On the power of noodles

Eat them often.

You are either a rice person or a noodle person. Don’t get me wrong, I love rice. I love rice with family meals, Cantonese barbecue and it is my preferred vehicle to sop up any flavour left lying around, but my heart belongs to noodles.

When I was a kid (I don’t remember the age, but it was when my sister was old enough to have friends and I was still too shy to speak English) my dad would pick me up from school once a week and we’d go to his friend’s Chinese restaurant in St Albans. Every week they’d ask me what I would want to eat and I would be too shy to ask for anything. I know, imagine a world where I was shy. Blame the bowl cut- it does things to your soul. Really, it was a script we would all stick to so my dad could order what he wanted to eat once a week and it was almost always beef chow fun.

It’s a simple dish of beef and flat rice noodles, which means it is really easy to fuck up. It’s one of the major tests of a good Cantonese cook because you don’t have a million ingredients to hide behind. The beef must be marinated, perfectly cooked and tender. The rice noodles must take on wok hei without breaking up- they can’t be oily or too dry and the beansprouts must still be fresh and crunchy without affecting the temperature of the rest of the dish. I didn’t know it then, but sharing a plate of these noodles with my dad once a week wasn’t just bonding, he was basically training my palate to be exactly like his so whenever we would have the option of ordering anything, it would always be the two of us against everyone else. It pays to have someone to back up your food choices when you come from a large family with diverse tastes. (Just so you know, if my cousin, my dad, my grandfather and I are all sitting at the same table, you will lose.)

It only occurred to me today, but I have a preference for rice noodles over wheat noodles because of geography. Rice is the staple of Hong Kong, so whenever my dad would make noodles, he would serve rice-based ones. Wheat doesn’t grow well in Southern China, so we’d really only have it with won ton noodles, under ginger and spring onion crab or deep-fried, covered in a gravy-based noodle topping (think seafood or pork threads with beansprouts). Well, if I think about it, we’d also have macaroni noodle soup, but that’s a cha chaan teng thing that I don’t think would go down well with anyone who wasn’t raised on it.

At home, because it’s difficult to get a wok to the right temperature to stir-fry noodles (it can be done, but having an outside wok station while raising chickens in the backyard is not a good idea), we would mostly have soup-based noodles. Now, I cannot stress this enough, I believe the broth is eighty per cent of the dish. When I see recipes in white people magazines saying you can buy a tetra pack of stock from the supermarket and dump a bunch of random shit in it with crappy noodles, I pity the person who follows the recipe. Anyone who makes soup noodles at home knows it is about finding the right bones from an array of animals (sorry, not sorry), blanching and simmering for long enough, choosing the right dried seafood to bring out some sweetness (if applicable), making toppings that highlight the complex delicacy of the broth, choosing the correct noodles for the dish and cooking them in a separate pot of water without salt (that means not in the broth, you heathens!). When it comes down to eating it, you can’t start talking about politics or gossip about that one dumb uncle who married into the family or your noodles will overcook in the bowl. Just shut up, eat, and give your bowl of noodles the respect it deserves. It’s going to be five minutes of your life where you don’t say anything. Think of it as a good discipline.

Unfortunately, because I am my father’s daughter, I am unable to cook soup noodles in conservative batches. I will always, somehow, fill the entire twenty-litre stockpot and I don’t have enough stomach or freezer space to justify it until we are allowed to have more than twenty people in our homes at any time. This is why I love going out for soup noodles. Sadly, a lot of people just consider a bowl of noodles a hangover cure because of the broth, but I consider it a luxury because all the hard work has been done for you. For under fifteen dollars, you have a beautifully balanced broth that you didn’t have to select, blanch, scrub or strain with perfect toppings (hey, these family restaurants make these dishes every single day) and silky noodles.

Now, I can’t believe I have to say this but taste your fucking broth before you start adding shit to it. When I see people dump spoonfuls of chilli, ask for citrus, shake soy or fish sauce onto their bowls before having a sip of the soup, I want to grab them and say it’s the equivalent of salting your Sunday roast before tasting it. It’s just rude.

When we were in lockdown, I didn’t have the heart to grab soup noodles takeaway because there is a sense of pride attached to the product. Every component of the dish would come in a different plastic container so it could maintain its integrity in the trip from the restaurant to home. I couldn’t justify it. So, while everyone was busy making bookings for wine bars, pubs and trendy venues as soon as the openings of restaurants was announced, I texted my local Isaan, Vietnamese and Cantonese family-run restaurants asking for tables. Every time I have gone up to the counter to pay, someone from the family tears up, tells me they almost didn’t reopen and says they’re happy to be serving their food the way it is meant to be eaten again and they get me right in the feels.

So what have we learned from this newsletter today?
1- Support your favourite, family-run, small businesses. They might feel like they’ve been there forever, but they could disappear tomorrow.
2- Respect your broth.
3- I am a daddy’s girl.

What I’m reading:
I won’t lie to you, fam. Nothing this week. I am uneducated swine.

What I’m watching:
Wisting. Look, if you know anything about me it is that I am completely fascinated by serial killer shit. Make it Scandanavian and you’ve got me hooked.

What I’m eating:
Noodles from everywhere. Snacks from D&K Grocer for the Chow Report. Fried intestines (they’ve changed the recipe and they’re better than ever), salted egg som tum, tom saap with chicken feet and sticky rice from Tom Toon Thai. My woodfire oven arrived so I’ve been dialling in my sourdough pizza base recipe. Pearl meat, scallops and crab noodles (that I wasn’t too proud to pick from its shell) from Flower Drum. Bun Cha Hanoi from Bun Cha Co Dao.

What I feel a moral obligation to share with you:
I honestly admire the tenacity of some good PRs and even though I love making coffee at home, Madeline from Reymond sent me some information on Industry Beans giving away free coffee for a year that I know some of you would be down with. All you need to do is download the app and pick up a coffee. There will be five winners and every coffee you buy in November counts as an entry. Now, how painless was that for me to share with you?

What I’m loving:
Alan Mulvahill recently shared this account on wanky cocktails and the impracticality of them. I LOVE IT.

Want to not-so-subtly tell your friend you want to eat noodles with them?

Were you the friend who has been tapped for noodles?