Episodit
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For years now , and since Andrew’s visit to the brilliant Albert Adrià in Barcelona in 2017, Andrew and Albert have been talking about collaborating on a menu that meshes the world of dim sum and tapas and upends European industry norms about pastry.
Finally on Friday 7th July 2023 - after months of emails and calls - Albert arrived with his team and boxes of specialist ingredients to prep for a special weekend menu that is an industry first and marks an exciting new evolution in creativity for both chefs. On the eve of these dinners, Mukta recorded a live Q&A with Andrew and Albert to explore the collaboration from an XO Soused POV!
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In a new format for XO Soused, we welcome a guest!
Susan Jung - arguably the most powerful voice in East and South East Asian food and cookery - sits with Andrew and Mukta to explore;
* why apprenticeships are sometimes better than formal culinary education
* how a well-timed lunch can help launch a food writing career
* what makes Susan angry as a restaurant reviewer
* Susan’s favourite meal
* What fried chicken reveals about East and South East Asia
* the special artisanal ingredients that elevate East and South East Asian cookery
Susan’s book, Kung Pao and Beyond, Fried Chicken Recipes from East and Southeast Asia is available from bookshops and online at Hive.
Apéritif: Susan, Mukta and Andrew talk a little more about chicken
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Puuttuva jakso?
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Macanese gastronomy is reputedly the oldest fusion cuisine in the world and has been recognised by UNESCO as an intangible cultural heritage.
This tiny territory - smaller than Hong Kong, which it neighbours - also has one of the most dynamic economies in the world where some of the best chefs using the finest ingredients cook for the very rich. How does Macanese food cut through this noise?
But how does a chef like Andrew - operating within a system of distinct yet connected regional Chinese cuisines - understand, embody, codify and cook a corpus that borrows so heavily from Portuguese colonial tastes and textures? And is fusion a problematic term or simply an imprecise word to describe complex alchemies involved in cooking food that lands well in a given context?
References
Boileau, Janet Patricia. "A culinary history of the Portuguese Eurasians: the origins of Luso-Asian cuisine in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries." PhD diss., 2010.
Das, Mukta. “One of Many Ways For Macanese Aluar” The Recipes Project, 2021
Jackson, Annabel. The Making of Macau’s Fusion Cuisine: From Family Table to World Stage. Hong Kong University Press, 2020.
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From being the little princeling in the kitchen during his culinary training to asserting his creative and commercial voice - Andrew’s authority has not always been clearly exercised, reflecting the complexities with succession in family businesses.
Considering all these complex succession hangovers, why was Andrew so adamant that his own new venture - A. Wong - should be launched on the site of his dad’s previous restaurant? Why not a clean break and a new site?
What has remained of his father’s empire - the other businesses, the team, the network - and how has the family adapted to the new business? Or are there continuities in how decisions are made and dreams realised through all three generations of Andrew’s family?
Thanks for listening to our special miniseries. Normal service resumes with the next episode of XO Soused on Tuesday 2 May.
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Episode 2 goes inside Andrew’s family as they battle to carve a space in London’s hospitality sector .
As Britain’s Asian restaurant sector transformed in the lead up to the new millennium, so too did the ambitions of many a restaurateur -not least Andrew’s father, who constantly cast about for new ideas and concepts.
What kind of pressures, limits and opportunities did this present to the family? How did the teenage Andrew understand these forces as they impacted on his father in particular? What did it mean to have a family business in this patriarchal world, and where did it leave Andrew’s mother and Andrew when his father passed away?
Tomorrow: British Chinese cuisine - Wong family dynamics from 2008 - the present
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Introducing a special three-episode mini series of XO Soused.
One episode per generation, and one episode each day from Monday to Wednesday this week.
Andrew’s family have been involved in the Chinese catering trade in Britain for three generations.
Every generation of Andrew’s family had an ambition for their business. During the years that his grandfather owned these businesses, these ambitions were shaped by this powerful patriarch and his network in the midlands, and by the realities of baby boomer Britain and its effect on the Chinese cuisine on its shores.
And along came Andrew’s father with ambitions to start up in London, setting a course for Andrew’s family that still defines their lives today.
In this first special episode of this miniseries, Andrew and Mukta delve into these personal histories - into these sagas of competition and cooperation, of succession and discontinuity - of the 1970s and 1980s.
Tomorrow: British Chinese cuisine - Wong family dynamics in the 1990s-2000s
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How do contemporary cooks interpret historically researched cookbooks? How relatable to contemporary dining are Song era historical recipes, and how far do recipe writers, cooks and chefs have to do this translation work? Andrew talks through a present day book of Song era recipes that he has been reviewing and researching as both he and Mukta explore how these recipes reflect Song dynasty social, economic, cultural and philosophical life.
How do these recipes draw from and sketch out the luxury markets that defined the era, as well as the clean-eating philosophies that developed in reaction to these rich diets? And, equally importantly, how does this cookbook - a complicated culinary snapshot of Song era cooking - capture the evolution of Han majoritarian cuisine against which all other Chinese cuisines have become ‘ethnic’, or ‘other’?
