Backgrounds:

LEX was born and grew up in Yibin, Sichuan, China. He is currently attending Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China.

The informant is a rapper, and so am I. We decided to go and eat hotpot together, and by the way also discuss future collaborations. During the meal, he made a classic Sichuan style hotpot sauce for me and shared the ingredients with me.

The Main Piece:

The Sichuan style hotpot sauce is called 油碟（you die), or oil dish. The ingredients are as follows:

mashed garlic，oyster sauce，sesame oil， coriander，green onion

When the food in the hotpot is cooked, we dip it into the You Die and then eat it.

Analysis:

LEX says all the liquid oil in the sauce can help to cool the hot meat that has just came out of the pot.

Personally, I noticed a significant difference between the hotpot sauce in Shenyang, where I came from, and in Sichuan. In Shenyang, we use sesame butter, which is more thick, with a lot of sugar, making it super sweet. But the Sichuan style You Die has no sugar in it. I think it is because most Sichuan People are accustomed to the super spicy food in the hotpot, because Sichuan food is famous for being super spicy. They grow up eating it and got used to it. But we people from the north are less accustomed to the spicy taste. So, we need sweet suger to offset the spicy flavor.

I also find that the Sichuan style hotpot sauce goes extremely well with animal organs, while the northern sesame butter goes better with meat. The difference in hotpot sauces reveal the different food preferences between northern and southern people in China

Intro

This is a recipe told by my grandpa. Now 79 years old, he lived the first 26 years of his life in a crowded house in Old Harbour, Jamaica. He moved to New York in ‘68 and has lived in the US since. A lot of his family still live in Jamaica and the country is still the place of his roots. He is Jamaican, Chinese, and Indian. He has a thick Jamaican accent so if you can read this in a Jamaican accent it may add to the experience. This is a transcribed script of what was said in the story, with the various “umm’s” and “uhh’s” omitted.

How To Cook Curry

“Well, one of the bad things that I did not learn from them (his parents), or did not get help from them, was because I didn’t participate in cooking and all that. I had it made when I was living with my parents in Jamaica, but I never did go around the fire at all. Later in life after I left home and got married I remembered what they used to do, like for instance I remember cooking some of the local dishes like curry chicken or curry goat. I learn a lot from them, like how to prepare it, cut it up and wash it, you clean it real good. With the curry chicken, a special way that the chinese does the curry chicken is the spices. One of the main spice was a scotch bonnet pepper. It was very hot. They have a way of rating pepper by how hot it is and this scotch bonnet goes way up there. Apart from the indian pepper, but it might be the hottest in the world. But the scotch bonnet is not only hot it has a nice flavor to it. So if you’re doing curry, curry chicken or curry goat, you want to use that scotch bonnet. For some reason after you season it up it takes a long process to cook goat, because there’s hardly any fat on the goat. It’s mostly muscle. The goat runs a lot so it doesn’t have a lot of fat like a sheep or a cow. It’s very lean so you have to cook it real long. So they use a lot of curry, that really yellow indian one. And they use a lot of… that thing, let me go to the pantry. They use the pepper and the garlic on the curry. And a curry that they use a lot is the Blue Mountain Curry. Tell her (my mom), they can mix the Blue Mountain Curry with the Sam’s curry and it makes three more bottles. As for the curry, you just got to cook it real long and add a lot of onion and green scallion (a vegetable) and cook it until you take a fork, it can stick it easily, and that’s when you know it’s cooked properly. Yesterday we cooked some curry chicken, but chicken is much easier, it cook much faster than the curry goat. But the curry goat is like a national dish in jamaica.”

Analysis

My grandpa told me this meal over facetime the other day. Ever since I’ve been a kid, curry chicken and goat have been a staple food of our family gatherings. You often can’t go to a family reunion of ours without seeing a curry dish made by grandpa. You may notice that the process of cooking it is very vague. That is actually how he tells people to cook it, saying things like just cook it until it’s done or add a bit of pepper. For example, my dad learned how to cook curry from him, and that is exactly the way my grandpa taught him how to cook it. This is certainly an interesting way of passing on folk recipes. The process of cooking curry definitely has a learning curve when learning it this way: learning how much water and how long to cook it add to the variety that it gets across the family. Without having clear measurements the curry dish always comes out different, and usually pretty tasty. 

My grandpa also gives a variant ingredient with the scotch bonnet pepper. His dad was chinese so this ingredient was an addition from that part of his heritage. By the way, the scotch bonnet is not one of the hottest peppers in the world. The curry dish also has origins in India and not so surprisingly, my grandpa is also Indian. Curry has always been a classic food in his life and will continue to be in ours.

Intro

The following is a folk-meal that was told to me by the lead pastor of my church. He is a non-denominational Christian pastor and is a caucasian male. I found out about this tradition of his when asking him about any folklore that his family may have had. We met at a local coffee shop in our town where I recorded the story. This is a direct transcribed script of what was said in the story, with the various “umm’s” and “uhh’s” omitted.

Goulash

“My mom made goulash. This thing called goulash. Whenever I tell people what goulash is they look at me like they’ve never heard of it. Do you know what that is?”

Me: “I’ve never heard of it.” 

“Nobody ever knows but that’s what she called it. She got the recipe from her mom, who got it from her mom. This is a dish, it’s like a pasta dish with noodles, meat, and cheese, and onions. Typically it would be seasoned a lot, I mean, a lot a lot. With paprika and other stuff. A lot of the time it was beef I think, but I don’t think it mattered too much what kind of meat. Oh, I think the vegetables were usually like tomatoes and something else. It’s always got a lot of red in it. Ya, it was a standard fair in my house.” 

Me: “Is it from a country?”

“No, from what I know… that’s a great question, I’m trying to remember. She said it was… well, my mom’s side of the family is Irish so I think it came from Ireland, but I don’t know why goulash would come from Ireland, it sounds more Hungarian. But ya that was a dish that was passed down, and my wife now makes it. But it changes a little as we make it. My mom used to put onions in it, but my wife doesn’t put onions in hers so it has probably been adapted over the years.” 

Me: “Is it just like a meal, or is it a special kind of meal that you eat at like thanksgiving or something?” 

“Nope, it’s just a meal that we have. Oh and we have Chinese every Christmas Eve. [Name]’s family had Chinese Christmas Eve and I had never had Chinese Christmas Eve. That’s just what we do. (wow, that was a quick bonus folk-tradition there at the end, though it may have been stolen from A Christmas Story).” 

Analysis

The meal that my pastor told me about in this story is one that, like he assumed would happen, I had never heard of. This is another weird, without context folk thing that my pastor told me. A lot of the things he said he had a hard time coming up with why they did it, saying a lot “we just did, I didn’t ask why.” The recipe he gives is not very detailed but it does give enough to be compared to actual goulash recipes. On the whole, what he said was very similar, from the paprika and tomatoes to beef being the main meat. From what I gathered from the site allrecipes, goulash is a pasta dish as he said, but can also be served as a stew, among other things. 

I thought it was interesting that his wife’s side of the family was Irish, but he didn’t think it would be Irish, he thought it would be Hungarian. It turns out, he was actually right on the money as goulash is typically a Hungarian dish. There are also dishes considered American goulash, which could also be the style that his family eats. It was also interesting to me that recipes do change so frequently. Even from his mother-in-law to his wife there was a drastic change in the recipe. Who knows how much this recipe may have changed in the past.