Cuisine Coordinates

https://tinyletter.com/grahammoliver/letters/cuisine-coordinates

Friends,

School has started! Still thinking about first days of school while approaching 40. If I’m counting correctly, it was my 27th first day of school: 11 of grade school, 5 of undergrad, 5 of grad, 5 teaching university in the US, and now 4 in Taiwan, with 3 overlapping as both teacher and student (and not counting a couple of very part-time years). This semester I’m teaching two classes I taught last year — one on academic writing and one on critical thinking and logical argument — along with my new ChatGPT-assisted writing course. If you’re curious, I made a list of all the resources I’m using to plan that class . In a month and a half I’ll have another “first day of school”: I’ve signed up for a 12hr/wk Chinese class. Hopefully I survive unscathed.

The above picture is from the Songshan Cultural and Creative Park, an exhibition space housed in a Japanese colonial era tobacco factory next to a boutique mall. It’s a great corner of the city to walk around, checking out some art and doing a little shopping for more unique items. We visited this place to attend a European-style piano concerto. I lost my love for concerts in the US. Ticket prices ballooned and being surrounded by filming cellphones didn’t work well with my attention or mood, but this was pretty nice. However, I learned that European orchestra music feels very anxiety-inducing! I think it’s more on me than the music. My goal is to check out some more Taiwanese-based classical music in the near future, do a cultural analysis on comparative anxieties.

We’ve had guests with us in Taiwan for the first time in a while, so I’ve been thinking about food more than usual. I want to catalog a list of foods that are a regular part of my life now but I hadn’t experienced in the United States. I’m not going to list every food that’s common in Taiwan but not the US, just the ones I eat more than a couple of times a year. For example, I never encountered stinky tofu/臭豆腐 and century eggs/皮蛋 in the US, but I hardly ever eat them here either (another example would be bitter melon/苦瓜 , which is maybe the only Taiwanese vegetable I actively dislike and avoid). I’m also not going to list things that are unavailable in the US but very similar to something in the US, like loofah/絲瓜 (yes, the same plant as what you use in the shower) is eaten a lot here but I find it almost the same taste/texture as summer squash. Lotus/蓮花 runs parallel to jicama and cold sesame noodle sauce will be familiar to anyone who has had a tahini-based salad dressing. Also, vegetarian, so no pork floss . Overall I would say texture, especially chewiness, is more important to cuisine here.

• Winter melon/冬瓜 is cooked with sugar to make a syrup that has a very distinct flavor and is used in a lot of drinks here. The closest thing I could compare it to is like a molasses mixed with a fruit syrup.
• While raw/pickled daikon/白蘿蔔 is common in the US, I never had it cooked until coming here, where it’s found mostly in soups or grated and fried like a hashbrown. It’s much less starchy than other root vegetables and falls apart in your mouth, while also absorbing a lot of flavor from what you cook it in.
• Desserts here are often way less sweet (though not always! looking at you mango shaved ice), but the big difference is the sweet soups and sweet beans. A very common dessert here, 豆花 , can have tofu, red beans, mung beans, boiled peanuts, tapioca/珍珠 , taro, and more, in a sweet broth, served hot or iced.
• Speaking of taro/芋頭 , it’s very similar to a sweet potato but gets that mashed texture from being cooked a lot more easily. It’s used here mostly in desserts, but shows up in salty dishes occasionally.
• While I ate a lot of tofu in the US, even the firm tofu there doesn’t compare to 豆干 (literally dried tofu, but in the US it’s often translated as dried bean curd) here. While soft tofu has the consistency of cooked egg whites, 豆干 is closer to the firmness of a cheddar cheese block. I use slices of it to do a fajita-ish dish often. In fact, for homework this month, I wrote a recipe for it!
• Fresh dragon fruit /火龍果 is not my favorite — its watery and has a very mild flavor — but it’s very healthy and has a long growing season, so you see it a lot here. In fact, near my house there’s a telephone pole that occasionally bears the fruit.
• Two vegetables, 睡蓮 (a stem from a water lily) and water spinach/空心菜 (literally empty heart vegetable) are both usually stir-fried with ginger or garlic and served fairly simply. They have the flavor of leafy greens, but are more fibrous and don’t do that thing where it feels like you’re growing some fur on your teeth.
• Finally, I’m sure I ate some salted egg yolk grated over pasta at some point, here in Taiwan the stuff is everywhere. Salted eggs/鹹蛋 are packed into the middle of the mooncakes I’ll eat for Mid-Autumn festival this month. They’re grated and used as breading on fried food (known as golden sand/金沙 frying). You can get fried rice with it. There’s even salted egg yolk cookies.

