What does it mean to cook modern Chinese?
On the new cookbook from Masterchef winner Sam Low, a tale of faux-french vanilla ice cream and a snack made from a very ugly fruit.
Nau mai, haere mai. Welcome to The Boil Up, The Spinoff’s weekly food newsletter. Written by me, Charlotte Muru-Lanning. It’s lovely to have you here!
Somehow, despite a long history of immigration and immense influence on how people eat in this country, Sam Low’s new cookbook Modern Chinese is only the second Chinese New Zealand cookbook ever published. The book, which was released this week, takes a contemporary hand to the nostalgic and the traditional, all the while adding to the definition of what it means to cook Chinese food in 2023. With matter-of-factly titled recipes like “juicy prawn toast” and “spicy saucy tofu”, rather than attempting to be a kind of definite compendium of Chinese food, the collection of recipes is an expression of what Chinese food, and identity, can mean in Aotearoa.
I had a chat with Low about what it means to make modern Chinese food, the politics behind food photography and the power of cookbooks.
CML: There seems to be a real self-awareness around how you’ve approached the connection between identity and food within the book, was that on purpose?
SL: I thought about how this book could inject all parts of me, and what I stand for, which is largely community. That's why I got so many incredible artists and makers. I have two of the most profound Chinese Kiwi poets, Nathan Joe and Chris Tse, writing poems in the book. The majority of the ceramics were made by a queer Chinese Malaysian friend, and Jean Teng was my writing mentor. I had so many people in my community help out with this giant project. When I was writing, I didn't realise that it was going to be the second Chinese cookbook to ever be published out of New Zealand – which is stupid when you think about it. The Chinese population has been here since the 1840s, I don't know why there hasn’t been more. I wanted to make sure that it had elements of everything that I think food could be or the way it should be reanalyzed moving forward within food media spaces.
You write in the book about the relationship between food and being queer. What influence has that had on the decisions you made when writing Modern Chinese?
For me, being queer allowed me to rethink the way that I was told how to be growing up. So then, when given these opportunities, and understanding that the way I exist is outside of the societal box, I was able to break out and be a little bit louder and own that I am different. I learnt that you can still respect tradition, but allow for new. If I wasn't queer I don't think I'd be able to even scratch that topic.
The look of the book is really distinctive – how much thought went into imagery?
Even with the photography in the book, I wanted to balance masculinity and femininity. Books that are being released now either lean into hyper-feminine, such as salads, pastels and pretty flowers, or lean into the hyper-masculine of hunted fish and cooking on open fire by the batch. There's no real inbetween and I am neither masculine or feminine so the photography needed to reflect that too. On top of that idea of gendered food, I wanted to stay away from Orientalism. If you look at a lot of the Chinese cookbooks that come out overseas, they will put things like Mahjong tiles and chopsticks everywhere. It's like, we get it, it’s Chinese, but you don't have to remind us in every single photo.
I really wanted the studio shots of me because I was over those shots where the cooks are leaning down smelling coriander in the soil – who actually does that? I wanted to be aware of the camera. I didn't want a photo of me pretending to shop. I wrote about this in the book, but back in the day, a lot of the queer men who wrote cookbooks never had their name or face attached, because it might be detrimental to sales and I wanted to take ownership of that, and say “no this is very me; very queer and very Chinese, and I created this cookbook”. I didn't want to detach my food from the person.
How have you approached the diverse nature of regional and diaspora Chinese food in the cookbook?
First and foremost, it needed to include a lot of recipes that were nostalgic to me personally. Growing up in a Cantonese household meant that I anchored the book around Cantonese eating. And then I thought about the earlier introduced Chinese dishes to New Zealand that was survival food. By survival food I mean food that was adapted to suit western tastes so people would spend money in Chinese businesses so that immigrants could survive. That’s dishes like sweet corn soup, black bean beef, and my version of mapo tofu. That’s since evolved to an understanding in New Zealand that there's so much regional variety. I have a few dishes in the book that are Sichuan flavour profiles, and Shanghainese, as well as northern Chinese, because these have started to become popular in the local dining scene. I felt it was important to give a brief summary of where dishes are from and how vast Chinese gastronomy is. That's a big reason no one else has done a cookbook that summarises Chinese food and that's why I didn't have the heart, or for lack of a better word, the balls to do a book that's called Chinese food. I had to call it Modern Chinese, because I could only speak from what I know of Chinese food.
