Documenting Taiwanese cooking with Clarissa Wei
On capturing the food culture of a proud island nation in her book Made in Taiwan.
Lecker Book Club is a monthly feature spotlighting a recently released book within the genre of food writing. As well as a podcast interview with the author, you can find additional content here. As the name suggests, I’d love this to be a conversation. Have you read the book? Are you cooking from it? Let me know in the comments, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
This month the book is Made in Taiwan by
.In Made in Taiwan, Taipei based journalist Clarissa Wei beautifully captures the food and spirit of this proud island nation and truly brings it to life on the page. The book is stunning – you'll read more about the thought and consideration that Clarissa and her team put into how it looks as well as what it says later in this interview – and it examines the current state of Taiwanese food in incredible breadth and depth for me, someone completely new to the food of the country. It's a beautiful and rich education.
It was such a pleasure to meet Clarissa via video chat and talk about this book which involved an astonishing amount of research and recipe development. I'm a big fan of Clarissa's work as a journalist. The podcast series she made with Whetstone Radio Collective, Climate Cuisine, is one of my all time favourite listens and it was so interesting to hear how she approached this book, the subject of which is something hugely personal to her, but one which she wanted to approach journalistically, and write as an act of documentation.
We talked about how missing home through food sometimes takes unexpected, shifting forms, why it was crucial that Made in Taiwan moved away from its original proposal as a quote unquote cozy cookbook and became something deeply political, and also her culinary collaborator on the book, Ivy Chen.
One of the noticeable things about Made In Taiwan is that Clarissa has explicitly credited Ivy on the cover of the book. Often I feel like the work that goes into cookbooks is credited somewhat opaquely, and it was refreshing to see this. Clarissa explain it was really important to her to do this:
“When I was in my early 20s, I was a little bit more hot headed and I would be very upset when I saw cookbooks of writers who would go to a place and spend a week there and then all of a sudden…they're an expert. I really knew that if I ever got the opportunity to do something like that – even though I'm Taiwanese, even though I live in Taiwan – I wanted to give credit as much as possible to the people who gave me these recipes
Because, even though I do talk about myself a little bit in there, I really hope it's not centered around myself. I really wanted this to be a work of journalism and for people to get to know the people of Taiwan and with that I wanted to give people credit, because it's so easy not to give people credit because it's a completely different language And people here wouldn't have complained, but I did not want to be that person.”
Clarissa grew up in LA and went to college in New York. She now lives full time in Taiwan, so I was curious about when she first moved there.
“I was going back and forth between the States and Asia since 2015. And then I got a full time job in Hong Kong in 2018, and that was when I really settled in Asia and my – now husband – boyfriend at that time was in Taiwan. So we were doing long distance and then we settled here full time in 2020.
But when most people hear 2020, and they're like, that's not a lot of time. You've only been there for three years. But not really. Like I really spent a lot of time here since 2015. And before that, my parents would take me here every single year for winter vacation. So I've always had a strong connection to the Island and, you know, in 2020 decided, Hey, I'm actually going to settle down here, start a family and, um, be here in Taiwan as a citizen and resident.”
I think there can be a tendency for cookbooks to lean into cosiness. Maybe that’s a marketing thing, or maybe it’s something about the format that can lead writing into a strangely apolitical space. Something I’d noticed in the run up to the launch of Made In Taiwan was that Clarissa was receiving a lot of, shall we say, strong reactions to the news of the book being published. And I should stress that none of these people had read the book, because it wasn’t even out yet. But they were pissed, and the nature of a lot of their complaints seemed to be the simple fact that it was a book about Taiwanese food, separate from the country’s connection to China. I wanted to ask Clarissa whether this response came as a surprise to her.
“Oh, I mean. I pitched it as much. Actually, the first round of pitching, it was more from that cosy angle that you were talking about. And that was in 2020, right? When COVID was starting and no one really got the urgency.
I think some of the feedback was, Oh, I already have an author on my list who is of Taiwanese heritage. They weren't writing a book about Taiwan, but they were of Taiwanese heritage: conflict of interest. And then by 2021, a series of things had happened: the world started to know more about the pro democracy protests in Hong Kong, there was a huge Stop Asian Hate movement in the United States, and then just more talk about Taiwan, China and Hong Kong.
And then I had revised my proposal to really embrace the urgency of the Taiwanese. story as well, being like, Hey, if we don't talk about this, it might actually be too late in a couple of years time. I immediately got placed with a publisher who understood that vision and that urgency. And I'm really glad that I got to tell this story, or that I was pushed to tell this story through this angle because, you know, while a cosy Taiwanese cookbook that you can curl up with by the fireplace would have been nice, we are in a weird place here in Taiwan and are constantly dealing with existential threats, even though most people might not talk about it on a day to day basis. Food and politics is undeniably intertwined here, even though a lot of people and a lot of my critics say, why do you have to push them together, but you can't divorce them.”
From Tainan-based rapper Gloj’s Lin Family Braised Pork Over Rice, to Clarissa’s mum’s Seafood Congee, and countless friends and other people she’s encountered, Made In Taiwan features the stories and recipes of many people. I asked Clarissa how she came to include them all in the book.
