It happened that an old friend of mine I hadn’t seen for nearly a decade was in Moscow the same week I was. And so my last day in the city was spent mostly in his company, with a short break between our Uzbek lunch at Tamerlane and Franco-Russian dinner at Jean-Jacques (yes, the same Jean-Jacques that has lately been raided by the police and is one of the preferred hangouts of Russia’s middle-class opposition movement; as for “Franco-Russian cuisine,” well, think cod brandade with dill in it) to permit my husband and me to stumble to Novodevichy Convent and back. Our epic reunion saw to it that I got about two hours of sleep before leaving for the airport, and maybe half that in the course of the ten-hour flight, so that by the time we touched down in JFK I was starting to think that maybe this whole “celebrity exhaustion” thing and the associated hospital stays weren’t completely, entirely frivolous after all.

That said, I survived the ordeal without the aid of an IV drip, and was my regular self again after a day or two, but it was short-lived. Within hours of my resurrection, I received an invitation that any other day of the year I would have accepted without hesitation, but on this one felt like some kind of cosmic harassment: Would I like to accompany X. to Brasserie Pushkin? That very night?

One of the last things my Muscovite friend said to me on the eve of my departure, or at least one of the last things I remember him saying, was that Moscow’s celebrated Cafe Pushkin had just opened a branch in my own city, and I simply had to try it. Now, unless my husband happens to surprise me, as he did this past Valentine’s Day, by whisking me off to Caviar Russe, I don’t make a habit of dining à la russe above 50th Street–but it didn’t seem important to explain this to my friend. I promised that I would, and settled it with a clinking of glasses. And here I was, 48 hours later, weighing serendipity against cirrhosis. Of course, I knew what I had to do.

The meal at Brasserie Pushkin isn’t really mine to write about, so I won’t. All I’ll say is that it wasn’t very good. But I was tempted as I was leaving by a gold-dusted pryanik, and am relieved to report that Pushkin’s pâtisserie is doing a better job than the hot kitchen.

This pryanik is kind of a big deal; allow me to explain. While I was in Moscow, another friend had urged me to visit Tula, about three hours by train outside the city and home to two important things: (1) Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s country estate, and (2) the toponymous tea-time confection known as the “Tulsky pryanik.” Everyone knows all about Tolstoy, of course, but the tea-cake isn’t well-known outside of Russia. (I hadn’t heard of it myself.) It turns out that Tula’s pryanik–there are many pryaniks–is a sort of gingerbread pocket with a condensed milk filling, notable for its intricate embossed patterns. Back home, they look like this:

Brasserie Pushkin’s version, as you can see, is a little more fantastical. Instead of the traditional sugar glaze, they’ve used edible gold dust, and the surface is raised in flourishes and ferns. But it still has that condensed milk filling, something like a tart dulce de leche, and made a lovely breakfast the next morning with strong, milky tea.

The thing is, I never made it to Tula. (After seven years, my Russian still works for some things, but, coward that I am, I didn’t fancy investigating whether missing the last commuter train back to Moscow and getting stranded overnight in a town with no tourist infrastructure was one of them. My husband, who can just about say the words for “beer” and “please,” could have lent only moral support.) While I remained in Moscow, I told myself that there was still time to pop into GUM, the historic department store on Red Square, and pick up a souvenir pryanik, but then vodka happened, and I never made it back there either.

I think it’s pretty wonderful that fate made sure I got my pryanik anyhow. You know how I know it was fate? As I was riding the 2 train to the brasserie, the woman sitting next to me was reading War and Peace on her iPhone. This is a true story.

No milk today, my love has gone away
The bottle stands forlorn, a symbol of the dawn
No milk today, it seems a common sight
But people passing by, they don’t know the reason why
How could they know just what this message means
The end of all my hopes, the end of all my dreams 

Richard Harris’s “MacArthur Park”:

Someone left the cake out in the rain
And I don’t think that I can take it
‘Cause it took so long to bake it
And I’ll never have the recipe again
Oh no 

I know what you’re going to say: that these are “metaphors.” Well, they are not good ones.

Why, it’s Lee Kum Kee’s iconic oyster sauce bottle, only redone with a silhouette of Mickey Mouse’s head.

Apparently Disney is now licensing–and there’s no particularly succinct way of putting this, so prepare yourselves–ready-to-assemble miniature tableaux of our favorite animated characters participating in a range of Hong Kong gastronomic traditions.

I give you…Mickey’s Magical Noodle Shop:

Here it is, still in the package:

Not to be left out, here’s Minnie presiding over a Chinese New Year feast:

Meanwhile, Donald is running a bo dzai faan (clay pot rice) joint:

Can you spot all the Mickey motifs? There’s some serious attention to detail here; check out the Mickey shaped knob on top of the lacquer candy chest:

The play sets are sold by a store in Hong Kong (from which I’ve purchased an embarrassing number of pointless items, though none quite so pointless as these, which go for about US$60) called Mimo, and possibly at Hong Kong Disneyland, too. Honestly, I’d be prepared to blow, say, four bucks, but just for the bottle of oyster sauce.

