5 Questions with Lee Tran Lam
by Marina Sano Litchfield
Lee Tran Lam’s audio and editing work challenges preconceived notions of the Australian food landscape. In her new podcast, the Culinary Archive Podcast, she dives into Australia’s food history.
NO.1
Firstly, congratulations on your new podcast! It’s always so refreshing to see more projects aiming to diversify the content in our media consumption. You were also able to bring on board so many incredible people doing this work alongside you. How did you find this collaborative process?
Thanks so much! The best thing about doing a podcast is sharing a mic with other people and it was fantastic to be able to ask Ferments Lab chef Darwin Su about his experiences growing up in Indonesia, eating tempeh wrapped in banana leaves, and how this national staple changed around the country—in Medan, it’s spicier because of the Indian community, while in another city in Java, they'll slow-cook the tempeh in coconut, lemongrass and sweet soy sauce; in another part of Indonesia, they’ll ferment tempeh until it’s black and tastes like cheese. He also talked about his soy sauce experiments, like making shoyu out of apricot or porcini mushrooms.
Sava Goto of Tofu Shoten grew up in Japan with a completely different experience of soybeans—in particular, freshly made tofu. So when she came to Australia and missed the Japanese tofu of her birthplace, she made it herself. And she makes so many different variations—from momen (which is semi-firm) to ganmodoki (which are tofu fritters) and she even takes the by-product of tofu (okara) and turns it into miso. She made a really great point in our episode about soybeans, noting how versatile soy is—it can be a meat substitute, you can drink it (as soy milk), it can be a dessert and it can be an oil. It’s pretty incredible. And as I learned from working on the Powerhouse podcast, you can turn soybeans into plastic and there was once a Ford car made out of soy, too!
NO.2
You’ve said before that ‘food is often more than just about being fed’—and it feels like you’ve gone almost directly from this philosophy to your new project exploring the legacies and histories of different food-related objects. Moving away from looking at whole dishes or cuisines, what was it like to deep-dive into the history of certain ingredients?
We used objects in the Powerhouse collection as a jumping point for our episodes, and what inspired our soy episode was simply me typing “tofu” into the Powerhouse collection and seeing what turned up—and what we found was this amazing story. Phyllis Wang, a diplomat’s wife, believed that she would not be able to find tofu once she migrated to Australia, so she dragged a stone quern from Nanking, China, in 1937 so she could make tofu here. Nowadays, you can find so many kinds of tofu in your local supermarket, so it reminds you of how much had to happen for tofu to gain a mainstream presence.
NO.3
It’s been so interesting (a generous term, in some cases) to see the rise of tofu in mainstream popularity over the last few years. Growing up Japanese, I was raised to view tofu as a comforting staple, but also as a food that is deeply embedded in tradition and status. This nuance is something that you don’t often see here — especially in how outside of Asian home-cooking, tofu has become popular simply as a vegetarian alternative. Are there other narratives like this that you’re hoping the series can help to dispel?
Yes, Sava Goto actually talks quite beautifully about this in the podcast. Her grandparents were farmers in the Hyogo prefecture in Japan and each summer, they would serve blanched soybeans they’d grown, seasoned with salt. In Japan, rice is such an important part of the culture, and she said farmers would grow soy in the ridges between the rice fields, for extra income, and people noticed that the fields with soybeans actually grew more rice than the ones without. So, soy—and tofu—was important agriculturally, but also because in Buddhist culture, it was an important meat substitute. Tech start-ups like Impossible Foods have made plant-based meats very popular today, but the tradition of mock meat goes back many centuries, with vegetarian Buddhist monks serving it to meat eaters as an act of hospitality.
NO.4
The new podcast (the Culinary Archive Podcast) relies heavily on the inclusion of and research around historical artefacts. What does it mean to you to be able to interact with these objects, and through the podcast, embed yourself in this archive?
It was fascinating to learn how a single object can tell you so much—for instance, there's a soy sauce jar that was sold in a gold-rush town in NSW in the late 1800s. The store was run by Sat and Amelia Wong, and they were catering to the Chinese miners on Australia’s gold fields. Here’s this amazing detail from the object description: “Between 1864 and 1875 Sat and Amelia sold large quantities of pork, clothing and dry foods to Chinese customers. Like other Chinese stores, they also sold opium which remained legal until 1906.”
NO.5
In your years working in diversifying food media, what are some of the most significant changes that you've seen in this landscape? Are there things that you’re still waiting for or hoping to see?
The Australian food scene is so multicultural, yet media coverage doesn’t always reflect that. I don’t think that’s necessarily out of malice, but just because people are so used to doing things by default that they don’t consider that there are other ways to cover things. For instance, so many local food publications will have an Italian issue, but how many have ever had an Indonesian issue? An Indian issue? Indonesia is our closest neighbour and Indian migrants are the biggest migrant community in Australia—so there are valid reasons for considering this (beyond just the utmost deliciousness of the topic).
I recently saw a publication describing “cheap eats” venues as places you shouldn’t be ashamed of embracing because their prices are so low, while it described “fine dining” venues as examples of mastery—but isn’t there also mastery in tending to a ramen stock that takes hours to develop, or making the fresh ingredients for banh mi? I was hoping we had moved on from “cheap eats” sections as the spots where media value “ethnic” restaurants just for being cheap, but it seems like there’s still a way to go.
When you look at top restaurants lists, do you wonder—could they be more diverse? I saw one that had one (!) Chinese restaurant on it, while featuring about 40 white or European-style restaurants. On the other hand, it’s been gratifying to work on projects like New Voices On Food and also see some writers really embracing how multicultural our food scene is. I really loved David Matthews’ recent Good Weekend review of the newest Chinese Noodle Restaurant outlet—there’s no doubt that thousands of people love this Chinatown institution (and its spin-off restaurants). Probably more people have eaten at the Chinese Noodle Restaurants than at Quay, yet we know so much about Peter Gilmore and no one really knows about the owner of Chinese Noodle Restaurant. So, I loved that David wrote about Xiao Tang Qin, who is originally from China’s Xinjiang region and was a concert violinist before arriving in Australia in 1991. He opened the first Chinese Noodle Restaurant while spending 19-hour days washing dishes and also serenading diners with the violin—and he still busts out a string solo today!
Find out more
The Culinary Archive Podcast is a series from the Powerhouse with food journalist Lee Tran Lam exploring Australia’s foodways—from First Nations food knowledge to new interpretations of museum collection objects, scientific innovation, migration, and the diversity of Australian food. Listen here.