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    Buttermilk Graffiti: A Chef's Journey to Discover America's New Melting-Pot Cuisine
    Buttermilk Graffiti: A Chef's Journey to Discover America's New Melting-Pot Cuisine
    Buttermilk Graffiti: A Chef's Journey to Discover America's New Melting-Pot Cuisine
    Audiobook8 hours

    Buttermilk Graffiti: A Chef's Journey to Discover America's New Melting-Pot Cuisine

    Written by Edward Lee

    Narrated by David Shih

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    American food is the story of mash-ups. Immigrants arrive, cultures collide, and out of the push-pull come exciting new dishes and flavors. 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 flavors of their lost country. A Uyghur cafe 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 Cafe 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateDec 28, 2018
    ISBN9781977331717
    Buttermilk Graffiti: A Chef's Journey to Discover America's New Melting-Pot Cuisine

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    Reviews for Buttermilk Graffiti

    4/5

    54 ratings7 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Chef Edward Lee travels the country, eats food, and apparently wastes food, as the humongous amounts of food he reports ordering at restaurants cannot possibly be eaten by him. I just can't believe he eats all that. And he doesn't bring a traveling companion save in one chapter.He visits New Orleans, Clarksdale, Montgomery, Indiana, and lots of other places. The chapters generally provide some introduction, some talk about the logistics of travel, interviews with chefs, and eating, and conclusion.The most memorable was his chapter of visiting Detroit, a city with a large Muslim population, during Ramadan. He decides to try the sunup-to-sundown fasting. Yet he sticks to his plan of visiting restaurants and talking to chefs and ordering a ton of food - and photographing it and talking about it - just not eating it. I was intrigued why someone would torture himself that way. When sundown is moments away, and he orders a big meal at a restaurant that he can actually eat immediately, a fellow faster frowns at him. He tells him he should break his fast with something humble; the fast is about showing solidarity with the poor, so it would be more fitting to order something humble. Besides (here it comes) all that heavy food you just ordered would just make you sick if you ate it right away.I wasn't particularly grabbed by any other chapters. Lee seems likeable enough. I couldn't help comparing it to EAT A PEACH by David Chang, another Korean chef memoirist. But unlike Chang, Lee is not into writing about his restaurants, or even himself, very much. They are very different books.
    • 3/5
      Edward Lee's exploration of the connection between immigration, food, and American culture contains 16 chapters that read like essays. Each chapter investigates how culture and environment can change and shape food, whether it's Black women cooking soul food or Nigerian or German immigrants adapting their food to American ingredients.For me, the book is a little too precious, Lee's reactions a little too exaggerated. Although I enjoy his collection of origin stories with the various chefs he interviews, his reaction to the many dishes he tries seems over the top to me. Maybe I lack refined taste buds--or maybe there's no maybe about it. I myself am a simple home cook, trying to make fresh food with a few ingredients and a minimum of labor. As for the recipes that accompany each chapter, I find them too time consuming and too complicated. (See above comment about being a simple cook.) If you have access to a Korean market for chili paste or regularly use rice flour, this may be the book for you. But it's not a great cookbook for me.
    • 4/5
      Reading is not easy for me right now, which is why this took me so long to finish. Even though it took me forever, I really enjoyed it. I love the way the author blends place, people, and food, while also discussing race, immigration, and what it means when cuisines become "Americanized." The recipes are super interesting and sound delicious, but I think most of them are more complex than I'd be comfortable attempting at home. Don't read this on an empty stomach.
    • 5/5
      I became aware of Edward Lee as a contestant for the Top Chef show on Bravo, the Austin Texas edition. I identified with him because we are both of Asian descent, and we don’t see too many Asian folks on shows like Top Chef. In addition to that connection, I noticed he is from Louisville, a city I travel to quite often, at least twice if not three times a year. So, I kept track, hoping that he would open up his own restaurant, I wanted to taste what I saw.Over time, I had eaten at three of his Louisville restaurants: 610 Magnolia, Milkwood, and Whiskey Dry, I enjoyed all of them and it made me a big fan of his culinary skills. When his first book: Smoke and Pickles came out, I was a bit more cautious, I was not a regular reader of cook books and I wasn’t about to start. I have read other books from famous chefs, Anthony Bourdain being one, but his books were different, they had a point of view and they were not all about the recipes. It was with this mindset that I happened upon this second book of his while I was visiting my favorite bookstore in Louisville, Carmichael Books. After flipping through the book, I realized that there was much more to the man’s writing than that of a chef discoursing on cooking, taste, food, and the food culture. He was in fact, much like Anthony Bourdain than I had realized. In addition, I figured that there is a certain amount of predestination involved since I was in a Louisville landmark thumbing through the book written by another Louisville landmark. So, I bought it.This book is divided into sixteen chapters, each have a story or two to tell, some times they coalesce into a tidy narrative, mostly they don’t, and that is the beauty of Lee’s story telling: nothing