white rice and french fries

It was roaming those linoleum-paved aisles where I could have rice and french fries on my plate at the same time – the local Chinese buffet that my family frequented when I was a kid. My game plan for dining there as a child definitely does not align with what I now understand to be the correct buffet strategy: consuming your own weight in seafood and smoked meats until your brain has gone through at least 3 cycles of existential dread. Unfortunately, at that age, I could not resist the siren’s call of the wonderland of carbohydrates available. It was a dream for any chunky Asian American boy. That grotesque abundance, though, is what opened my mind to food combinations that I wasn’t likely to find at home.

White rice and french fries.

The two items next to each other just seem like a natural result of a child’s palate. Bland, plain, and starchy. For me, though, this starchy duo provided a way to satisfy both my Asian and American hungers at the same time. Eating the sticky, lightly chewy rice, paired with the crispy fried potatoes was like satisfying a carnal desire. Textural contrast surely isn’t a unique concept to any one food culture though. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. 

It’s baffling to me that many chefs and food personalities in recent years have built a large part of their brand or identity on the concept of texture – not because the subject isn’t important enough to discuss, but because the rhetoric I often hear from these chefs is that eaters don’t think about texture enough. This is a ridiculous statement to make. The desire for textural food is just as, if not more innate, than the desire for “flavorful” food. People just seem to understand texture. It doesn’t require training of the palate to know the difference between “crunchy” and “soft”. It’s the reason sticking chips inside a squishy white bread sandwich is likely a universal experience for American children. Kids might not understand that they dislike mustard because it’s bitter, acidic, or spicy. What they do understand is that the crunch of their potato chips makes that texturally homogenous, ham and American cheese on white bread more palatable. 

A taste for textural contrast is ubiquitous. What we often fail to consider is that the spectrum for texture is just as complicated and colorful as the spectrum for flavor. The general labels we use to describe the texture of a food are only so useful. Tortilla chips are crunchy. A half-sour pickle is crunchy. Walnuts are crunchy. The issue here is probably made abundantly clear; none of the listed foods actually have the same texture. If I were to eat these three foods at once (weird, but not gross?) the resulting bite would undoubtedly have a high degree of textural contrast. Yet, they’re all “crunchy”? We run into similar problems when discussing flavor, but it all just serves to highlight the limitations our language has in describing these complex experiences. Earthy, herbaceous, bright, warm – these words put us into the same corners. All this is to say that the textures found in our food are just as complex and varied as the flavors.

Upon this realization, the Asian American experience seems to dive deeper into the world of texture. Food cultures around the world gravitate towards different textures. As Americans, we love crunchy and crispy foods. We want the bottom of our pizzas to be crisp and our vegetables crunchy. We also generally like foods that are soft - bread should be squishy, potatoes should be creamy, and meat should be meltingly tender. If a cut of beef is “chewy”, the American palate doesn’t want it. Foods that might be described as “smooth” or “slippery” are also a big turn-off. It’s a miracle that sushi and raw fish have made their way to the American mainstream (and this explains why it still isn’t a favorite for many individuals). 

However, the textures renounced as generally undesirable in American food culture are often celebrated across Asian food cultures. Rice is sticky and chewy, or even bouncy in forms such as mochi or tteok. Meats are often cooked to retain their texture – the juicy, chewable fat in a hunk of pork belly something to be celebrated, not rendered until crispy. The slipperiness of silken tofu, the rubberiness of chicken cartilage, or the unique springiness of the highly emulsified beef meatballs found in Southeast Asian soups. These are the textures I grew up eating and loving alongside those soft peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and crunchy chicken tenders with crispy fries – American/Western-forward textures that were less common in my Vietnamese mother’s cooking.

Combining the texture palates of America (and its associated Western European influence) with those of Asia, a staggering number of different food textures have their boxes checked. It is this ultrawide exposure to the texture spectrum that I believe is indicative of the Asian American eating experience. It’s the reason a bowl of soft congee doesn’t always leave my mouth feeling satisfied. The reason I’d much eat a tender filet mignon with a bowl of fluffy, sticky rice instead of creamy mashed potatoes. The reason I’d be excited to have crispy french fries on my plate next to my white rice.