The family keeping watch over a 52-year-old pot of soup
wsj.com
wsj.com
If it's still open, it would be going for 130+ years at this point.
ETA: Found it. Established 1895, the year Taiwan was annexed by Japan. It's not soup, it's a meat sauce (滷肉) used on a noodle dish. Scroll down to the middle of the page, which shows the chef with the pot in front of him.
The ingredients are typically finely minced fatty pork with soy sauce and strong flavorings like dried mushroom, garlic, star anise, and a fermented bean sauce that's super salty. Plus other ingredients that make the taste unique to the chef or shop.
I imagine any region with a large Taiwanese or Chinese population will have a restaurant that serves it (or the chinese version gai fan).
The funny thing is, this place got famous a dew years ago, so you now have to wait in line for hours to have this perfectly normal bowl of $2 soup. I didn’t really mind because even if there was no line I’d probably eat here once every 3yrs when I was hungry and happened to be in front of it.
But this is relatively common in Bangkok and actually one of my favorite places was recently headshotted by fame. They serve pad kapow, which domestically is the most commonly eaten and beloved dish amongst Thais. This place managed to elevate the dish without getting snooty about it, reasonably priced, fantastic ingredients, consistent quality, great service, hygienic, and just excellent in all regards. It’s a 10min walk and my wife would go there to eat multiple times a week.
Unfortunately a YouTuber made a video about it and now all of the YouTubers who pass through town make a video about it and there’s a 2hr line at all hours. I’m happy they found success, but also obviously annoyed despite the selfish nature of these feelings.
We now order it for delivery every couple months.
Usually the stuff that goes viral doesn’t bother me- the tourists need to eat somewhere, and living here I have much more ability to find good food than they would, so it kind of works for everyone that they end up concentrated in a few places that I don’t miss.
But I do dearly miss the pad kapow at Gapow Tapae (if you’re passing through Bangkok get there 20min before they open and wait in line, it’s worth it).
Interesting, I go there pretty regularly and while It is well visited, I not once encountered a queue there
I’m probably just exaggerating and remembering selectively.
Sure, the soup is good ... but is it the best they could have after 52 years? By committing to maintaining one pot for so long, they pay the opportunity cost of not being able to explore related long-lived methods. If there's a different recipe that surpasses this one after only one year of simmering, they'll never find it.
At first I thought this might be related to the secretary problem, but of course if after 50 years of recipe B, you have the option of switching back to recipe A if it's better.
Maybe related questions:
- if you have the resources to run just one online learning model, but can't stash/restore state to just continue a prior model where you left off, how do you find the best online-learned model?
- you have space in your garden for only one large fruit tree. You have an heirloom apple tree currently and it produces decent but not amazing fruit. How do you choose whether to replace with something else, given that a replacement may take years to develop the root system needed to be really productive?
- (more loosely) you're in career track X and have advanced over years, the work is ok but could be better. How should you decide whether to retrain as something different?
I guess you've been doing this for a while, and presumably it's been working, plus I know that historically this is how people lived. But be aware it's not risk free.
A suggestion: A pressure cooker - not for the pressure, but because they can be sealed. Heat the food, then let it cool without opening it. Kind of a less secure form of canning.
Ive learned leaving soup out and reboiling is fairly common in some cultures which is unfortunate. Bacteria rapidly multiplies at room temperature around the world (well, maybe not antarctica).
I know next to nothing about chemistry or biology but I do cook a lot of food, and quite often have leftovers.
After many years in Germany, I got into the habit of leaving food out, and that would mostly be fine. Very rarely would food spoil, at least from a culinary perspective (I'm not disputing the presence of bacteria or harm of its waste).
However after even a few months in Taiwan I learned that this strategy is basically impossible: food left outside spoils within hours.
Given I originally come from a country that is warmer, but much dryer than Taiwan, where food doesn't spoil if left out nearly as fast, I do believe it has to do more with humidity than with temperature.
But yes I'm mostly in a dry environment doing this, I haven't tried it anywhere that was warm and humid at the same time.
It helps a lot to not seal the leftovers but let them have airflow and dry out on the surface. Sealed containers with moisture in them get nasty much faster.
If your immune system becomes suppressed or you become injured, then you're skating on very thin ice.
We've known this for a very long time. There's a reason refrigerators are popular.
And yet, this was common before the electric fridge. I've lived without a fridge for years and the amount of food I ate after being left out overnight would give americans a stroke.