is intentionally meant to be completely self-contained, everything is a bit messy, and that is its charm. He goes off and wanders these United States as someone who is not completely assimilated, someone who’s difference is written on his face. He goes into places where he is not completely welcomed, he is an outsider wherever he went. More to the point, he asks a lot of question, as a writer should, and he often invites suspicious scrutiny from those very people that he most wanted to have a conversation with. He does persevere, and he does have fascinating conversations, about the food of course, but also about his subjects lives here in America, about how they got here, what they think, how they feel about issues that are important to their daily lives. The chapters always end with his own interpretations of the recipes he speaks about in the body of the chapters, some are significantly different while others are tweaked, according to how he feels.More important than the reportage of the stories is his own assessment of the stories, he speaks plainly and bluntly about what he experienced, there is always an elegiac feel to his prose. He conveys the sense of the immigrant experience both in terms of the fulfillment that comes from being satisfied with where they ended up yet also with a sense of sadness regarding the loss over the thing that defines the speaker’s past and culture. But, there always the description of the food, he is blunt and honest about the food he tastes, and he will call out a bad interpretation, but when he goes into the food, he is all at once evocative and descriptive. The only thing that he was not able to evoke is allow us to actually smell and taste the food, but he comes awfully close. He also does not insist on authenticity, because authenticity is not real to him, people will cook and eat differently as they evolve within this American stew, only the quality matters.The stories are told as a main piece that brings us to social and cultural points, points that are made subtly but clearly. It gives us a sense of what the feelings are with the people telling Lee the stories but are not overpoweringly obtrusive. I enjoyed the food writing, the travelogue, the stories, as well as the thoughtful reflections. It made me appreciate the breadth and depth of a meal, it could be just a satisfying meal, which is all that we ask, while it can also be a cross cultural exploration, if you converse, reflect, and question your experience. Lee always went to the small, inconspicuous places in search of honest foods that reflects the cultures that are the most representative of the subject in each chapter, so it was with great excitement that I discovered that I had actually been to one of the places he focused on. Shapiro’s in Indianapolis is not small, nor is it inconspicuous, it is an icon in south Indianapolis. I happened to eat there while I was on my way home. It was a delicatessen in the finest sense of the word, and as I read Lee’s account of his visit, I could visualize the scene as I was there myself. I of course excitedly tweeted the picture of my meal at Shapiro’s to Lee, a reader lives for those little moments.Finally, as he was winding down his book, he took us into his personal reflections about his life, his wife, his daughter, his Korean background and family. It is a very important point for me, it took a certain amount of courage to expose his thoughts, his fears, and his past history to the readers; and the humanity of what he had to say made the book that much more welcoming and honest. Going back to our shared Asian background, I felt his battles with the parental and cultural expectations. I was able to appreciate the frustrations and fears coming from the younger Edward Lee even though he rebelled against those expectations and took the road less traveled, while I took the well-trodden familiar path, only to be rebelling in my later years. The last few chapters, in speaking of those challenges in his life as well as speaking about his adopted hometown of Louisville, was a very nice ending, it made the book journey more meaningful and the stories already told that much more appreciated.
    • 5/5
      Loved it. Works at every level from the human to the culinary and very interesting for cooks without roots.Great writing too.
    • 5/5
      I thoroughly enjoyed this food history journey with Chef Lee. Mr. Lee really took me on a grand experience. I not only got to use my sense of imagination but creative as well. This is due to the fact that there was only descriptions of the food as told by Mr. Lee and the contributors. There were plenty of recipes for featured dishes but no pictures. This is as Mr. Lee explains is to open the senses. Without any images, there is nothing to compare the finished product with. Before there was Instagram, people had to relay on their instincts to make a dish and share it with family and friends once the food was done. No pictures.I like cooking. Although, I am not a professional like my sister. What I do like about cooking is that I can play around with measurements, spices, and foods. Learning about the different cultures and dishes that were featured in this book were great. It made me appreciate the history behind what I am eating more. Foodie fans from beginners to experts will love this book. A real food experience for the senses!
    • 5/5
      This is not your typical cookbook. Not even close. There are recipes at the end of each chapter but they are just a fraction of what I got out of this book. Instead Chef Edward Lee gave me a glimpse of different cultures that came to this country and the foods that define them and how they have adapted them. Wait, even that is only part of the story. I may never get to taste Chef Lee's food but I am thankful I am able to read his writing! He brings alive the idea of food being a central part of so many culture's lives in a way that makes you want to immediately start cooking his recipes for family and friends and discuss what you just read.