For a foodie like me, one of the great joys in life is finding an exceptional recipe. Bonus points if the recipe is spot on in recreating a fond food memory. You know that kind of recipe, I’m sure. You make it. You taste it. And there is that Wow! moment when you know that the recipe is everything you want it to be.
This is such a recipe.
The original version of this recipe comes from Francis Lam. He is a former New York Times food writer and the current host of The Splendid Table. In a 2017 NY Times Magazine article, Lam wrote that this dish hits “every pleasure center in the brain.” Those words certainly caught my attention. After five months in Covid19 isolation, my pleasure centers are getting a little rusty.
Lam is a gifted food writer in addition to being an excellent cook. His magazine piece accompanying the recipe is a poignant essay on the son-of-immigrants experience–the frustration of being from a culture but not of it. The article is worth reading if you can pull it up on the NYT site. Here is a link: Francis Lam.
Here is an excerpt about Lam’s search for his mother’s Stir-Fried Tomatoes and Eggs recipe: “So I went online and found recipe after recipe, with an eye toward cobbling together my own. I read the cookbook author Genevieve Ko’s version and took from it the idea of just lightly cooking the eggs before finishing them in the tomatoes. I read Chichi Wang’s version, on Serious Eats, and lifted her brilliant use of fragrant rice wine in the eggs and ketchup in the sauce. I read dozens of blog posts, mostly relating the same story over and over again — a story of nostalgia, of Mom’s cooking, of home…. And after all this reading, I started to realize what I was really seeing: people, just like me, missing a knowledge that they felt should be in their bones, coming to someone else’s recipes to connect them to where they came from while being rooted in where they are.”
If Francis Lam intrigues you as he does me, here is a link to a Splendid Table video where he explains how to cut and peel and onion. (I confess that I hate peeling onions with a passion.) He has a gentle charm and a quirky sense of humor. Francis Lam explains how to peel an onion.
Here is the recipe.
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