Well, this, which I recently discovered in my local Pathmark, isn’t that.

This contains “beef extract, iron, caramel, wine and special flavourings to reenergize and remove the dullness from your life.”

Remove the dullness! Oh, I love this. The wording reminds me of those Slap Chop infomercials that were making the rounds a few years back. (The Slap Chop is a kind of domed chopping device aimed at people with no fine motor skills, or something.) “This tuna looks boring. Stop having a boring tuna, stop having a boring life.”

(1.) Pan-fried loh bak gow, or Chinese daikon cake. Made from grated daikon and rice flour, and studded with goodies like dried shiitakes, tiny dried shrimp, and fragrant Chinese sausage, it undergoes a preliminary steaming before being seared in slabs and served with oyster sauce. It’s super-laborious but not difficult per se. This is the second year I’ve been making my own, and I think I might have cracked the code.

(2.) Pussy willows, and (3.) A lacquered “treasure chest” filled with the best candies, to usher in a sweet new year.

I posted about this simple dish, my goodness, nearly two years ago. I still love it, and I still make it all the time. In fact, I made two shanks this very week, and my husband has been getting some champion bentos out of them.

I have nothing to add to my original post, really, other than this photo, which I took on a whim the other day because I thought the meat jelly was so pretty. There’s so much gelatin in the shanks, even these boneless ones, that the simmering liquid sets into a beautiful aspic.

“My own wife made them,” he had pleaded, but the officer was unmoved. My mother was secretly grateful for the showdown, since the odiferous cache made her own contraband–three hunks of Yunnan ham and a few sacks of dried shiitakes–look benign by comparison. She passed through without incident.

That wife’s impulse to weigh her man down with smelly greens of her own pickling is the same one that drives my mother, year after year, by mail or in person, to smuggle me these items: Chinese people express love through umami. It’s got to be some inherited memory of peasant life, this enshrining of umami–the instinctive understanding, even among prosperous city-dwellers who’ve never wanted for food, that to eat rice is to subsist, but to eat rice with a smear or morsel of something richly salty is to dine. Sugary indulgences are all right for children, but they’re forgotten the instant they’re metabolized. Only a shelf-stable gift of umami can enliven meals for months to come.

Yunnan ham, if you haven’t tried it (and you probably haven’t, since it’s illegal to import into the U.S.), is a cured pork product that’s a bit like prosciutto, and even more like a Smithfield ham. Dried shiitakes are, well, dried shiitakes, but the ones my mother brings me are several cuts above what’s commonly available in this country. Both ingredients are serious flavor bombs. A slice of Yunnan ham the size of a cheese single can completely transform the character of a pot of stock. As for the mushrooms, when you’re done rehydrating them in hot water, you’ll find that the water itself has become stock.

Since my mother left, I’ve been using these ingredients in just about everything. I don’t really distinguish between Asian and non-Asian applications. Just last night a few slivers of the ham went into a pot of otherwise rather southwestern chili; they’ve also made their way into dishes like steak-and-ale pie. I badly want to recreate my grandfather’s delicious and, as far as I can tell, entirely sui generis take on Yunnan ham sandwiches, which he makes by marinating slabs of it in honey and then piling the salty, gooey stuff between gummy white slices of Life Bread, Hong Kong’s answer to Wonderbread. But I’m about to open the third of my three packets of it, and it seems like a relatively inefficient use of the product. Better to ration it out in soups and braises than to eat half the block in one sitting; I’m less likely to bring on kidney failure that way, too. (Yunnan ham is salty.)

(The holy trinity of sandwich ingredients, à la my grandfather.)

The dried mushrooms have a more identifiably “Asian” taste than the ham. Or the caps do, at any rate; the stalks, which are too tough to eat, add an all-purpose flavor jolt to any brothy preparation. One of my favorite ways to use them is in a casserole I reverse-engineered from a seasonal special at Hon Café. It starts with boneless chicken thighs in bite-sized pieces, which are first flash-seared with scallion tops and then braised with peeled chestnuts* and the rehydrated shiitakes in a mixture of soy and oyster sauces, Shaoxing wine, chicken stock, sugar, and ginger, with a touch of cornstarch for body–all the usual Cantonese suspects, in other words. At the restaurant, they serve it on a sizzling cast-iron platter so that it stays warm and keeps caramelizing, but I’m not that fancy. Here is a not-great photo of my take on the dish, which I served with some dry-fried string beans jazzed up with crispy shreds of that Yunnan ham.

