July 2023
Every time I travel I tell myself I’m not going to cook a big thing, I’m going to focus on the writing and dedicate myself to a singular project. But no, that has never happened. Every time I travel I end up squeezing in a pop-up or a catering event or a large dinner for friends. I can’t help myself. I must cook and I must cook in large volumes.
And while it's never really the intention when I travel, I never regret it. In the end, it’s the way I connect the most deeply to a place. A new place becomes dimensional and tangible in a small way when I’m engaging in the local food culture. It’s my magic portal in. It’s also my offering. It’s what I have to give back.
It was long overdue - I had been meaning to do a “thank you” dinner at Pocoapoco since I left the residency in 2019. It was the first organization that took my sprawling and wandering project on Korean-Mexican diaspora seriously. My time there allowed me to play in the mud of early thought and was the incubator for so much of the work I am focused on now.
Pocoapoco was the first place that gave me permission to collapse my food and writing life and call it art. My prior education taught me that we don’t engage with fine art on the domestic level. This just isn’t true in other parts of the world. In the oldest places, art and tradition and functionality all align. In Oaxaca I felt strongly the blurring of craft and fine art. In a place where domestic arts are older and stronger than the history of the U.S. itself, of course traditions of ceramics, textiles, and cuisine are fine arts.
During my time at Pocoapoco we were encouraged to take on a secondary study and I requested to take lessons with Aurelia, the resident cook. Aurelia was and is the heartbeat of Pocoapoco. When asked where her favorite place to eat in Oaxaca is, Residency Coordinator Francesca said, “Here — whenever Aurelia is cooking.” I think that says it all. Cooking with Aurelia helped me understand cooking as a practice. I’m fully aware of how pretentious that sounds but I think there’s real power in words and continually calling my cooking a practice reminds me to treat it as such — a constant drum of curiosity and growth.
For all of this I wanted to cook a meal of gratitude made with local Oaxacan ingredients in a Korean preparation. Two ingredients I’ve come to associate strongly with Oaxacan cuisine are Chepiche and Hoja Santa. Chepiche is a slender leafy herb that tastes like lemon and anise and cilantro. It’s fragrant and bright without being acidic like citrus. At Crudo, a Japanese-Oaxacan concept, they mix finely minced chepiche with their sushi rice and wanted to try this as a Korean-Mexican application. I made 주먹밥 (Jumokbap) with chepiche and cut rounds of steamed red cabbage leaves so they’d be pliable like tortillas for wrapping the rice.
Hoja Santa or Hierba Santa translates to “sacred leaf” or “sacred herb”. Some stories trace the name of the herb to the idea that the Virgin Mary dried laundry on the branches of the plant. But more likely the sacred designation came from the Aztec culinary tradition which used the leaf ritually.
When I first tried Hoja Santa I immediately thought of my favorite 반찬 (banchan), 깻잎 (Kkatip) a soy based perilla leaf pickle. Most Koreans will relate to the memory of someone you love, wrapping hot rice in a perilla leaf and shoving it into your mouth. So much of Korean love is about shoving food into mouths. In our family, we substitute “big feelings” with feeding. Some things don’t have words. In their place, there is a version of care.
I’ve included a recipe below for making Korean Pickled Hoja Santa but I think the real pleasure of this recipe is in the process of coating each leaf in the marinade. It’s such a delicate, careful, tedious process. You have to consider each leaf as you spread the marinade across each leaf without crushing its fragile structure. It’s a slow, loving process.
The day of our gratitude dinner I prepped all day alone in the Pocoapoco kitchen with Lily sleeping nearby in a sun patch with a scooped out watermelon halve as a water bowl. The current residents were either deep in their own study or out exploring Oaxaca. Francesca would arrive in the afternoon to help set-up, Emanuel and guests would arrive at 7. While cooking alone is not a new thing for me, this particular solitude felt like a time capsule. Cooking in the Pocoapoco kitchen 4 years later, in the place where my project started, I could feel the slow creeping weight of this amorphous research project and the space it's taken in my life.
