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| "Tofu With Soy Sauce And Carrot" by Chris 73 (see end of post for full attribution) |
To Fu, or Not Tofu?
by Judith Cullen
© 2016
As time passes, our relationships change. I cherish memories of the righteous freedom
of my child and young adulthood, when my head was still filled with questions
of "how" and "why" instead of bearing the time-inflicted
patina of doubt. Yet, every now and again I surprise myself. I find myself
embracing something new in a new way, and I feel that young excitement again. Today it was tofu.
I was introduced to the curd in the 1970s. Back in those
times buying lettuce in the produce section, a single side of an aisle and not
even a full one, meant purchasing the sphere of green known as iceberg. There were no other options. Since there were Caesar Salads there had to
have been romaine, and I am sure there were gardens bountiful with green leaf varietals,
and red. They might have even existed in
my little fenced-yard of the world. I
just didn't know about them. They were not a part of my formative gastronomic
experiences.
One day there appeared in our produce aisle a white mass of
something encased in a plastic container.
With typical childlike directness I pointed at it and said, "What
is THAT?" in a volume that would penetrate a crowded football
stadium. My Mom answered off-handedly,
"That's bean curd" in the same tone she might use to describe the
wash water after you had scrubbed the
kitchen floor. I was perplexed. How would you curd a bean, and why? Mom would
not speak of it further. It was clear
that she did not consider it real food.
My future relationship with tofu was defined by that moment. As a newly minted professional, I remember
meeting a couple who were vegetarians and ate tofu. The "he" of the
couple especially enjoyed quipping us carnivores about tofu "weenies"
in an attempted double entendre. I just could not understand how something that
looked like a primary school glue bottle experiment could be tasty, much less
nutritious. But it is a big global
table, and there should be a place for everyone. So I let the tofu lovers have their place
without derision or condescension. They
were welcome to my portion of bean curd.
Yet, as we know, with the passing of time can come many transformations.
What once seemed an inviolate reality
can alter, the only constant in a dynamic universe being change. Recently, I went into a new local eatery and
was fascinated to try a new spin on hash.
Now, I know and you know that "hash" is in truth an approach
to preparation, like poaching or broiling.
You take all sorts of bits of stuff and you chop them up small, then you
fry them up in a skillet. Most people
think of meat and potatoes hash, though when we were little Mom would often put
all the leftovers of a pot roast in the meat grinder for homemade hash. So we would have carrots and bits of onion in
ours.
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| "Tofu Cooked Chinese Style" by Andrew Lih (see end of post for full attribution) |
This hash had different things in its base, so I was intrigued. There were carrots, and sweet peppers. It all sounded very interesting, so I ordered
it. It was delicious. It had been fried with some generous bits of
stalk-y parsley, but once I picked those out it was quite delicious. I forked a particularly savory cube of
seasoned something into my mouth and thought, "That's really good. What is it?" I swallowed and the realization washed over
me, and I urgently asked the neighboring table if I could look at one of their menus
for a moment. Sure enough, that savory
bit was tofu.
Just within the last week I was at a local specialty store
and found myself excited that they had Thai style salad rolls in the prepared
foods cooler. I love salad rolls! Doesn't matter whether it is chicken or
shrimp, with a quantity of decent peanut sauce I will schlump down a mess of
salad rolls, and happily lick my fingers afterward. The options in the cooler were shrimp, or
tofu. Now, I had a long drive across the
county to get home with a few stops to make on the way, and it was an
oppressively hot day. We've all heard
stories about deadly shrimp consumption.
I decided, with a slight reluctance, to play it safe and purchase the
tofu rolls. They turned out to be
delicious.
It's a small victory, I think, changing my perspective on
tofu. It gives me hope that I might not
be getting rigid in my middle age - or maybe quite as rigid. After all, I am not yet giving up my love of
meats. But I am willing to partake of a
new taste, prepared in an enticing manner.
I am sure that tofu has come a long way in America 's ever adaptive cuisine in
the decades since that first encounter with it: nestled there, almost embarrassed,
at the end of the grocery aisle amidst
the green and the leafy. And me? It seems I have come a long way as well.
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Wikimedia Commons image "Tofu
With Soy Sauce And Carrot" is from the user Chris 73 and is freely available at
//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TofuWithSoySauceAndCarrot.jpg under the creative commons cc-by-sa 3.0 license license.
"Tofu
cooked Chinese style, Beijing ,
China
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