Crossroads, No. 1: Soleil Ho's Buddig Turkey Slices Over Rice
Snap, pop, Buddig turkey slice
Hi all!
Hope you all had a lovely holiday season and got some much-needed rest with your loved ones. To kick off the new year, I’m (re-)introducing a column from the Dill days that was very near and dear to my heart. It’s interesting to reflect on how certain ways of cooking and eating shape identity. Food, after all, is and continues to be a reflection of our lived experiences, the places we’ve lived in, and the different cultures we’ve been exposed to. I mentioned this earlier in the fall, but I’ve become increasingly fascinated, not just in how second- or third-generation Asians like myself are cooking (taking flavors and dishes we grew up with and making them our own), but also in how the generations before us learned to adapt their way of cooking when they first arrived in a new country—trying to create the foods of their homeland while having to make do while having to make do with the ingredients they have available to them in their new environment. The result becomes a sort of quirky hybrid, in-between cuisine that’s reflective of where they’re from and where they currently live, something simultaneously rooted in tradition and innovation.
All that to say, I’m happy to be unveiling Crossroads, a new column about cooking and eating at the crossroads of multiple cultures. We’ll be talking about dishes crafted from immigrants’ culinary resourcefulness and creativity—weaving stories about making the unfamiliar seem familiar, and discovering how food helps us reckon with the convergence of different identities. For this first installation, I’m excited to be speaking with Soleil Ho, who’s an opinion columnist and cultural critic at the San Francisco Chronicle and writes about gender, race, food policy, and life in the Bay Area. Soleil recalls how their grandmother influenced much of their family’s culinary understanding of Vietnam, but had to re-adjust her approach to cooking upon immigrating to America in the seventies where Asian ingredients weren’t as easily accessible. Read on to learn more about how the culinary ingenuity their grandmother developed as a result paved the way for one of Soleil’s childhood comfort dishes.
After the fall of Saigon in 1975, Soleil’s grandparents fled Vietnam and journeyed to the United States. There, they remained at a refugee camp in Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, for a few months before eventually moving to Freeport, Illinois with their eight children to live with a sponsor. Soleil describes their grandmother as the “main cook” of the family, and though her specialty was Vietnamese food she soon found herself navigating an unfamiliar culinary landscape as a refugee on welfare in suburban Illinois. Her meals became informed by whatever varied, random ingredients she could procure from the church food drive—a can of Spam here, fruit cocktail there, perhaps some sliced bread. She even learned how to make meatloaf from her sponsor, an older German woman.
“The whole family was very confused, but ate [the meatloaf anyway], because obviously that was what they had,” they explain. “That sort of thing makes you learn how limited your palate is, because they were settled in a small town in the middle of Illinois and didn't have the sort of modern access to ingredients that many of us can rely on and just take for granted. And so substitution was just a necessity.”
Soleil’s grandparents would later discover the wealth of Asian grocery stores in Chicago, and occasionally made the 114-mile journey into the city to stock up on Vietnamese essentials like fish sauce, Maggi seasoning, and noodles. Eventually, the meals Soleil’s grandmother made evolved into a kind of hybrid fare that blended the best of Vietnamese flavors with the ingredients she had readily available to her in the Midwest. It was the kind of culinary inventiveness that she continued to maintain, even later on when Soleil was growing up in New York.
“There are certain things that I realized, in retrospect, as being not coastal Vietnamese but instead adaptations, like putting Oscar Mayer braunschweiger on sliced white bread in a substitute for bánh mì,” Soleil recalls. “But there was no judgment, no sense of, ‘this isn’t real.’” This is food, this is what we’re eating. My family was very much informed by their working class situation—I mean, even beyond the working class, right? They didn’t have anything, literally anything when they came to this country. And so, the idea of authenticity wasn’t even on their minds.”
A childhood comfort food that stands out to Soleil is cold cuts over rice: thin slices of turkey—“Buddig brand,” they add, “in those plastic packets that you could slice open”—hand-torn and scattered over a bowl of jasmine rice, finished off with a few drops of Maggi seasoning. It was a quick snack their grandmother threw together for them and their cousins during their grade-school days.
“All of us were picky eaters,” Soleil reflects. “There was a cohort of us that were maybe one, two years apart from each other. During family gatherings, us kids would just eat the spring rolls and nothing else, really. We were catered to however our parents could. The rice with cold cuts was the compromise. It reminds me of the Vietnamese’s tradition of charcuterie that’s been established since French colonialism. If you squint, [this dish is] kind of like rice with chả lụa, which is basically Vietnamese pork bologna.” (Comparing it with chả lụa makes sense, perhaps; Buddig lunch meat is curiously, but also affectionately known for the faint “snap” each slice makes when you bite into it).
And how do you make it? “Two Buddig sheets for a small bowl of rice,” they explain. “Tear them up. A little Maggi goes a long way, about three drops.” Even if this dish is a relic of the past—since then, Soleil has transitioned into enjoying other things like canned fish or beans over rice—it’s still one that’s played a notable role in their Vietnamese-American childhood. “I still do stick with x + rice as a template for a lot of my meals,” they conclude. “[Vietnamese] people are rice people, more or less.”
Serves 1
2 slices of Buddig™ Original Turkey
A small bowl of cooked jasmine rice
Maggi Seasoning, to taste
Roughly tear (by hand) he turkey slices and scatter over the rice. Shake a few drops of Maggi over the rice and serve.