Netflix series Ugly Delicious, is chef and restaurateur Dave Chang’s intensely frank search for the gritty realities of food development and is an ingenious personal account of his questions about our favorite foods. Season 1 Episode 3 is titled “Cooking at Home” and it begins with David explaining how he’s only just starting to enjoy cooking at home again.
Dave compares his cooking to Escher paintings and Bach fugues, with intertwining narratives of flavor (or dimensions, or musical lines) competing and blending into something so familiar it takes you home – perhaps to a roast chicken your mom makes, even if you aren’t eating roast chicken.
Dave calls this style “Ugly Delicious.” There is no taxonomy for this expansive approach, but the show examines how food and culture and location and memory all influence our creativity and repertoire in the kitchen. He jokes at one point that he learned to put frozen sirloin steaks in the toaster oven from his mother.
He hesitates, though – he leans in and grins with pride that his mother never taught him how to cook some of their favorite home meals but he knew. He knew from watching her over and over.
The “Home Cooking” episode centers on Thanksgiving Dinner. The quintessentially American ideal meal, Thanksgiving dinner can be a comprehensive show of meats and starches, with gravies and savory stuffing, and all the favorite fixings.
Is Memory More Important Than the Process or the Presentation?
Throughout the episode, the narrative digs into what about food makes them what to eat it – or make it! Increasingly, Danish chef Rene Redzepi says, people want something that tastes like home when they get out of the house. People want a brownie for dessert, after a great steak. Familiarity is easier – that doesn’t make it less delicious. But it might make the meal a little more ugly.
Dave agrees – they sit at the Redzepi household. He says that “the thing that can separate a restaurant experience is literally how much someone cares about making THAT food…it has less to do with perfection than I think with intent. The intent is more perfect.”
“The reality is that Good Food is everywhere.” Dave Chang, S1E3 Ugly Delicious
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Dave emphasizes that getting people to buy in to caring is the best part of cooking for others, and it’s what is needed at restaurants – not, perhaps the “glossy” presentations and cuisines, of recent TV and celebrity chefs.
Dave and Rene go back and forth on whether the business or home is the “sanity” of their lives. They laugh hesitantly because the reality for both of them is that one can not exist without the other. Home life and restaurant life are heightened in their shared energies.
“Sacrilicious”
The camera pauses over a bookshelf with book titled “Jewish Soul Food” and then changes to Pulitzer Prize Winning Critic Jonathan Gold, and Author and Radio Host Evan Kleiman. Gold calls a knish “sacrilicious” as they work to knead the dough of the classic Jewish snack.
Memories matter. Kleiman laughs that she’s teaching Gold something in the kitchen. The knish turns out to be “so good” and I as the viewer am there with them tasting it, joking about the size of chef’s home ovens and wishing I could actually smell through the screen.
I think the more you know how to cook, the more adaptable you are
Evan Kleiman, “the fairy Godmother of the LA food scene”
How have you learned to adapt your family’s home-cooking style into your own?
“So much f***ing pain for this f***ing dish.” Dave is back at his parents house, working on mashed potatoes. Perhaps one of our most time-consuming classic American side dishes. And perhaps the most valued in traditional households like mine.
Rene gets excited as he brings out his favorite pana cotta. He relishes the slow spoon digging deep into a jar of some long-aged caramel with prunes to top it off.
“That’s Home Cooking,” declares Dave. He says “perhaps the romantic in me…wants to dream impossible goals. The mean is much higher than before, but… It’s harder to find the titans.”
Family Tradition: Making Candy
Thanksgiving weekend in my family includes candy-making. Not an essential part of the American Thanksgiving meal, but a tradition, an anxiety, a wonderful and productive and chaotic bridge between the four generations crowded around the table, making hand-dipped chocolates with cherries, coconut, peanut butter, and trays of fudge and toffee.
Perhaps most of all, although it is ugly and delicious, it is most of all generous in its helping of care. I watch the smiles on all the faces and wonder at the southern heritage and smothering sugars and butter that means love in this family.
This weekend, all four generations participated, with all types of candy in production at once, cast iron on the stove with butter Browning for toffee, the Indiana University Hoosiers playing for the Old Bucket against Purdue University, winning in double overtime, and two children under four climbing up to the table to help dip candies into steaming chocolate.
Grandma carries another handful-sized chocolate across the room to share it with an in-law, as she did with me when I first came with my wife to Thanksgiving. She says “ain’t that good,” with so much powerful tenderness. The “good” extends for a while and her intonation lifts at the end before a quick “mmm” as she returns to the counter.
It is the best candy I have ever tasted, every year. It is gloriously messy. It is Ugly Delicious. And I want to share it with everybody back home. And I want to bring it to every holiday party.
Thanks, Dave Chang, for the inside look at the way you and yours celebrate love and generosity with your food. Will be finishing the series ASAP.
To the food warriors: Good Food is everywhere. Keep looking for the best, but appreciate what is around you.
Valhalla's Table 