Excerpts
Cook a Feast
With Eric Kim
The food writer and author of Korean American shares the importance of feasting for all occasions as well as a delicious fried chicken recipe.
Eric Kim is a New York Times staff food writer born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. He worked his way through the literary and culinary world to eventually become a digital manager at Food Network and a senior editor at Food52, where he amassed a devoted readership for his “Table for One” column. He now hosts regular videos on NYT Cooking’s YouTube channel. His work has been featured in The Washington Post, Bon Appétit, and Food & Wine. This essay and recipe for Soy Sauce Fried Chicken are featured in his new cookbook, Korean American.
What is a feast if not a meal persevering? When I think of feasts, I think of long, leisurely dinners, ones filled with family and friends gathered around a couple big tables. Feasts should be full of joy (the word “feast” actually comes from the Latin festus, meaning “joyous”). If the TV dinners, stews, and rice dishes in my book showcase my family’s daily home cooking, then my feast chapter is about our occasions: the messy, disorganized hodgepodge Thanksgiving, with influences that span time and space; the Argentine empanada-folding party that my mom and I have, just the two of us, every Christmas; and the Korean fried chicken we always chase with soju and beer because that’s just the way we do it.
And it’s not that these meals themselves require more time to cook, but that we create more time to eat them. When we create rituals out of pleasure, like we do with holiday foods, we look forward to them that much more. And what could be more comforting than repetition? Even better when a food tradition is specific to a family, because that means it has a singular story that no one else shares. There’s a reason japchae and kalbi make me think of parties as much as a big roast chicken: The return on these dishes is as high as the investment (both physical and emotional), which makes their recipes especially precious. Jean’s kalbi tastes best when it’s been marinated for days (don’t let anyone tell you otherwise). The empanadas take patience (and practice) to fold prettily. The scallion stuffing requires day-old bread that you start drying out the night before. Time is a main ingredient in so much of my family’s cooking, but especially in our festal food.
When it comes to family, time has always been of the essence. Feasts aren’t just about celebrating for the sake of celebrating; they are opportunities to stop and acknowledge the simple act of being alive. In my family, celebrating a birthday is the same as celebrating the day of someone’s passing, as many Koreans do in the form of jesa, an ancestral rite. When mourning a lost loved one, people say to think of it as celebrating the life of that person rather than lamenting their death, but I’d go one step further: Celebrate that you loved someone so much that their loss has created a hole in you. As humans, we like to brush off our scars, but sometimes they’re the only evidence we have left of the people who matter most to us, and the people who will eventually leave us. Even at jesa, there’s food. Nigella Lawson says it best in my favorite book of hers, Feast: “I am not someone who believes that life is sacred, but I know it is very precious. To turn away from that, to act as if living is immaterial, that what you need to sustain life doesn’t count, is torepudiate and diminish the tragedy of the loss of a life.”
Eating, then, can be one way to honor the dead. And therein lies the magic of feasting: spending time on an act that we, the living, often take for granted. Food couldn’t be more of a repudiation of death. It’s an act of the living— and it’s we the living who understand most how precious, and short, life can be.
Aunt Georgia’s Soy Sauce Fried Chicken with Jalapenos from Korean American
1 whole chicken, (3 to 3½ pounds), cut into 10 serving pieces
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 cups potato starch
Vegetable oil
7 large garlic cloves, thinly sliced
3 large jalapeños, thinly sliced
ÂĽ cup packed dark brown sugar
ÂĽ cup soy sauce
1. In a large bowl or resealable plastic bag, add the chicken pieces and season with salt and pepper. Add 1 cup of the potato starch and toss to coat each piece. Remove the chicken pieces and repeat. Add the pieces to the bowl or bag, sprinkle in the remaining 1 cup potato starch and toss to coat each piece again. Set aside on a plate until the starch on the chicken begins to look wet, about 15 minutes.
2. Pour 2 inches oil (enough to cover the chicken pieces while frying) into a large Dutch oven. Heat over medium-high heat to 350°F.
3. Line a plate with paper towels. Working in batches of a few pieces at a time, add the chicken to the hot oil and fry until lightly golden, about 4 minutes per batch. Transfer the fried chicken to the paper towels. Then, fry these same pieces a second time until golden brown, about 8 minutes per batch. Set these twice-fried chicken pieces aside on a wire rack until you’ve double-fried all of the chicken.
4. In a medium skillet, combine ½ cup vegetable oil, the garlic, 2 of the jalapeños, the brown sugar, and soy sauce and set over medium-high heat until it bubbles up. Add a few pieces of the fried chicken to the sauce and use tongs to quickly turn them over in the glaze just until coated. Remove and transfer to a serving platter. Repeat with the remaining chicken.
5. Garnish the fried chicken with the remaining jalapeño slices and serve immediately or at room temperature, when the soy sauce glaze on the outside will be at its crunchiest.
Excerpted from Korean American by Eric Kim. Copyright © 2022 by Eric Kim. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
