Why Rice Reminds Me Of Who I Am
we all have meals –
that remind us of home. Meals that our mothers or fathers cooked as a celebration; the food you ate when you were sick; the comforting dishes that signal childhood nostalgia.
For me, those meals involve rice. It’s become a longstanding joke that our rice supplies become depleted when I arrive home. It’s a rare occurrence in our household when rice isn’t sitting in the rice cooker (and if you’re not cooking rice in a rice cooker, what are you doing?).
The rice in question: short-grained, white rice that comes in 30KG bags from the store in New Malden. It sits in a huge clay urn in our utility room, regularly decanted with a large wooden scoop. It accompanies any variety of meals like mum’s special Korean BBQ chicken (life changing), bulgogi, curries, stews and soups.
If I was sick, I would eat bowls of hot white rice, enriched with soy sauce and sesame oil, scattered with sesame seeds and little squares of salty, crunchy gim (seaweed). It’s still one of my favourite meals to eat when I get home, often accompanied by homemade miyaguk, a garlic seaweed broth littered with hidden morsels of tender beef. There is nothing more comforting – I have about four massive Onken yoghurt pots filled with this soup in my freezer, which I quite literally keep for a rainy day.
Living in Cornwall, I didn’t have a rice cooker (there was no room in the Shed) or access to amazing Korean rice (Cornwall is literally the whitest county in the UK). So whenever I came home to my parents house, I would devour rice for every meal. And I began to wonder if that was a result of my environment – that there was no access to great Asian food because where I lived was so devoid of ethnic diversity.
After a year of living in different countries and being part of different cultural experiences – and in many ways rediscovering my identity as a person of colour (I am half South Korean, half English) – and then returning to Falmouth, I realised that as dreamy as the Cornish lifestyle was, I had been whitewashing my heritage, and that showed up in the food I was eating.
I missed going to Wan Chai, our family’s favourite dim sum restaurant in Chinatown, where you could eat a hundred dumplings (each) and still never pay more than £50; I missed the diversity of food in places where not every single person in the restaurant was white; I missed the smell of my mother’s spice-laden cooking and the comfort of dishes that called me back home.
In short: I missed rice.
I have always felt caught between two halves – never Asian enough, or white enough, and I spent years growing up thinking that to be beautiful was to be blonde, blue eyed, small and ‘perfect’. It informed my relationship with food, and it’s taken a while to find a way back to the comfort of being in my own skin.
I would not dare to compare my experience with what Black people across the world – particularly in America and the UK – have to go through. I’ve spent this past week thinking about how we can do better, learn more, support causes, donate to funds, educate ourselves and confront our own internalised racism. As a non-Black POC, I am committed.
And there is so much work to do.
Cat x
kimchi fried rice.
This is what my mum used to cook for packed lunches at school, always kept hot in an adorable little thermos. I would share it out amongst friends who would smell the spice and salt and immediately abandon their sandwiches in favour of something a little more exotic. Mum would serve this up at birthday parties, and make it for lunch when I came home from university.
Honestly, it will never be as good as Kie-Jo Sarsfield’s, but we can live in hope.
You’ll need:
– cooked rice – not basmati or jasmine, but short-grain white rice
– 1 carrot, chopped and diced
– 1 onion, chopped and diced
– 3-4 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
– 1-2 spring onions, sliced – kimchi (when I can’t get my mum’s kimchi, I go for Cultured Collective’s white miso and turmeric, it’s great)
– ½ cup soy sauce
– sesame oil
– sesame seeds
– bacon lardons
– 1-2 eggs
– 2-3 tbsp neutral oil (I use rapeseed)
Heat the oil in a large, heavy-bottomed pan. Add onion, carrot, garlic and bacon (if using) and fry on a medium heat until softened. Add the rice, flattening and spreading across the pan, turning the heat up and leaving for 5 or so minutes, so the bottom gets crispy. When it starts to sound like it’s browning, turn the heat down then start to mix up the rice. Add the soy sauce and a little sesame oil, then the kimchi. Crack the eggs into a bowl, give it a whisk then pour into the pan. Stir through. Once cooked and crispy, serve in a high sided bowl. Add a little more sesame oil, scatter the sesame seeds and the spring onions.
food stories.
- Please read Melissa Thompson's piece for Vittles on Black Erasure In The Food Industry
– Amid the protests in Minneapolis, Tomme Beevas has turned his restaurant into a hub for protection and supplies.
– I Nearly Went to Prison for Philando Castile. I Closed My Restaurant for George Floyd via Bon Appétit
support and donate.
– support Black people in food – Samin Nosrat posted about who you should know and follow
– call out racism in the food/restaurant industry – read this tweet from Ruby Tandoh on Giles Coren's blatant racist behaviour in his reviews
– donate to racial justice funds – here is a list of lesser known BLM funds compiled by Roundtable Journal
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