The menu was an accumulation of many small intentional steps up until now. The soy pickled hoja santa was something I tested and fell in love with while in Chiapas last year. The 고추장 gochujang mole was a nod to the recipe Aurelia taught me in that very kitchen. The achiote 쌈장 has become a go-to dish for me. Achiote is a staple ingredient in Mérida where I’ve spent the bulk of my research time and where I first started making this recipe.
When guests arrived they came with homemade mezcal in a Peñafiel liter bottle. I was assured that the best mezcal comes in this DIY carafe style. The kitchen was buzzing with guests arriving, mezcal being poured, new introductions, besos all around. Francesca nearly burned her eyebrows off lighting the pilot on the oven but somehow this was a big deal to no one and we all just kept on.
The Pocoapoco community is small but diverse. Sitting at a table with new people from places I’ve never been felt easy and intimate. I think if you can find a broad commonality among the work of past and present residents, it would be an openness in form. It’s an immediate coven, despite drawing artists in from so many corners of the world. The intimacy, in my estimation, is a product of the city itself. Oaxaca is a city that reveres art in all its forms.
To give an example, when I first arrived in 2019, Francisco Toledo had just passed away. I can’t do justice to Francisco Toledo in this humble space but in short he was an artist, painter, sculptor, activist, and cultural leader. The streets were absolutely lined from corner to corner with memorial flowers. I have never seen an entire city, not necessarily in mourning, but in an act of joyful sending off. It deeply moved me, the wave of that collective gratitude for what this man had accomplished and had given to the city. In Oaxaca, art was always open and fluid in definition. In Oaxaca, art is politics, it’s tradition, it’s the endurance of culture. It defies monetization because it prioritizes the availability of art over exclusivity.
After the cooking was done and I joined the table the conversation turned to common food memories across our many disparate backgrounds. We all understood our ethnic cuisines as defining and othering, all in the same breath. We shared common experiences of being made fun of or being questioned for the foods we ate. We talked about food and memory, their unbreakable and formative link. Our appetites are the memories of our generations past. Why do I crave kimchi? Because hundreds of Chos before me ate kimchi every day. Why are many Asians lactose intolerant? Because dairy was not a major component of our diet. Blood holds memory beyond your body.
To me this dinner was the actualization of what I want my work to be. I want it to treat food like language. I want food to be the vehicle of conversation and memory and sentiment and pleasure. Most of all, pleasure. Your food memory says where you’ve come from and where you’ve gone. It never dilutes the past, it only reconstitutes it in more relevant forms. It’s become the common thesis while working with diasporic communities — the endurance of food memory and the way it tethers us to history and place beyond our own lifetimes.
SOY PICKLED HOJA SANTA
Ingredients
20-30 hoja santa leave (if they are very large, halve them)
1/4 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup water
1/4 cup 고추가루 (Gochugaru)
3 Tablespoons white sugar
2 cloves garlic, finely minced
1/4 onion, very thin long slices
1 tsp minced ginger
1 tsp fish sauce
2 tsp roasted sesame seeds
In a medium sauce pot bring the soy sauce, water, sugar, and ginger to a low boil and then take off the heat and let cool completely
Meanwhile, wash and dry your leave thoroughly
When your soy sauce mixture is completely cool, add your gochugaru, fish sauce, sesame seeds, garlic, and onion. The mixture should be paste like but loose enough to spread
Coat each leaf one by one with the sauce and lay flat in clean tupperware
Layer each leaf on top of one another and press down every few leaves to get rid of air pockets
If there is remaining sauce, pour over the top
Let marinate overnight and this pickle is ready to eat
SPECIAL THANKS
Thank you to GYOPO for helping fund this dinner for Pocoapoco and supporting my research in Mexico. Special special thanks to Ellie Lee for helping give shape to my curiosity and sharing interest in Korean diaspora not only in the U.S. but abroad.
Thank you to Emanuel Hahn for being a part of this project and documenting it all with his immense talent.