Tenderheart: A Cookbook About Vegetables and Unbreakable Family Bonds - Hardcover

McKinnon, Hetty Lui

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593534867 ISBN 13: 9780593534861

Verlag: Knopf, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

JAMES BEARD FOUNDATION BOOK AWARD NOMINEE • ONE OF BON APPETIT'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • The acclaimed author of To Asia, With Love explores how food connects us to our loved ones and gives us the tools to make vegetarian recipes that are healthful, economical, and bursting with flavor.

"A love letter to vegetables and almost a memoir through recipes, this truly special book speaks to the soul as much as to the stomach." —Nigella Lawson, author of Cook, Eat, Repeat

"Gorgeous, down to earth, vegetable-driven dishes that strike the most delicious balance between fresh and exciting, and cozy and approachable.” —Molly Yeh, Food Network host and NYT Bestselling author of Home Is Where the Eggs Are and Molly on the Range

Heritage and food have always been linked for Hetty Lui McKinnon. Tenderheart is a loving homage to her father, a Chinese immigrant in Australia, told in flavorful, vegetarian recipes. Growing up as part of a Chinese family in Australia, McKinnon formed a deep appreciation for her bicultural identity, and for her father, who moved to Sydney as a teenager and learned English while selling bananas at a local market. As he brought home crates full of produce after work, McKinnon learned about the beauty and versatility of fruits and vegetables. 

Tenderheart is the happy outcome of McKinnon’s love of vegetables, featuring 22 essential fruits and vegetables that become the basis for over 180 recipes.

• Miso Mushroom Ragu with Baked Polenta

• Carrot and Vermicelli Buns

• Crispy Potato Tacos

• Kale, Ginger and Green Onion Noodles

• Broccoli Wontons with Umami Crisp

• Soy–Butter Bok Choy Pasta

• Sweet Potato and Black Sesame Marble Bundt

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Hetty Lui McKinnon is a Chinese Australian cook and food writer. A James Beard Foundation finalist, she is the author of four other cookbooks, including the much-loved To Asia, With Love (2021), the award-winning Family: New Vegetarian Comfort Food to Nourish Every Day (2019), Neighbourhood: Hearty Salads and Plant-Based Recipes from Home and Abroad (2017), and Community: Salad Recipes from Arthur Street Kitchen (2014). Hetty is also the editor and publisher of multicultural food journal Peddler and the host of the magazine’s podcast The House Specials. She is a regular recipe contributor to The New York Times, Bon Appetit, Epicurious.com, and ABC Everyday; and her recipes have appeared in Food52, the Guardian, The Washington Post and more. Born and raised in Sydney, she now resides in Brooklyn, New York.

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Chapter 1

A Book About Vegetables . . . ​and So Much More

This book is about vegetables but, for me, there can be no story about the significance of vegetables in my life without telling you about my father, and the enduring legacy of the fresh, tender world he created for his family.

I only knew my father for a short time. He slipped away quietly on a Sunday afternoon on the last day of 1989. As the world outside prepared to celebrate the dawn of a new decade, our world fell apart. I was 15 and my life would never be the same again.

My father’s name was Wai Keung Lui, but in Australia he was known as Ken. Born in Guangdong, China, he came to Sydney, Australia, as a teenager during the mid-1950s to study business. He learned to speak his special version of English, heavy-accented, with many endearing language quirks. As a young man, he lived in Sydney’s Chinatown, above a grocery store. The inner city of Sydney is now home to sought-after, urbane neighborhoods, but back then it was where postwar immigrants landed, crammed into tiny terrace houses or apartments. He eventually joined the urban sprawl, moving to a house in the southwestern suburbs of Sydney, next door to my Goo Ma (Aunt Betty) and Goo Jeung (Uncle Benny). My Yee Goo Ma (my dad’s second eldest sister) and my Paw (his mother) lived on the same street, in the house “on the corner.” In 1967, he married my mother, and it was in this house that my siblings and I grew up, where my father would see out his unexpectedly short life.

My memories of my father are suspended in time, a disrupted dream without an ending. Every memory I have of him is through the lens of a child. He was tenderhearted—generous, caring, affectionate, kind and playful. Solidly built with a booming voice, he looked and behaved as the model immigrant—polite, well dressed, respectful and gregarious. His charcoal hair was neat, perfectly slicked with Brylcreem; he wore button-down shirts and meticulously ironed slacks to work, saving his three-piece suits for our weekend visits to Chinatown. He took photos constantly, filling album after album with images of family celebrations and outings, turning the laundry into a makeshift darkroom. On our first family holiday to China in the early 1980s, he traveled with a camera bag the size of a suitcase. Through my child-eyes, he embodied strength; he routinely carried boxes of vegetables and sacks of rice on his shoulders. For years after his death, I dreamed of this image on repeat, my dad entering the house like a hologram, a sack of rice stacked upon his broad shoulders.