Honorable mention 1 — Taiwan has its own variety of almonds/杏仁 which have a strong licorice taste. I don’t eat them often, but they shock me every time.

Honorable mention 2 — While I avoid Italian food in Taipei as much as possible, it amuses me greatly that basically every Italian restaurant here serves a thick, creamy corn soup. I’m still trying to find the origins of this, since the only Italian dish involving corn I remember eating before was polenta (which I’ve never seen here). In addition, many coffee shops here serve what they call “Sicilian coffee,” which is iced Americano mixed with lemonade. Maybe a place used Sicilian lemons to make it and there was some confusion about the name? I have no idea, but Googling leads me to believe the more commonly known version is Algerian .

Further reading:

• It’s ghost month again! As I did last year, I will link Michelle Kuo’s primer on what happens when the gates of hell are wide open. For homework this month I had to watch the supermarket PX Mart’s ghost month commercials, featuring ghosts punishing a range of sins: scamming , bullying , and leading two women on . Each commercial ends with “What people do, not just god sees.” My teacher said there’s been a cultural shift to making ghosts less something purely to avoid and instead have become a mix of good and bad, more like people, with some sympathy towards them. So this year’s PX Mart ghosts are punishing people who deserve it, while last year’s featured conversations with ghosts about traditional offerings. Why does a grocery store advertise things about ghosts in the first place? Well, you have to buy all the offerings to give the hungry ghosts from somewhere…
• ​Yuki Noguchi had a wonderful article on NPR trying to explain why Japan has way less of a problem with obesity than the US. While many of her points also apply to Taiwan, a big thing here that might not apply to Japan is that there are lots of cheap, healthy, bland options. I struggle to think of the equivalent to the typical, ubiquitous Buddhist vegetarian buffet. I’m also curious for a little bit of the economics’ role in it, not on behalf of the consumer but the food industry workers.
• LEAP , the wonderful publication that puts forth young people’s voices about gender issues, has two great articles this month about women and public transportation. One is about a van that helps elderly women in a rural community get into the city. The other is about the tiny number of women who drive for public transportation . Both are well worth your time.
• There are uncountable ways the American incarceration system is an ongoing atrocity. Katie Engelhart’s recent accounting of dementia and Alzheimer’s prisoners is a necessary read about one.
• And this 53-year-old prisoner describing how Taylor Swift has helped him through prison surprised me with its beauty.
• I found Wired ’s article on the fight against myopia in Taiwan to be fascinating. I’m hesitant about the drastic nature of the claims in the article (that a huge swath of myopia cases disappear when students go outside more), but I have been very curious whether the current practice of avoiding sunlight for skin cancer reasons has swung too far into vitamin D deficiency territory, and this article gives me more fuel for that fire.
• I was disappointed in the final act of Tears of the Kingdom , but have another video game recommendation for you: Guacamelee and its sequel are silly bursts of fun, which were clearly lovingly crafted (and very packed with jokes). Highly recommend.

I have an addendum to my social media post last month: in it, I wrote how much I love being able to check in on people who I’m not quite close enough to talk to but still hold fondly in my mind. There’s a negative version of that I’ve run into as well, where you hold someone fondly in your mind and then look them up to find the reality doesn’t match your memory, that the person they’ve become is not the person you wanted them to become. Social media is, in some ways, a shortcut to getting to see inside someone’s head that was previously unavailable. This is, of course, helpful in many situations and horrifying in many others.

I hope that when someone checks in on you, they are as gratified or terrified as you would like them to be.

-g