feed reed

a series on memories and food

sexy fish by Celecia Price

Kentucky circa 2003

I had no reason to be scared of Louisiana Hot Sauce. I had seen it in the fridge. Dad ate it all the time atop saltines and bologna. A poor man’s charcuterie. The bottle’s bright primary colors were just colors, and not flavors, up to this point. Over the summer when my siblings and I were very young and both parents worked, we were often under the supervision of babysitters. Our sister Sarah, the eldest, assembled my brother and me in the kitchen for something special. She had that hot sauce in her hands and was very excited to share it with us. I had no reason to be scared. Dad ate it all the time.

“Try it,” Sarah said.

I tilted my head back as she shook the bright red vinegar mixture straight down the hatch. Before the sensation even registered with my tongue she had the youngest, Clay, taking shots of it as well. At this point my 6-year-old tongue was on fire, but I held it together. Despite the searing pain there was something about the sauce I enjoyed. The newness was intense, but pushed me through a threshold of taste. I had only really had salty, sweet and savory. Now I could check “excruciating spice” off my list. Clay, on the other hand, began crying immediately. The crying summoned the babysitter who for some reason left all three of us known fugitives unattended. Clay then vomited on said babysitter. The babysitter saw Sarah with the bottle and pieced together the situation and called our mom, dripping with emesis. I do not remember if the babysitter ever returned. It was a high-turnover position.

Trying new foods as kids is scary. Especially when a loved one pulls a fast one on ya. Our parents do their best to introduce new foods to us, but their best intentions have to compete with the pranks of lunchroom peers and siblings with nefarious intentions. It’s hard to know who to trust when they say try this. It sucks to grow up with feelings of distrust and skepticism around food. It holds us back from new experiences and stunts our health to a degree. I wasted too many years not eating good food because I didn’t believe someone when they said, try it, it tastes good.

Maddie

I moved to Jackson, Wyoming in 2021 and quickly met Maddie, a fellow Southerner. Unbeknownst to us we grew up an hour away from one another. We became close friends because of our shared experience growing up in the South and our love for food. More accurately, a love for what food means in our lives, and the deeply held conviction that preparing a meal for people is our truest act of love. Although we have so much in common, there is one thing that cleaves. Maddie does not like spice. I still love her. She was a picky eater into her college years. I had been an adventurous eater from an early age. My very poorly researched hypothesis has to do with where we grew up and the people around us. Race, class and food are inextricably linked and always will be. My home of Bowling Green, Kentucky in Warren County is an immigrant resettlement site. A by-product of this ethnic diversity is a diverse food culture as migrant families establish economic footing in the restaurant industry. Asian markets are on every corner and authentic mom-and-pop restaurants open on a monthly basis. Our palates differ for so many other social factors and habits. Like how much our parents took us out to eat, their preferences, the accessibility of restaurants, etc. I think my tastes developed quickly because the best thing my picky parents ever made were reservations. And Bowling Green had cheap, diverse restaurants to satisfy our family of five.

Maddie isn’t picky anymore. In college, her friend group showed each other traditional foods from their diverse backgrounds. She recalls her friend Nida taking her to a Pakistani restaurant and really enjoying it. I’m envious of Maddie in that regard, she was able to trust when told to try. We’re now both liberated eaters. Maddie and I went to one of our favorite sushi restaurants for this essay.

Itadakimasu

Kampai opened up in December 2021, around the same time I moved to Jackson. It’s a gorgeous, navy dining room with light wood and gold trim illuminated by natural light from its massive windows. There’s a large bonsai tree in the center and I don’t know if it’s real. I’ve never asked because I like the mystery. The horseshoe shaped bar wraps around the chefs who stand ever so slightly above their patrons. They serve omakase style: the Japanese dining tradition where the chef chooses for you. David was our chef for the night. We tell him we have no preferences or food allergies and relinquish all control. We’d be making no choices off the menu, letting the master guide us through the night.

To brighten the palate, David starts us off with a modest pile of Napa cabbage and heart of palm with a simple vinaigrette and dusting of chili spice. Four simple elements wake up the tongue. There’s no need for the whole kitchen sink and 1,000 calories worth of Paul Newman. And if you don’t like salads because it’s “rabbit food,” or because of some other tired trope, then grow up. The adults are eating. Maddie and I finish and David lets us collect our thoughts before serving the second dish. Gyoza hit the table next. We each had two small pieces of the lightly seared shell stuffed with wagyu and foie gras. How much was I capable of eating? All of them. Not four, not six. But all the restaurant’s stock. Unfortunately, I did not get that opportunity. David watches me house the two I was given. We were both pretty hungry so the introductory dishes went quick with little conversation, but foreplay was over. On to the main event. A lot of raw fish.

Ignorance is bliss, but knowledge is power

Food is weird in that a complicated dish with a lot of ingredients all chopped up and indiscernible can make us feel safe. Like, the less we know the better. It tastes good and I can’t tell what’s in it. On the other hand, food we know too much about might scare us. I can see the fish’s eyes and that it was once alive. A big problem with American food culture is that we are so far detached from the living things that sustain us. Our cheeseburgers had eyes and a face at one point. We get freaked out when we’re reminded of our food’s animalness. I don’t want us to be ignorant of where the food comes from and how it’s lived. I want to know my fish, and I want it raw.

We’ve been conditioned to think raw animal products are bad. Milk, eggs, beef, fish, etc. But some of our tastiest dishes never see the stovetop. Sashimi, tartare, Kibbeh, oysters, even the egg whites in a good whiskey sour. I have studied fermentation sciences and am hyper aware of the writings of Louis Pasteur. The validity and importance of pasteurization are not lost on me and I am not a MAHA advocate for raw milk. However, the local dairy makes a raw maple chocolate milk that whispers sweet nothings into my ear and I’ll drink it until the maple chocolate cows quit giving it. I digress.