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XO Soused is a fortnightly audio and video newsletter. We’d be grateful if you can share XO Soused with your friends!
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How does a chef cooking Chinese cuisine incorporate bitterness into their dishes? Is bitterness truly necessary as sweetness, sourness, pungency and saltiness in Chinese gastronomy? Or is it trapped in a traditional medicine cul-de-sac? What did key Chinese gastronomic thinkers and writers think about bitter tastes and how did this thinking shift in recent centuries? What ingredients and techniques layer in bitter tastes and how have these changed over the course of Chinese food history?
XO Soused is now available as a video - watch below
Further reading on drinking bitter tea: Mei, Yuan, circa 1790. Wuyi tea [武夷茶] in Suiyuan Shidan [隨園食單], translated by Sean Chen, Way of the Eating, 2019
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XO Soused is a fortnightly audio and video newsletter. We’d be grateful if you can share XO Soused with your friends!
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewwongandmuktadas.substack.com -
What are braised bear paws doing on a (likely) imperial banqueting menu from the 1700s? What does the appearance of this exotic meat, and other dishes like steamed camel hump, tell us about the changing categories of ‘wildlife’ and ‘livestock’ in global food history, and about how Chinese heartland foods and peripheral cuisines are constructed?
Are there more to the names of these dishes than straightforward description, or can these names signal less about the central ingredient and more about the look of the dish?
As the skills and knowledge to cook such dishes remain accessible to Andrew and his chef network, how can he bring such complex ideas of edibility to his diners without crossing certain lines? What cross-cultural encounters about edibility and etiquette does his banqueting menu already contain and where else will he push out the envelope?
Further reading: Yue, Isaac, 2018. The Comprehensive Manchu–Han Banquet: History, Myth, and Development. Ming Qing Yanjiu 22(1):93-111
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After an unexpected hiatus, XO Soused is back to being a fortnightly audio newsletter. We’d be grateful if you can share XO Soused with your friends!
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We kick off season 2 of XO Soused with an update from Andrew about the swap he has made to his evening menu - from à la carte dining to a fixed banquet menu - at his restaurant A. Wong. This has meant changing from catering for a variety of guests who bring different appetites: ‘some people eat more, some people eat less, some people…. have five or six different dishes, others just want to have a duck in the middle’ to serving 19 different dishes to every guest across four or five courses.
What do these changes now demand from Andrew’s kitchen brigade and how has this changed Andrew’s role at the pass? Is this different from the organisation of banquets in Chinese history? Can Mukta’s analysis of Qing-era banqueting menus help Andrew with new ideas for preparation and for dishes that buy his kitchen the time and fluidity it needs? How will Andrew integrate Mukta’s analysis into his future banqueting menus?
XO Soused has been a fortnightly audio newsletter. Intro and outro music: 遊子 [wanderer] by mafmadmaf.com
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Andrew is taking his restaurant in a new direction in 2022. Gone is his à la carte menu and in its place will be a a dining experience akin to some of the historical Chinese banquets written into court records and novels, and painted on to silk. In this special festive episode Andrew and Mukta discuss why Andrew has taken this direction, what historical recipes are inspiring, and what underlying rules and rituals shape flavours combinations, the dishes that are served and to who, and even where dishes are placed on the table.
Download Dr Isaac Yue’s excellent chapter on the Qing-era Han-Manchu banquet to access the translated dishes that Andrew reads from during the episode.
This episode of XO Soused is a festive special. XO Soused will return for season 2 in January 2022.
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As we come to the end of the first season of XO Soused, we share a rough cut of a recording by Andrew and Mukta as they look back on almost 8 years of working together —from the very first research Mukta did for Andrew for the launch of his basement bar the Forbidden City to almost ending it all over their presentation at SXSW - a presentation they didn’t even deliver as a result of COVID travel restrictions.
Andrew and Mukta pick out key moments and summarise the lessons they have learned. They end with some advice for chefs and anthropologists/academics looking to do similar kinds of cultural-historical research together.
XO Soused has been a fortnightly audio newsletter. Andrew and Mukta will be back in mid-December 2021 for a festive special before returning in Jan 2022 for season 2.
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What is Beggar’s Chicken? What are the myths that surround it and why are they important? How has Andrew attempted to bring Beggar’s Chicken - chicken stuffed and wrapped in leaves and clay - into his professional kitchen, and what iterations of the dish is he trying next?
Why is the technique such a fundamental part of its origin story and how has that technique and the recipe changed over time?
XO Soused is a fortnightly audio newsletter.
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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewwongandmuktadas.substack.com -
What are the differences between family cooking and restaurant cooking? How has lockdown and chef-prepared cook-at-home meal kits blurred the boundaries of home and restaurant? Is there a difference in the way Chinese chefs approached this compared to chefs of other cuisines?
How did the divide between family food and restaurant food get created in China, and how has the divide been muddied in Chinese food history? And as family meals increasingly take place in restaurants - in family-style eateries and Michelin-starred places - how do chefs cater for a new generation of - perhaps - more clued-in child diners?
