Ethnic fusion on the family table
The preservation of cuisines has to be rooted in day-to-day efforts. This is as true for home-style cooking as it is for gourmet cuisine.
While Taiwan is famous for its food, paradoxically fewer and fewer Taiwanese are actually cooking for themselves. When well-known foodie Wang Hsuan-yi passed away a few years ago, her widower, Jan Hung-tze, recalled that many of the dishes she excelled at and which had become so familiar to him essentially died with her.
“Family recipes are different from the food you see in restaurants. If there’s no one to make them regularly and to pass them down, it can be almost impossible to keep them alive.” This is something that deeply concerns Su Wenwen.
Together with college friend Tao Guihuai, she founded Yuli Common Kitchen, with which the pair have chosen to forge a new trail, harnessing the power of a commercial space to collect and pass along family recipes.
The dish they began with, brined duck with osmanthus, leaves a lingering, fresh flavor in the mouth. They got it from Su’s mother.
It might be a home-cooked recipe, but that doesn’t mean it’s simple. Yuli also prepares other, more gourmet recipes, including well-known Jiangsu and Zhejiang dishes like Suzhou-style smoked fish, deep-fried sliced gluten with “four joys” (daylily, black fungus, bamboo shoots, and mushrooms) and ten-ingredient mixed vegetables. However, these weren’t taught to Tao and Su by chefs from high-end restaurants, but rather by Ye-Lin Yueying, widow of the founder of Taipei’s Yun Fu Lou Restaurant.
“They say that back in the day, regulars of Yun Fu Lou would get invited to the Ye household once a year for some home cooking,” says Su. Despite the dishes being labor-intensive, they’re still built around home-style cooking.
The path that led to this way of doing business is, in retrospect, not at all surprising.
A bit over a decade ago, as Su was recovering from an illness, she and Tao decided to begin cooking for themselves. With it much easier to cook for a group, though, she invited a group of friends over, who then started taking turns cooking for everyone.
This group, hailing from a variety of backgrounds, began to share their family recipes, and Su started to realize that every home had its own few specialties.
It was from that rotating roster and open embrace of all kinds of dishes that the recipe for Yuli Common Kitchen grew.
Today, the restaurant’s menu spans dishes from all over Greater China, changing every day but always offering a set meal of four dishes and a soup. This has become the restaurant’s trademark.
Su herself was already no stranger to this kind of sharing of meals from all over. She still remembers how, when she was a little girl, her mother would take some of her brined duck with osmanthus over to the neighbors in the air force dependents’ community a street over and then come back with some freshly made Nanjing food, and how an older neighbor originally from Zhejiang would share her lotus-leaf-wrapped steamed pork with sticky rice with them.
“Even though back in those days people really cared about where your family was from, at the dinner table none of that mattered,” she says.
Food really can be the most straightforward way to bring people together in acceptance and tolerance.
For Huang Wan-ling, each dish comes with memories of learning it from an old chef, and those tales are passed along through the taste buds and to the heart.