“Going into this, I wanted a very diverse group of people, not just people whose families came here after 1949, which is kind of the dominant perspective in Taiwanese food and English media. And so with that, I sort of tapped into my reporting. While I was writing this cookbook, this was when a lot of things were happening in the political space in Taiwan, and I was shooting documentaries about cross strait tensions and like warplanes coming over, and so through these assignments, I got to know a lot of people, and while I was there, I was like, hey, give me your recipe or tell me about your family's recipe. And then I had a Rolodex of people I could cycle through.
So we have young people, and older people, and from whose families came from different immigration patterns. I was really lucky to have a researcher, I brought on a researcher who helped me get organised and talk to all of these people. And even if people did not give me their recipe per se, I wanted their perspective in it. And there are a couple of recipes like that. So like, the ice cream burrito and the dessert section, that's not their recipe, but I did interview them. I wasn't able to do that for every single dish, but as much as possible, I wanted to talk to a vendor or a chef on the ground and just get a little soundbite in of their voice and what this dish means to them and what makes it special.”
One subchapter of the book, Indigenous Taiwan: The People Before Us, details Clarissa’s experience working and living at the restaurant Dawana in southeastern Taiwan. Dawana is owned and run by Aeles Lrawbalrate, who belongs to the Rukai people, one of 16 officially recognised Austronesia indigienous groups in Taiwan. [Clarissa points out that the term Rukai is a bit simplistic; it was attributed by the former Japanese occupants of Taiwan and is just a broad categorisation for a bunch of tribes with similar linguistic qualities.] I asked Clarissa how she came to meet Aeles and why it was important to include her story in the book.
“So I think a lot of people have heard of the WWOOF programme. It's a programme where you can sign up and then live on a farm and work with someone. So Aeles had put a listing up…and she doesn't necessarily have a farm, the jungle is her farm. She has a restaurant and this was in a period of my time where I was just kind of single and restless, and did not know what to do. And I thought, Hey, going to live with this woman for a month sounds really fun.
And what we did is every morning we would go out in the jungle in the back of her pickup truck and just pick some vegetables. She never called it foraging. It was just like, let's just get some ingredients for the restaurant. And then we would work at her restaurant and then we would go home and she would tell me stories of her upbringing. Her mom was the last shaman of the tribe. Her dad…he actually just passed away at like the age of a hundred or something crazy but he remembers like running in between tribes with like a torch like barefoot to deliver messages which is so surreal.
It's like from a different time and I kind of just it's Became this recorder when I was there and just try to document everything and remember everything. So I knew when I got this book, I wanted to dedicate a subchapter to her stories. But she's so inspirational and there's so many people in Taiwan like her.”
And the recipes that Clarissa included in this subchapter are ones that she remembers making with Aeles in the restaurant.
“Like the sausage, it's with betel nut leaf, which is an ingredient that she keeps on pushing. And so that's the thing with the indigenous people here. They're not necessarily pushing ingredients that are indigenous to Taiwan because there's no market for that. But it's also ingredients that just grow really well here or introduced before….so the betel nut leaf, that's really prominent in Vietnamese cuisine or Thai cuisine. But here in Taiwan, people don't eat it.
There's a stigma around it because it's wrapped around the betel nut. And that's kind of a psychoactive ingredient that gets people high. But it's really nutritious and it grows wild, but people don't eat it. And so Alys has been on this campaign to promote it. So she like puts it in her sausage.
Same with the pigeon pea. I have a recipe for pigeon pea stew that was actually introduced in the Japanese colonial era. And it's such a great ingredient when you're growing it on the farm because it helps enrich the soil. The most majority of Taiwanese people don't cook with it. It's used a lot in India and other parts of Asia.”
This isn’t a book of every day cooking. The recipes are often complicated, involving a lot of time and specific techniques. It’s a serious piece of documentation of Taiwanese food culture right now. But are there any recipes that Clarissa has a particularly close relationship to?
“The one that I always tell people – and that I'm actually making right now in my Instant Pot – is the braised pork belly over rice. Just because it's so simple, but with the Taiwanese diaspora, there's a tendency to overcomplicate it.
I think a lot of people put in a million spices and then they braise it to death and they'll add all of these things. And when I was interviewing the vendor who makes it, he only puts four ingredients. Water, sugar, soy sauce, and shallots.
I added a little bit more. Because his secret is using the leftover braising liquid that they've been using for three generations! So I added a little rice wine, and garlic for complexity. So what really stood out is like how simple a lot of these flavour profiles are and not to overcomplicate things. And with Taiwanese food, what I realise is chefs exercise a lot of restraint in terms of seasoning. And that was something I really struggled with because I'm American and we tend to over salt things.
And when I brought on a bunch of recipe testers as volunteers, a lot of the feedback was….Uh, everything could use a couple grains of salt. But then Ivy's like, but we don't eat like that here in Taiwan. Like everything is very…not salty. And I kind of had to be the middle ground where I was like, okay, let's maybe add a little bit of salt, but not too much.