David serves us my favorite dish of the night. It’s a flight of fish. Four small plates have four cuts of fish in ascending fattiness. The first was Tai, a Sea Bream. Maddie and I take the small translucent bites and interrogate its texture. The bream isn’t flaky nor lean like an akami cut of tuna that’s close to the spine. I loved the sea bream for the same reasons I like motel mattresses. It wasn’t too soft and wasn’t too firm. I am also workshopping new metaphors.

The next three pieces were aptly described as tuna, medium fat tuna, and fatty tuna. The leanest piece, akami, had a gorgeous, purple-red hue. It’s a cut of fish that even my meat-and-potatoes dad would love, and that man cannot describe the difference between a craisin and a leek. I know that because it is a real question I’ve asked him in real life. The chutoro, medium fatty tuna, was my favorite of the night. Somehow this cold fish warmed the mouth. It was perfectly balanced. Lastly was otoro, the fatty tuna. The light pink fish fell apart traveling from plate to mouth. It was deliciously soft and to use the dumbest cliche in the book, it melted like butter on our tongues. Maddie and I took each silver dollar sized cut slowly. David recommended we forgo soy sauce and wasabi. It’s easy to fall into the trap of dressings, sauces and supplements. There’s nothing wrong with saucing things up, but it’s important to peel back the layers of a dish and appreciate the thing for what it is.

Back in the South when I was a kid, my mom tried to show us okra. If done wrong, this slimy fibrous vegetable can be disgusting. The odds were stacked against her. However, deep fry some okra and slap some ketchup on it and your six-year-old is good to go. Everything tastes good when you have a flavor buffer of batter and ketchup. As I grew up and began cooking more, I began to peel back those layers. Sauces became less and less. Frying turned into pickling. The okra became what it was supposed to be. Just okra. Sashimi is fish in its best form. There are no buffers or layers hiding the flavor of the fish. The tuna’s richness comes down to the balance of fat and muscle and nothing more. The sashimi David served us was raw, untainted, and remarkable for its simplicity. I also did not have to look in its eyes.

Spice: My love for it; Maddie’s aversion to it

David has been crushing it. Each dish he served took us to different parts of the palate. Some pieces are chilled and finish with citrus notes. Others are lightly seared and umami flavors linger on the center tongue. He’s our tour guide, showing us the best spots in town. David’s biggest challenge of the night is taking us up spice mountain and bringing us back home safely. He delivers two pieces of nigiri topped with pea sized portions of wasabi. The wasabi wasn’t diluted with soy sauce or covered up by another sugary drizzle. It was front and center on the piece, and in our noses.

Wasabi gets its spiciness from a thing called isothiocynate. In contrast, peppers and other fruiting vegetables are spicy because of a different thing called capsaicin. Isothiocynates are water soluble and capsaicin is not. Your saliva, fats in the food, and your glass of water help whisk away the potent wasabi sensation. Pepper related spice is much more difficult to escape because it isn’t water soluble. I know this because on Thanksgiving of 2019 I ate a Carolina Reaper for the first time. My ex-girlfriend’s mom had a boyfriend who looked like Anton Chi

gurh, and served me a pepper just as uselessly evil. He loved to grow peppers. Anton gave me a wrinkly, deep red pepper and told me to “try it.” I knew it was going to suck but I will do anything for the bit. He and I shoved the little gremlins in our mouths. I knew my best bet was to swallow it whole to avoid smashing up the seeds and releasing all the oils from the pepper itself. For some reason he elected to chew and unleash hell onto his tongue, lips and esophagus. Water did not help our situation and neither did Anton’s shots of tequila. I still do not understand why Jose Cuervo was his Plan B. I guess if you’re going through hell, keep going.

Maddie and I take the nigiri and cheers it like a shot of tequila. Our eyes widen as the wasabi spreads through the roof of our mouths, but before we can register the sensation, the spice disappears behind the rich fat of the fish and subtle starchiness of the rice. David not only controlled our menu, but the fleeting seconds of flavor within each piece. Maddie and I relished in the final pieces of the night. King salmon, golden light snapper, sea bass, black cod and eel. In true Reed-and-Maddie fashion, we wrapped up the evening with ice cream. A green tea soft serve with whiskey caramel and cocoa nibs. I’d later get a text from Maddie close to midnight informing me that the green tea ice cream may have contained actual caffeinated green tea. I was asleep.

“Exploration can’t happen until you’re ready,”

Maddie said. There’s a lot of words on Kampai’s menu I don’t know. But I do know omakase. I know to entrust. Maddie encapsulates our whole night with a simple story about her older brother. He came to visit Jackson and she introduced him to her favorite butter chicken curry. He is also a pretty straight shooter when it comes to food, but he loved the curry. He loved it so much he found a recipe online and started making it at home. He makes it for his little daughter. He’s a regular at his local Indian restaurant now. We stand to gain so much when we just try it. Enriching our lives through food requires us to trust. From masters of the craft like David, to college friends like Maddie’s, and yes, even our sisters.

Thank you for reading Feed Reed. Thank you to my highly paid, genius creative team, Garrett, for coming up with the title. Thank you to Hannah Smothers for your guidance and editing. Thank you to Maddie for your thoughtfulness and endless support. And my deepest gratitude to Dan at Kampai for providing us the exceptional meal and giving this first essay a chance. Now go make a reservation.