Pork is especially fine if it is properly packaged... That is part of what 'curing meat' is all about.
Most people that brought lunch or dinner to work or school prior to maybe the 1990s thought nothing much of unrefrigerated food being eaten several hours later. Laborers still often do. So do kids.
And tuna at room temperature is surprisingly good (as long as it is not rotten, or the temperature isn't too high). I mean tuna salad, although sushi is served just barely below room temperature.
I remember in grade school taking thermoses of soup for lunch, though I would never do this as an adult (and not only because it was disgustingly lukewarm five hours later).
I wouldn't do it in this weather though.
Could perpetual stews over decades act in the same manner?
Actual customer reviews are less gushing than the WSJ article....
More often than not I have a great experience in restaurants with 2-3 out of 5 in ratings, and shit experiences with restaurants with 4-5/5 ratings, I've simply stopped reading reviews at all, anything with numbers on the internet is basically fuddled with nowadays.
This is the way. If I'm traveling I consider Tripadvisor's top lists as things to avoid, and don't use the site otherwise. Bangkok in particular, you can basically walk blindfolded and you'll run into amazing food.
If you want to wait in line for something actually worth waiting for: https://maps.app.goo.gl/GodS2ozgTYR1K4kGA?g_st=ic
I always get the pad kapow with half crispy pork and their sour pork soup. My wife gets the pad kapow with glass noodle. Their spice levels are accurately described. If you are not tolerant to spice, definitely get one of the lower levels, they aren’t over the top and the dish does need some chili.
Also, feel free to get in touch for more places to go and things to do (lived here for over a decade): firstname.lastname at gmail.
Poor families do it to cheaply make long lasting meals.
My late maternal grandmother used to have a pot of forever soup on the stove, and she would put whatever she had on hand in.
Spare ribs, check. Leftover veg, check. McDonalds fries, gross, but check.
Of course, my grandmother was a farmer all her life before I was born, so she was always making far too much food (nobody ever left hungry was a mark of pride) but it took some growing up before I really contemplated the kind of life that joke would have come from.
And yes, always had soup going.
I do wonder if there’s some pluralistic ignorance going on, where travelers convince themselves it must be amazing because everyone else seems to think so.
It didn't give off the vibe of years of collected flavors; it was a thin broth and it didn't taste like much else other than beef broth from a fancy instant noodle packet and a ton of MSG (and to be clear, I'm normally a proponent of MSG but it genuinely was overdone here).
Maybe it really is just the volume that they're going through that's affecting the taste and composition, because they were doing decent business, but this was the biggest disappointment on my short visit to Bangkok.
I would eat it out of respect for the craft and the values that are being preserved.
[1] https://www.seriouseats.com/the-best-slow-cooked-italian-ame...
> Aren’t Italian Americans just regular Italians
No. The term generally refers to a groups of people descended from Italian immigrants who formed their own culture in America that blended regional Italian languages and cuisines with local American ingredients, language and customs. The big pot of red sauce in question doesn't exist in Italy, it's an invention of early 20th century Italian immigrants to the US.
It is typically the custom of Americans to hyphenate our ethnicity and claim descent from some European country or another. (Or African or Asian, or wherever the family had migrated from.)
Indeed, an Italian-American is not a "regular Italian" because they enjoy neither citizenship nor residence in that sovereign territory. Italian-American cuisine is also unique, and distinct from "regular Italian" cuisine. Sure, they draw a lot of ideas from the Old Country, but c'mon: tomatoes originated in the Americas!
I could be known as an "Irish-American" but really, I was adopted by a non-Irish family, and the Irish clergy/religious who educated me were fully inculturated into the United States, so we learned a patriotism for our homeland, along with a very American faith and culture, and not a futile nostalgia for some long-lost European territory. There was not a trace of Celtic spirituality or "Irish Republican rebellion" taught to me or my classmates.
I do appreciate Irish culture from afar, and I enjoy the St. Patrick's Day festivities that are not drunken orgies, but I am constantly reminded that I was never "Irish" and I do not derive my identity from hyphenating such things.
> but c'mon: tomatoes originated in the Americas!
Yes. But they were brought to Europe like right after Columbus landed and have been part of Italian and European cooking for longer than the US has existed. So you only sort of have a point here. (Same for corn, eg. polenta )
I mean, tomatoes are definitely a big part of Italian cuisine, despite any differences that American Italians introduced to the menu.
[1] https://www.seriouseats.com/the-best-slow-cooked-italian-ame...
Oh, you mean the flavoring!