XO Soused is a fortnightly audio newsletter.
Intro and outro music: 遊子 [wanderer] by mafmadmaf.com
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewwongandmuktadas.substack.com -
Why are there so many ingredients in Chinese cuisine that are dried? What is the cultural and culinary importance of these foods?
Weaving their way through key dried items such as abalone, bird’s nest and even controversial ingredients such as shark’s fin, Andrew and Mukta discuss why Chinese chefs have chosen certain seafood, livestock and plant matter for drying and rehydrating, and what flavours, textures and cultural value this adds to dishes.
And how are these foods dried? What marinades and stocks are used to soak the foods before drying? How many times ingredients are dehydrated and rehydrated in these same or different stocks and sauces? And how should we rehydrate foods before finally cooking these in a dish?
XO Soused is a fortnightly audio newsletter.
Intro and outro music: 遊子 [wanderer] by mafmadmaf.com
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewwongandmuktadas.substack.com -
Raw fish and vegetables appear in some regional cuisines in China, with a variety of dipping sauces. Were the Chinese the first to champion raw meats and fish in East Asia? With such a rich culture of preparing raw meats and fish to present to diners in Confucian and Han times and on-and-off up until 14th Century China, what knife and saucing techniques, and skilful finishes with hot oils and fats did Chinese chefs have to master?
Why have raw preparations of vegetables and salads narrowed in recent centuries in Chinese food history? And what about the histories and cultures of raw meat and fish dishes in Western Europe? What’s the future for raw meat and fish preparations inside and outside of China?
Read Alec Story’s translation of Ni Zan’s [倪瓚] 14th Century recipes: https://sundries.alecstory.org/2018/01/ni-zans-dietary-system-of-cloud-forest.html
XO Soused is a fortnightly audio newsletter.
Intro and outro music: 遊子 [wanderer] by mafmadmaf.com
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewwongandmuktadas.substack.com -
Why should dessert go at the end? Why have western and westernised restaurants embraced this structure of cooking and eating, while in some Asian cuisines, sweet and savoury dishes are served together? More importantly, why do western professional kitchens barely use sugars in their savoury dishes? Meanwhile chefs cooking some Asian foods use sugars - cane sugar, beet sugar, honey, and maltose - in equal quantities as savoury ingredients for taste, colour, viscosity, and depth and balance of flavour.
So where does that leave Chinese desserts? What are their levels of sweetness and creaminess? How does Andrew create desserts for A.Wong that navigate these Chinese norms and the expectations of his Chinese and non-Chinese diners?
A video and accompanying recipe for Dragon’s beard candy: https://www.tastemade.com/videos/dragons-beard/
XO Soused is a fortnightly audio newsletter.
Intro and outro music: 遊子 [wanderer] by mafmadmaf.com
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewwongandmuktadas.substack.com -
Who are the iconic female chefs in Chinese food history? What influence did they have on Chinese cuisine? And why are they not more prominent in the histories?
What are the gender dynamics that Andrew encounters in professional kitchens in China and in the UK? And does he think about gender when he recruits or supports his kitchen team?
And take a look at the book that Andrew has a hankering for: Johnson, Ian, 2021, Forbidden City: The Palace at the Heart of Chinese Culture. New York: Assouline
XO Soused is a fortnightly audio newsletter.
Intro and outro music: 遊子 [wanderer] by mafmadmaf.com
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewwongandmuktadas.substack.com -
How does creativity work for a professional chef cooking Chinese food?
What was creative culinary life like in the palace kitchens in China? What was the role of tradition and how did other rules and boundaries either restrict or even elevate innovative thinking? When there’s too much choice - a defining characteristic of working from vast and well stocked palace stores - how does a chef find a culinary direction or a theme, and find a space for his specialism?
And what rules and boundaries allow Andrew to innovate in his kitchen? How does his experience mirror the creative lives of imperial chefs in the past or of the Michelin-starred chefs around him?
If you’d like to read more about chefs in the Qing Court: Rawski, E, 1998. The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions. University of California Press. Pages on food and the court (pp 46-49) can be viewed for free on Google Books
XO Soused is a fortnightly audio newsletter.
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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewwongandmuktadas.substack.com -
Chinese restaurants in the UK (and in other places) often offer a hundred or more dishes on their menu. What is the reason for this? Why does Andrew’s restaurant, A. Wong, offer 70 items every day and what has he had to negotiate to get to this number?How is the professional Chinese kitchen and its arrangements of stations, and the construction of meals in the dining space, geared to offering this variety compared to a western restaurant of similar size?
How has Chinese banquet culture defined the length of composition of Chinese restaurant menu? What is the legacy and impact on restaurant menus of the ingenuity and open-mindedness of past dim sum chefs and their ability to create hundreds of different dim sum? And how do Chinese chefs negotiate this and find space to create signature dishes?
XO Soused is now a fortnightly audio newsletter.
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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewwongandmuktadas.substack.com - Näytä enemmän