Basically that was a huge lesson for me that Taiwanese food is very minimal…focus on just the original flavour of the ingredients. So if you source a really beautiful pork belly, you won't need that extra soy sauce or salt or all those spices. And it was a really enlightening lesson for me.”
In the subchapter Why Is Taiwanese Food So Sweet?, Clarissa explores the complicated relationship Taiwan has with sugar. She describes a conversation with Yen Wei, the food stylist on the book, where Yen explains how she makes spring rolls, stir-frying the ingredients inside the roll with nothing but sugar - not even a pinch of salt.
“So things are seasoned sparingly, but with a lot of sugar, which again is…for someone who grew up in the West, it's very confusing at times. And the things have just gotten sweeter and sweeter. But again, that was kind of an internal conflict I had as someone writing a cookbook. It's like, how true do I want to be to the flavours here?
And again, I just went back to, you know, people can read this recipe….taste, like, I really encourage people to just use their taste buds. If it's too sweet, don't put that much sugar. If it's not salty enough, add more salt. But these flavours were guided by Ivy's flavour profile, who has been here for so long and wanted to keep it like that.
I mean, most of it is historical. When we were colonised by the Japanese, Taiwan was the only place where they could have sugarcane plantations. So it just became a really huge part of our economy. I think it was like two thirds of the population, they were sugarcane farmers. So it just became associated with wealth and progress.
You can buy all of these different types of sugar in the, the store, but I can't find coarse sea salt anywhere. It's really fascinating what people prioritise here.”
Wheat doesn’t grow well in Taiwan, and until the Eisenhower administration started a food aid programme in the midst of the Cold War, the main carbs in the Taiwanese diet came from things like rice and sweet potatoes. Clarissa goes into some of the details of this All American Wheat programme in the book, and explains why it was an important part of the story to include.
“So with the wheat, the U.S. had this programme – and it wasn't just with Taiwan. It was in the Cold War. They wanted to win over the favour of a lot of countries and bring them away from communism. So Taiwan just got a billions of dollars of aid, but we also just got a surplus of wheat because the U.S. had produced…and it was a way to get Taiwan to be pro U.S. versus being more sympathetic towards, say, communist causes. And even today, most of our wheat is American.
And that was something I was really confused about when I was recipe developing, because when I first started, I was like, this recipe is not working with my American brand of flour. And why isn't it working? And then when you Google it online, actually most sources say it's because Chinese wheat has a lower protein content. And something about that did not sit right with me because I was like, we don't have Chinese wheat. Like we don't communicate with China like that. Where is this coming from?
So I messaged so many food bloggers and bakers and eventually got a hold of this guy who has a Chinese blog called Brian Cuisine. And he teaches Taiwanese people how to make Western sourdough breads and baguette. And he was like, Oh yeah, I mean, you're completely right. The protein level of wheat in Taiwan and in America is exactly the same. The difference is how they mill it and the additives that they use. And so the water ratio will differ a little bit, but yeah, there was a point where Ivy and I had packets of American flour and Taiwanese flour and we're looking at the protein content and it was the exact same and I could not figure it out.
And even to this day, if you tell me, like, how to change the water ratio, I'm like…I'm not really sure. Our solution was my parents just brought bags of American wheat for me and then Ivy and I just tested it from scratch. It's not like I have a conversion formula in my brain!”
One final note that I wanted to share from my conversation with Clarissa is how the visual aspect of the book ended up a beautiful piece of expression in itself. And that’s something that came about organically through collaboration.
“Something that's fun for a lot of people is [that] I included photography notes. throughout the book. My food stylists were really good at putting in Easter eggs throughout – we worked with museums who donated or lent us their pieces. And so if you flip through the book and you look at the photography notes, you'll notice little tidbits. And I'll say, you know, this plate came from this era and why they use this utensil.
And I hope it's not just informative in the text, but the photos can tell you a little bit more about Taiwan as well. So that's the fun thing that we baked into the book that most people won't be aware of until they get their physical copy.
My stylist and photographer Yen Wei and Ryan Chen, they approach every dish like a scene and every chapter, like a little movie, if you will. So if you actually look through each chapter, every chapter has a different light setting. So the night market one is like very warm. So you'll see all the pictures are very warm. The family style is more bright pastel colours. And so that was, they had their foundation and then they had their props that they would put in.
I would say like 90 percent of these dishes, these props aren't just like random things they found, it's like, they use this pot because this is how the plate that we would eat with at home or this is what you would see at the night market. It's very purposeful, it's very scenic, and I did not ask them to do that, they just did that by themselves. I just had an amazing team and it's incredible that they did that and I learned so much so much from the process.”
Made In Taiwan by Clarissa Wei is out now, published by Simon & Schuster
You can find all the Lecker Book Club picks on my Bookshop.org list.
This interview was edited for clarity and brevity. If you would like to hear a longer, more in depth version of my conversation with Clarissa, click here for the podcast.
You can follow Clarissa Wei on Instagram and you can follow Lecker there too