Considering the absence of Chinese cookbooks in Aotearoa, what are your thoughts on the significance or power of cookbooks?
When you have monuments or placements where cultural significance is documented and presented, it allows the public to be reminded of the progress of cultural movements within a place. When you have that it gets rid of xenophobia and also the idea of a monolithic culture. The lack of Chinese presence in New Zealand, within media or art, means that you can forget that there was this larger history of Chinese diaspora here. There’s a lot of room now, especially in today's climate, for new voices to come up to push forward culture and allow room for delicious and new. That seeps into everything else.
Weekly bites
At The Warehouse you’ll find 1.2kg packs of Weet Bix for $6 – a price cheaper than it typically retails at other supermarkets. So when the retailer was told last week by the popular breakfast cereal manufacturer Sanitarium that due to “supply constraints” the product would be pulled from stores, while keeping stocks flowing to its competitors like Countdown and Pak'nSave, suspicions were raised. The Warehouse laid a complaint with the Commerce Commission which asked Sanitarium for a “please explain” and newly-minted grocery commissioner Pierre van Heerden said it was an unusual practice for a company to pick and choose which stores absorbed supply issues. The saga seems to have been resolved – on Tuesday Sanitarium backtracked on its decision and reinstated supply agreements with The Warehouse. The grocery commissioner has described it as a “real win” for consumers.
A banal conversation about the difference between French vanilla ice cream and vanilla ice cream led Dylan Jones to deep dive into our local commercial ice cream makers. As it turns out, when it comes to French vanilla, none of the commercial options contain the essential ingredient. Read all about these fraudulent single scoops on The Spinoff.
It’s a site well known for its massive collection of bulk packs of chips and toilet paper, but now West Auckland’s Costco is also the site of massive collective win for workers. Staff at the store will now be paid above the living wage after negotiating the store’s first ever collective agreement. Union members voted to ratify the new agreement last week which will see nearly 200 First Union members who work at the store paid $26.50 an hour, slightly more than the new living wage of $26. General secretary at First Union Bill Bradford said the workers also have a pathway to earning $30 an hour after four years with the company. In December last year, First Union signed a deal with Countdown that put the lowest-paid workers on the then-living wage, of $23.65.
Do you have a penchant for indecent produce? The Spinoff staff writer Gabi Lardies writes about the pair of “horny kiwi fruit” (NSFW) which sold for a cool $77 dollars on TradeMe earlier this week.
Dogs at polling booths is back for 2023
In 2020, we showcased big dogs, small dogs, long dogs, short dogs, hairy dogs, happy dogs, nervy dogs, silly dogs, stylish dogs, sleeping dogs – and we’d be barking mad not to do it all over again. On election day, The Spinoff will again bring you nothing but live pupdates until 7pm. On October 14, send your photos of dogs at voting places around the motu (no humans please) to info@thespinoff.co.nz.
We’re focusing on on-the-day dogs, but will consider any particularly fetching advance-voting dogs, especially if they’re voting from abroad.
The weekly snack
MD Woodapple Nectar, $2.60 from Serandib: I love when a drink is described as a nectar. It’s a title that takes a drink from a mere thirst quencher, to an experience with celestial associations, and with a bit of (literal) grit to it. So when I think of the wood apple – a decidedly unattractive fruit – it’s hard to comprehend that it could even be turned into something that might be described as a “nectar”. A regular in Sri Lankan cuisine, as the name might suggest, it’s a woody fruit – firm and round, with a rough exterior. As someone uninitiated to the wood apple club, I pounced at my opportunity to try it, even if in liquid form. Even for a nectar, the content of this bottle was extraordinarily thick: rather gloopy in a way that verged toward baby food consistency. Although, before you even notice the texture, you’ll notice the scent: a gorgonzola-esque funkiness that will absolutely not be appealing to everyone. On taste, it’s a sipper for sure with a muted tartness that’s on a par with what I imagine a blitzed box of raisins would taste like. Yes this drink is shockingly thick, tastes a bit like raisins and has a whiff of blue cheese, but I’m on board. 7.5/10
Talk next week!
Hei kōnā mai, Charlotte
