new old comfort food
a rebelliously beige dinner for july
Hello! Apologies for the radio silence last week—it’s summer, a recipe I am testing wasn’t ready yet, and sometimes we here at Mess Hall HQ simply take a week off. If all goes according to plan you should be getting a bonus post next week, and TOMATO MONTH will resume in stride. I hope everyone is staying cool, dry, and well-ventilated.
I am embarrassed by any nostalgia I feel for the original new york city Mission Chinese Food: it risks a sort of bro-chef adulation I disavow, and a snobbish downtown hagiography I hold no right to, having never actually lived in Manhattan, let alone downtown. But the smog of time allows me to look back at a handful of nights in 2013—waiting in line drinking the free beer, pissing in the bathroom while staring at a photo of Laura Palmer1, eating salt cod fried rice, feeling like something exciting was happening and you were able to not just experience but eat it—and think well, we had a nice time for a minute there, didn’t we. One time I saw David Byrne outside! I was in my 20s, I had my first job I actually liked, I was working with people who knew all of these things about food. I was still avoiding meat, so I’d always order the bacon without the bacon: their thrice-cooked bacon stir-fried with rice cakes and a dozen other things, hold the pork.
A few years later, when the restaurant moved next to 169 Bar—turns out that original place had rats, go figure—and I was eating meat again, I ordered the bacon, full stop, every time I went. I’d order the wings too, and that wackadoo cabbage salad with tahini and seaweed and buckwheat, and usually five other things because this was the sort of place you’d want to go to with a group, but the bacon never stopped being the highlight. I’ve made it at home multiple times now, despite how cheffy of a recipe it is: first you BOIL the bacon then you FREEZE AND SLICE it and DEEP FRY IT and THEN you stir-fry it—with Chinese rice cakes, onion, serrano, bitter melon, chili crisp, fermented black beans, sichuan peppercorns, cilantro, scallions, a variety of other liquids and powders, and inari age, that delicious Japanese fried and marinated tofu. The whole thing is fussy but worth it2, a good party trick. It’s sour and salty and zingy and spicy and chewy. It tastes like that part in that MUNA song where they go iwantthatgirlrightovertheretowannaDATE! me!, if that makes any sense. This is how banged up the recipe is in my copy of the Mission Chinese cookbook:
The thrice-cooked bacon cemented my love of rice cakes and inari, two ingredients that I’ll now often grab a bag of if I’m at H-Mart or another Asian grocery store. Inari in particular is such a heavy-hitting bag of stuff to keep in the freezer: it defrosts in like 5 minutes (pop it in a bowl of warm water), and makes an already-seasoned garnish for rice bowls or noodles or stir fries etc; I’ll often make myself a fresh pot of rice for some inari sushi, which I just realized I want to eat tomorrow. All of that to say: when I saw a recipe for an aggressively simple stir-fry of rice cakes and inari in the Mission Vegan cookbook, I dog-eared that page hard.
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