The crumbly sweetness of the chestnuts, the silkiness of the chicken, and the glorious meatiness of those shiitakes, all plump with the braising juices…I’m getting hungry just thinking about it. It happens that I’ve been soaking some mushrooms all day, so I think I’ll make a version tonight that incorporates the red miso I picked up last week at Sunrise Mart. And that concludes this year’s volume of my annual What I Did With My Umami Gifts report. (Last year’s, you might remember, featured a Yunnan ham and shiitake hot pot.) I write them for my mother, to reassure her that I have indeed been dining, not subsisting.

* A note on peeled chestnuts: I have boiled and peeled them from scratch, and I have bought them ready-to-use. Let me tell you right now that there is absolutely no benefit to doing it yourself. It’s time-consuming, kind of painful (the tough inner skins can get trapped under your fingernails, in some cases forcing the tip from the nail bed–ouch!), and I’m pretty sure it’s actually cheaper to buy them pre-treated. I don’t really understand the economics of it, but there it is. If you are in New York, you can stock up on $1 vacuum-packs of them at Pearl River Mart. 

At first glance, it looks like the main difference is in the casting. Depending on your region, you’d have gotten either Enrique Iglesias or (Egyptian popstar) Amr Diab as your emperor. But the real divergence doesn’t happen until the final moments of each spot. In the Iglesias version, the coup is successful, and his despot is catapulted into the arena just as the portcullis is raised on a hungry lion:

In the Diab variation, it’s the emperor who raises the portcullis, releasing the lion on the three women:

Of course, there’s no actual footage of anyone getting mauled, but it’s perfectly clear what’s happening. And it blows my mind.

Now, I don’t want to get too facile here and do a purely misogynistic reading of the Diab commercial. Clearly there’s a political element to it all, and to some extent the three gladiators are being punished in their capacity as rebels, as challengers to the social order, and not simply as “women” per se. In his paper “Advertising and Empire: Selling America in the Middle East”, Robert W. Lawrence even argues that what the women represent, above all, is American imperialism. As such, they must be symbolically crushed by Diab, an Arab, so that the Middle East can feel better about buying Pepsi–which is, of course, among the most culturally imperialistic of American brands.

None of this makes the Diab spot any less chilling to watch. I don’t care if Britney, Pink, and Beyoncé are portraying flesh-and-blood women or abstract symbols; the fact is that, in both commercials, their rabble-rousing is working and the crowd is on their side, and still Diab’s emperor flips the switch and condemns them to a violent death. Now, if I happened to be the political advisor to an actual tyrant, this is just what I’d tell him to do, but as a marketing executive for a soft drink (a soft drink!), I might opt for an approach that didn’t end in the capital punishment of folk heroes without trial.

I have long urged copywriters to consider the consequences of playing fast and loose with high-stakes rhetorical propositions. As I noted some time ago, encountering the conceptual morass pictured above, gravitational collapse is not the only process that can create a black hole.

As usual, nobody has listened to me.

Domino’s Pizza recently introduced a new line of “Artisan Pizzas.” Or did they? “We’re not artisans,” the copy reads. “But this might just convince you we are.” They go on to describe the new crusts as “artisan-style.”

So let me get this straight: The pizzas are artisanal in style, but not actually artisanal, although they taste so close to artisanal that they might fool you, only they never get the chance to fool you, because Domino’s has a policy of total artisanal transparency, although it’s a muddy sort of total transparency, seeing as they’ve opted to call their convincingly artisanal yet admittedly unartisanal pies “artisan,” and, while we’re on the topic, what does “artisan” even mean anymore?

After all that, it comes as a relief to learn that the toppings on Domino’s Artisan Pizzas are standardized and non-customizable, allowing me to skip straight past the part where I’d have had to decide whether to ladle my pie with a white sauce or a “robust inspired tomato sauce,” a concoction apparently inspired by robustness, but not quite so inspired that it is able to attain either legitimate robustness or a hyphen, unless I have it all wrong and the sauce actually possesses both robustness and inspiration as entirely distinct qualities, although we are left guessing as to the particular source of that inspiration.

For some of you, the real story in this post may be that I sometimes order from Domino’s. I don’t know what to tell you other than that the only way I can be made to sing karaoke, an activity I avoid as much as possible until it can no longer be avoided, is by the administering of liquid courage in such doses as to result in a profound depletion of mineral salts, for which the only cure is a Domino’s pie with 24 times my RDA of sodium. So what I am basically saying is that my occasional Domino’s orders are manifestations of a form of sporadic, distress-induced pica.

You believe that, right?

I bought a stack of old Life magazines from a junk store a few years ago and this was in one of them. (It was a great issue all around; check out the pictorial exposé on short shorts–or, as the publication memorably puts it, “tourniquet-tight abbreviated britches.”) I would say that it was ahead of its time, only nobody seems to eat Limburger cheese anymore. I think it would do nicely as a poster, too.