My dad woke at 3 a.m. every morning. In darkness, he dressed swiftly and met my Uncle Benny outside, traveling together to work at Flemington Markets (now known as Sydney Markets), the largest wholesale fruit and vegetable market in Australia. During the week, my dad worked for my Uncle Benny, who oversaw a banana wholesale business. On the weekends, he worked part time as a waiter at a Chinese restaurant.

In many ways, his job at the markets defined him. He became known as a supplier of fresh produce not only at work, but among our family and friends. Every day, he came home from work with trays and boxes of vegetables and fruits, ready for our family meals, but always enough to share with others. Crates of mangoes for our elderly neighbor Earl who lived two doors away, oranges and apples for our family doctor, boxes of cherries as gifts at Christmastime, peaches, plums and apricots for aunts, uncles, cousins and friends. There were bananas, too, in excessive quantities. My older sister Letty recalls that, as a small child, she walked around the neighborhood distributing fruit baskets to the neighbors.

For my mum, he brought home gai choy (Chinese mustard greens) for pickling, fresh gai lan, ong choy, choy sum and bok choy for nightly stir-fries and juicy iceberg lettuce for braising. Mammoth, plump heads of cauliflower and broccoli, hefty daikon, tender cabbage and shiny eggplant sat in deep cardboard boxes left around the kitchen, dining room and laundry. As a child, I didn’t see living among cartons of fresh produce as anything but normal. We snacked on fruit all day, often making ourselves sick on it (there was a notorious cherry overconsumption incident, which my mother still laughs about today). One summer’s day, I ate an entire basket of apricots in one sitting; they were the best apricots I’d ever tasted—plump, sweet, floral and tenderly firm—spoiling apricots for me forever. I am still constantly searching for the apricots of my youth.

My father had an indulgent side. On Fridays he brought home live mud crabs from the market, their shells trussed in pink string. He left them in a large bucket in the kitchen, their death row. I would prod at them, childishly taunting them in their final hours of life; they responded with snapping claws and flailing legs. At the deft hands of my mother, they would soon lose their lives, wok-tossed with ginger and shallots, a succulent, irresistible dish.

My father’s job meant he kept strange hours, which filtered into our daily lives. Due to his early start at work, he was always home when we arrived back from school. “After-school snack” was an official meal in our house because this was my dad’s time to shine—he relished the opportunity to purchase or prepare more “Western” foods for us. From our local bakery he would pick up meat pies, sausage rolls, finger buns, custard tarts or apple turnovers. But my siblings and I agree that our favorite afternoon snack was his salad roll, which he filled with iceberg lettuce so finely shredded with a cleaver that we wondered if he was hiding some secret ninja kitchen skills. My dad was the type of person who, if we told him we liked a particular food, would inundate us with it; once my sister told him she liked orange juice, and for weeks he bought her an entire bottle of orange juice every single day. It was my dad I turned to when I wanted to try cheese; he brought home packs of Kraft singles, which were like gold to me, and later introduced me to blocks of cheddar. My dad possessed a child-like wonderment about life in the West and a palpable excitement about the world, which I sensed was too often suppressed by his predestined duty as an earnest Chinese man, bound by tradition and responsibility.

My father went to bed at an early hour, so we rushed through evening activities. We ate dinner while the sun was still up. At around 5 p.m., we would hear my mother bellowing through the rumble of the kitchen exhaust fan—“hong toi” (set the table), “sik faan” (the Cantonese term for dinnertime, which translates to “eat rice”). Dinner in our house was a noisy affair. My father liked the hectic sounds of the television while we ate, so, to the soundtrack of the nightly news, we devoured our dinner swiftly and neatly. My parents didn’t allow a messy table and every grain of rice needed to be accounted for. At the end of every meal, like clockwork, my father remained at the table, peeling himself an orange. On occasion, I would stand beside him, hoping to snare a segment or two.

Losing a parent or carer (or any loved one) as a child, or before we fully understand who we are or who we will become, changes us in a profound, uncomfortable way. The reverberations of loss echo throughout our lives, in ways that we don’t expect. It’s a crack that keeps opening, a knife that keeps twisting. It is a dull ache that lingers in our soul. I have carried this memory of my father as the generous “fruit and vegetable guy” close to my heart my entire adult life. It is a memory that fills me with pride. When I stopped eating meat as a teenager, I felt comforted by this...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593534867
• ISBN 13: 9780593534861
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 528
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland