself as a fusion chef in the original sense of the word, in some ways that's an oversimplification. While I celebrate Asian flavors and my identity, too often the rest is overlooked. Countless times, I have been asked to sit on panels as an expert on Chinese cuisine, assumed to speak that language, or even advised to write a cookbook on Asian street food. I admit, this has happily been the impetus for me to learn more about my father's culture, which I've achieved through the usual routes of Google, cookbooks, and friends; however, my grounding is French. Not only is it my most proficient second language — I've spent two years, collectively, in Paris, Burgundy, and Normandy — but, more important, it's also the food I know best.

I hold a BA in French from Columbia, and I've trained in the kitchens of Bouley, Chanterelle, and various restaurants in France. The French technique is the base upon which I've built my cuisine. It's a solid foundation that has allowed me to develop a highly personal way of cooking that is as much of a hybrid as my upbringing. The most accurate term for my culinary style would be Contemporary American — a broad category that celebrates the diversity of this country. Ours is a vast nation, and likewise its cooking influences cover a huge range. American cuisine needn't be pigeonholed into its subcategory of Germanic-based dishes — that is, hot dogs, hamburgers, and apple pie.

People say that American food has become grossly homogenous and are quick to point out that large fast-food chains and processed-food giants feed most of the population. I would argue that we are constantly surrounded by a variety of alternatives and that, with a little ingenuity and elbow grease, we can all eat well, and diversely. I have a small house in a quiet fishing town on Long Island, just off of Moriches Bay. I'm an avid fisherwoman, with a small, old-fashioned skiff I borrow from my neighbors. Whenever weather permits I go off looking for clams and hoping for striped bass, bluefish, fluke, or flounder. Sometimes, though, I happen upon the unexpected and find a wealth of mussels growing underneath the dock I launch from, or, while digging for hard-shell clams with my toes, I haul up a conch from on top of the sand. (They hang out there, in shallow water.)

The first time I found a conch was also the first time I cooked one, although I'd eaten the mollusk many times before in ceviches, long braises, and fritters. I'd already dragged in an abundance of both hard-shell and steamer clams, and instead of throwing the lone conch back, I brought it home and did a little impromptu Internet research. My maiden conch chowder — a bastardized version of Manhattan clam chowder — was whipped up that night. It simmered alongside my pots of New England clam chowder and steamers.

I could have just thrown the conch back and not taken the leap to explore a new ingredient for my repertoire; instead, I created something that yielded two quarts and, subsequently, fed me for four separate meals. It was economical, ecologically sound, local, educational, and, yes, delicious.

There are times when I visit a greenmarket and overhear a shopper buying a bunch of turnips or beets ask the farmers to discard the tops. All I can think is, what a shame; that was an entire separate meal's worth of vegetables. That's a free side dish with purchase, and it leaves no carbon footprint! Just as heartbreaking is when someone throws out the liver of a chicken; it's like throwing out a potential appetizer or lunch for the following day. You have to ask yourself: Is it sustainable to eat only the prime cuts of local, well-raised animals?

People often shy away from new taste experiences; they assume they could never like what is being offered to them — novel spice profiles, different cuts of meat they weren't brought up with, or entire animals they have never seen at the table. I find this frustrating because I believe it is rooted in cultural bias. The mind is born without prejudice or preconceived notions, but it is trained to "dislike" certain foods. These seemingly small biases have serious repercussions. We ultimately control what is grown or produced; if we believe we won't enjoy something and deem it unappealing, we won't cultivate it. On the other hand, more adventurous palates can lead to biodiversity, a key to the survival of this planet.

There is, thankfully, evidence that things are improving. While many of the products I use can be esoteric or hard to find, foodways continue to evolve. Ingredients like mesclun, kimchi, and jicama were exotic when I first started cooking; now they can be found in most grocery stores across the States.

I have always tried to keep my dishes and menus original in an attempt to engage — and, sometimes, challenge — people's tastebuds. I'm lucky enough to have built my career in New York City, where I am surrounded by bright and inspiring palates. It is a city full of energy, with access to fabulous products and a diverse clientele, a metropolis that has championed annisa, my small fine-dining restaurant in the West Village, and the sadly short-lived bar Q, my attempt at Asian raw bar and barbecue.

It is also a city that feeds me well. Besides being only blocks away from many other talented, innovative chefs, I love my neighborhood falafel joint, the women who set up tables for tacos outside the church on Sunday mornings, and my favorite stall in Chinatown for dumplings or turnip cakes. I've been eating and cooking here for twenty-five years and now consider myself a New Yorker. I've built a home for myself, and my cuisine, in the West Village. I am grateful to have been able to carve out my own niche in one of the world's biggest urban epicenters. And that is what I think the American palate aspires to do — create its own unique, complex identity.

A tightly crowded city is a breeding ground for cultural differences — new strains develop and evolve at a rapid rate. Studying and developing these mutations on the culinary front is one of the mainstays of my cuisine; I'm always striving to achieve balance without borders. This book is an assimilation of all those elements that contribute to my perspective on the wonderful, ever-shifting cultural chaos around me: my years of cooking, traveling, and eating.

I wrestled with the desire to write a chef's cookbook, filled with intricate recipes that are challenging to replicate at home, where we're not graced with massive amounts of space, an employed prep crew at our beck and call, or a staff of dishwashers to clean up our messes. Those books are beautiful; I own many of them — I turn to them often for inspiration or to satisfy a curiosity about a place too far to travel to at that moment. This book has elements of a chef's cookbook, but, for me, food isn't really about aspiration; it's about eating, and sharing time at the table with others. So this book is also one that you can go to a daily basis, if you'd like. It is full of stories, ideas, and techniques that can be used and passed along, and contains many recipes that can be executed to varying degrees of complexity. There are some dishes that can be simplified to suit a weeknight dinner, and others that, with a few suggested twists, are appropriate for a festive event or holiday meal — and, of course, there are many that are fit for any occasion.

Don't be daunted by the unfamiliar ingredients — ankimo (monkfish liver) or lobster tomalley come to mind. They are just untried delicacies and among the easier foods to work with; they usually infuse a dish with a distinct, strong burst of flavor without demanding a lot of manipulation. When you see one in a recipe, keep reading. I hope that you'll learn something new and be motivated to try a dish whose biggest challenge lies in tasting a substance you haven't seen before.

Fancy-sounding French items — like pot-au-feu or beef bourguignon — are most often born from peasant food; they're economical and teach you how to use every part of your produce. One of the reasons braises are such an integral part of that cuisine is that they were employed, originally, to elevate the lesser — often chewier — cuts of meat that needed to be cooked down to become tender. Beef bourguignon isn't much more than a stew. Pot-au-feu translates, literally, to "pot on the fire," referring to the pot of water in which the protein is cooked; it's a process that yields a brothy richness you love to dip your bread into: It's essentially a special pot roast. These dishes might require you to leave them on the stove a little longer, but the steps and techniques involved are entirely within the range of any home cook.

I like to change these basics by bringing in complementary elements from different cultures or locales, or throwing in an unexpected ingredient from the haute-cuisine pantry. My take on Vietnamese pho is an excellent example. That hearty noodle soup is made, traditionally, with oxtails, that part of the animal you'd easily discard if you could afford to. Combined with cinnamon and star anise, among other aromatics, those oxtails make a deeply flavorful, fragrant, and protein-rich broth in which noodles, a cheap staple in Vietnam, can bathe. When I wanted to find a way to use the remains of a duck I'd cooked, I decided to use the carcass and leftover meat for my own pho. I created a duck stock, and, to mix some "high" (gourmet) with the "low" (street food), I garnished my bowl with some foie gras, an unnecessary but tasty measure.

Another dish you will find within these pages is Chilled Sweet Pea Soup with Smoked Sturgeon and Caviar. I've altered this recipe numerous ways to suit time and place. The combination is an annisa creation, one that has been served in the dining room to many customers at the height of spring. When I am at my house on Long Island, the peas in my vegetable garden don't always have a good year, so I might make the soup from local asparagus. I may have been lucky enough to catch a bluefish or find some local oysters and will smoke those instead of sturgeon for my garnish. Sometimes I'm enjoying the good company of guests, or the season's first really hot days, and would rather buy some smoked salmon at the local fine-foods shop. As for the caviar, well, that is irreplaceable, true; still, the soup tastes delicious without it — just add a hint of lemon zest and bit of sea salt.

I have included my suggestions for tweaking dishes, but your environs will lead you there and elsewhere. I hope this book provides the same freedom and sense of place for you, the reader, that I have found at the stove.

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Excerpted from "Cooking Without Borders"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Anita Lo.
Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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