Buttermilk Graffiti
CBC Books | | Posted: November 29, 2018 4:23 PM | Last Updated: December 4, 2018
Edward Lee
American food is the story of mash-ups. Immigrants arrive, cultures collide and out of the push-pull come exciting new dishes and flavours. But for Edward Lee, who, like Anthony Bourdain or Gabrielle Hamilton, is as much a writer as he is a chef, that first surprising bite is just the beginning. What about the people behind the food? What about the traditions, the innovations, the memories?
A natural-born storyteller, Lee decided to hit the road and spent two years uncovering fascinating narratives from every corner of the country. There's a Cambodian couple in Lowell, Massachusetts, and their efforts to re-create the flavours of their lost country. A Uyghur café in New York's Brighton Beach serves a noodle soup that seems so very familiar and yet so very exotic — one unexpected ingredient opens a window onto an entirely unique culture. A beignet from Café du Monde in New Orleans, as potent as Proust's madeleine, inspires a narrative that tunnels through time, back to the first Creole cooks, then forward to a Korean rice-flour hoedduck and a beignet dusted with matcha.
Sixteen adventures, sixteen vibrant new chapters in the great evolving story of American cuisine. And forty recipes, created by Lee, that bring these new dishes into our own kitchens. (From Workman)
From the book
New Orleans is a port city, founded by the French, ruled by the Spanish, bought by the Americans, and culturally impacted by West Africa, Afro-Canadian descendents, Germans, Sicilians and Irish. It is the most racially and culturally evolved polyglot city in America, a flawed by seductive utopia. If I lived in New Orleans, I probably wouldn't last long. There is too much temptation for me. Even today, it seduces the young, from tourists to professional derelicts, all of whom wind up on the banks of the Mississippi searching for their idea of hedonistic abandon. For all the French Quarter's predictable, groomed debauchery, there is still a dark underbelly that awakens in the wee hours, when the college kids have vomited up their Hurricanes and gone home for the evening. This is the New Orleans I know well. A tawdry hangout on Bienville Street is where I often end up. If Jezebel is behind the bar, she'll fix you right up. There are still places in New Orleans that don't exist on any map. These are the places where you can feel the tensions of being in a harlot's town.
From Buttermilk Graffiti by Edward Lee ©2018. Published by Workman.