The Dishes Are Done Man
Dinner last night was a Cantonese style braised oxtail. I’m not suddenly going to make this a food blog (or maybe I will, who knows/cares) but wanted to revisit momentarily the earliest attempts at creativity. When I was 16 or so, I would watch Martin Yan’s PBS cooking series Yan Can Cook. His catchphrase, as most everyone knows, was “…and remember, if Yan can cook, so can you!” I don’t know that the phrase necessarily gave me the confidence to begin cooking but I sure was hungry and terribly high all of the time with nothing but frozen burritos to eat. While I didn’t consider cooking at the time a creative endeavor, it certainly became the initial means by which I would attempt to deal with, or even avoid, persistent worry about most things. And besides, eating was better than not eating.
If you’ve ever seen Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead, a coming-of-age tale about Christina Applegate trying to make “much money” (I just watched Do the Right Thing the other night), you’ll possibly remember the character Kenny, her twin brother in the film. Kenny, played by Keith Coogan (grandson of Jackie Coogan), was a bit of an apathetic stoner with few interests other than…hittin’ the reefer. With no one around to feed the five siblings (remember, the babysitter dies), Kenny is seen drooling over a Julia Child episode where she whips up some crêpes suzette. Kenny begins experimenting in the kitchen—first attempts were waffles I believe—until his character progresses into a mature individual, crew cut and all, and attends culinary school, leaving his pot smoking days behind him. Kenny’s development into adulthood was remarkably similar to my experience in the kitchen and life, however, substitute Martin Yan with Julia Child and crêpes suzette with orange chicken.
“The dishes are done man!”
There were much larger things happening in the world in 1995 but I was much too stoned and starved to unfortunately pay any attention to any of it: Selena was killed by Yolanda Saldívar, her manager and fan club president; Mississippi finally ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, 130 years after the amendment was passed by Congress; Yahoo! was incorporated the same year the Unabomber manifesto was published which stated, “…we're too plugged in. We're letting technology take over our lives, willingly;” and OJ Simpson tried on a pair of gloves. All the while, I was simply attempting to go off of my frozen, green chili burrito diet while my parents were busy making ends meet. Enter Martin Yan.
Yan grew up in Guangzhou, China and moved to Hong Kong on his own at the age of thirteen. He began his career as a cook at a family friend’s restaurant where he learned the method of siu mei, or Cantonese style barbecue, and reportedly slept on the kitchen floor after his shifts. After attending culinary schools in Kowloon City and Hong Kong, Yan eventually received a Master of Science in Food Science from the University of California, Davis in 1975. Three years later, Yan was teaching cooking at a college extension program in Calgary—where he had moved after China to continue his studies—and somehow found himself filling in for a cooking show which would eventually become Yan Can Cook for CFAC-TV. Four years later, he moved to San Francisco and continued the show with KQED in 1982. Yan Can Cook has since become an umbrella brand for a number of other projects including nineteen cookbooks, a handful of restaurants (M.Y. China at the Westfield Centre mall in San Francisco sadly closed last year because of COVID-19), a host of shows like Martin Yan's China, Back to Basics, Taste of Vietnam, and a dozen or so more.
I only discovered the show in 1995, seventeen years after it had originally began when Cantonese food, at least in Boston where I grew up, had already been fairly popular. Walking down the streets of Chinatown, Boston, one couldn’t help but salivate over the roast duck, pork, and char siu (barbecued pork) hanging in the windows of any number of siu mei restaurants among the bakeries, dim sum palaces, teahouses, and gift shops, especially if you were on the marijuana. In addition to Yan Can Cook, I received concurrent “cooking lessons” from the parents of two Cantonese friends, one who was a chef in Chinatown, Boston. The first recipe I learned was braised oxtail. The recipe went something like this: brown the oxtail, add lots of beef stock, salt, tons of sliced ginger, braise until done, serve with white rice. Simple.
A year after high school, I attended Johnson & Wales for a limited amount of time until I understood that cooking is damned hard work for very little pay, unless you’re Martin Yan or any other celebrity chef. However, I’ve continued over the years to dabble in the kitchen and to explore cuisines of the world—the easiest way to travel when you’re stuck indoors from global pandemics—especially during the darker days of adult life or when writing, design, or whatever other creative endeavor just wasn’t doing it for me at the moment. I’d love to be able to identify the exact episode I watched that shifted those early years but Martin Yan has recorded 1,500 episodes of Yan Can Cook since 1982 and there is no definitive list, at least not that I can find, of the show. I did, however, find an early episode of Yan making “luscious lemon chicken” (embedded below), which will have to suffice. While I may not be able to carve a chicken in eighteen seconds like Martin Yan, I do keep a fine pantry of items like Sichuan peppercorns, Shaoxing wine, and Chinkiang vinegar thanks be to him. I will also say, he, and Kenny alike, were largely responsible for my final days of smoking the pot.
Contributors to Wikimedia projects. “Martin Yan - Wikipedia.” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 18 Oct. 2003, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Yan.
Krishna, Priya. “The PBS Chef Martin Yan Teaches Chinese Cooking to a New Audience - The New York Times.” The New York Times - Breaking News, US News, World News and Videos, 15 June 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/15/dining/martin-yan.html.
