CULTURE'S CONSEQUENCES: The Secret Ingredient in this Luscious King Cake Is...
Revealing the Hidden Cultural Reasons Behind the Daily Headlines.
Bite into a slice of Dong Phuong’s King Cake, and prepare for a culinary epiphany. All pastries entice with sugar and spice, but the King Cake, available only in New Orleans during Mardi Gras season (hurry up folks, that officially ends at the stroke of midnight, Fat Tuesday, on the 12th of February this year), adds so much more to the experience. Maybe it’s the added anticipation of possibly being lucky enough to find the plastic baby Jesus embedded in your slice (the King Cake, as is the case with so many traditions associated with Mardi Gras in Catholic New Orleans, began as a holiday treat for Epiphany); maybe it’s the delight in the visual reminder of the Mardi Gras season, with its purple, green and gold frosting; maybe it’s the pleasure that comes from being excused from the guilt of excess this time of year, yet one more time (which is what Mardi Gras, after all, is all about). Sure, King Cake’s all that…but THIS King Cake, the one baked by Dong Phuong, the Vietnamese bakery in the northeast corner of New Orleans, wow, this one is, you recognize from that very first bite, over-the-moon (and Dong Phuong, no surprise, also makes some of the best mooncakes around).
My daughter introduced me to King Cake many years ago when she first moved to New Orleans, and every year since, she and her wife have insured that, one way or the other, King Cake would become part of our family “sweets” traditions, like babka and honey cake, like ambrosia, pralines and pusharatas. But this year, in order to give us a taste of something really special, they stood on line in a cold early morning rain for an hour in order to buy not just any King Cake, but a Dong Phuong King Cake. Now, there are a lot of wonderful King Cakes in New Orleans, a city dedicated as it is to good food, good music and good times. And every New Orleanian, as you can imagine, will give you justifiable reasons why their King Cake, like their favorite restaurant or club, is their favorite. But, as is the case with these things, one or two nevertheless often rise with the dough to attain near universal recognition for achieving an ethereal level of baked bliss, and this year, I was gifted to be able to have the Dong Phuong King Cake experience myself.
Inhale, and let’s begin with the frosting: no, it’s not the flat, hard crusty kind: rather, it’s soft and fluffed, as I discovered when my tongue slid through a cloud of frosting with absolutely no effort at all. Not as light as a meringue, which would be too wispy on a King Cake, but not your usual slab of glazed sugar, either. Here was an immediate and unexpected richness, alerting me right at the beginning that this King Cake experience was going to be kicked-up, and to prepare for the main event: the cake itself. Biting down, I encountered not the usual brioche or kruller-type cake, which is sometimes a bit too dry and stolid, or a bit too thick and doughy, which, in either case, fills but is not fulfilling. No, this bite brought butter: rich, warm, oozy butter, emanating not from a hole here or from a particular layer there, but from layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of just-right baked perfection. Exhale. I get it.
Huong Tran, an immigrant from Vietnam, started Dong Phuong in 1982 in New Orleans. The Gulf Coast of the US, of which New Orleans is a part, has one of the largest Vietnamese communities in America today, which began as a wave of immigrants from Vietnam in the early 1980’s and mid-1990’s after the end of the “American” war (as the Vietnam War is more often referred to in Vietnam). It’s not hard to understand why the Gulf Coast would be a preferred place for Vietnamese immigrants to come: the climate is more similar to Vietnam’s more tropical climate than many other parts of the US, it’s made up of a long coast-line, with shrimp and seafood playing a major role in the local economies just as seafood does in Vietnam, and the need for workers in this industry was great. Tran and her family came with what would be over a million other Vietnamese immigrants, to start a new life in America, and in so doing, became part of the American immigrant story. In Vietnam, Tran’s family baked. So when she came to America and had to start her life over, she baked. And, as it turned out, she baked a King Cake like no other, making her contribution to the American immigrant story by using both her culinary and survival skills, plus a secret ingredient used by every immigrant before her: her culture.
The American immigrant story is an ennobling myth of finding success through hard work, perseverance, and overcoming. Often this means creating something new that benefits the many, or doing something that improves on they way things have been done. For immigrants, what better place to look for inspiration to create something new or better than to reach back into one’s own culture? In Tran’s case, her culture had already been influenced by yet another culture, and I am referring to the French influence in Vietnam. The first time I went to Vietnam, I gorged on pho, banh mi, delectable seafood…and baguettes. Warm, buttery, flaky, magnificent baguettes. Just the way you get them in France. This was a southeast Asian rice culture, for sure, but well-influenced by wheat, via the French. A banh mi, after all, requires a baguette to turn it into Vietnam’s favorite sandwich. Millions of people in downtown Ho Chi Minh City every day go to their local bakery and bring home their daily baguette, just as they do in Paris (and, if they’re lucky, get to munch the end piece on their stroll home).
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