My parents used to tell me that the more new foods I tried, the longer I would live. Luckily we exist at a time when many Americans have access to an incredible diversity of dishes and ingredients. Three Asian cookbooks add delicious dishes to our at-home repertoire and provide a key to unlocking the foreign ingredients found on shelves of Japanese, Korean and Chinese markets.
"Japanese Comfort Cooking" by Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat is the sequel to the authors' "Japanese Soul Cooking" (2013). Both books offer recipes for Japanese home-cooking classics, but "Comfort Cooking" also includes many dishes influenced by American, European and other Asian cuisines. The seasonings, however, are mostly Japanese, including condiments such as soy sauce, mirin, miso paste, rice vinegar and so on.
The first recipe in "Japanese Comfort Cooking" is for all-purpose dashi, a broth flavored by kelp and bonito flakes that provides the essential umami backbone to many Japanese dishes. I used it to prepare the book's tako meshi, or octopus mixed rice, made with precooked octopus and seasoned with mirin, soy sauce and ginger. The rice got slightly toasted at the bottom of the pot, adding a pleasant crispiness to the dish. Another traditional dish is salmon teriyaki, which the authors rescue from the too-common, gloppy corn-syrup-based sauces by simmering the fish with mirin, sake and soy sauce. It's served with a tongue-tingling dusting of sansho pepper, the Japanese relative of Sichuan peppercorn.
The book's tuna sashimi transforms a classic Japanese dish with creamy, New World avocado chunks and a sauce made from sake, mirin and two kinds of mustard. The kamo jibuni, a duck-and-mushroom stew supposedly favored by samurai, was less successful. The recipe unaccountably calls for only two cups of dashi, not enough to cook the dry ingredients, let alone feed four hungry warriors.
One way to read "H Mart: the Cookbook" by Stacey Kwon, the Korean supermarket chain's president, is as an extended advertisement. That's true, but this is also the tale of a remarkable success story. The author's immigrant father, Il Yeon Kwon, opened his first supermarket in Queens, N.Y., in 1982 and has since established nearly 100 supermarkets across the country. H Mart was founded to provide Korean foods to the growing number of immigrants in the U.S. and to adventurous eaters intrigued by the flavors of Korean cuisine.
As with many immigrant markets, however, there's a learning curve. Entering an H Mart, with its rows of bags and jars of foreign foodstuffs, can be overwhelming. Fortunately, "H Mart: the Cookbook" provides beautifully illustrated guides to Korean foods, from kimchi and produce to ramyeon (dried noodles) and snacks. The guides include instructions on how to consume specialties such as Korean barbecue dinners, including many variations on wrapping meat, rice and seasonings in lettuce leaves.
The recipes in "H Mart" cover Korean home cooking, from traditional to modern. It begins with salads served as banchan, or side dishes that accompany many Korean dinners. The oi muchim, or spicy cucumber salad, jolts your tastebuds with the heat of the preferred Korean spice -- gochugaru, or ground red chili flakes. A good main for barbecue is dwaeji bulgogi, stir-fried pork flavored with layers of gochugaru, gochujang (fermented red chili paste) and other sauces, then mellowed with a bit of brown sugar. Ms. Kwon instructs readers to wrap the meat in lettuce leaves, also stuffed with rice, more gochujang and, optionally, raw garlic, making a glorious but messy mouthful.
Other dishes straddle the line between Korean and Western tastes. The ramyeon mazemen is the kind of meal some young mad scientist would mix up in his dorm room. It takes as its base spicy packaged noodles, blends in seasonings to add sweetness, spice and umami, then tops it with stir-fried ground pork or beef, a big handful of chopped garlic chives and strips of dried seaweed. "H Mart: the Cookbook" may be an advertisement, but I'd love to see similar cookbooks focusing on foods sold in other Asian markets.
Fuchsia Dunlop is probably the premier interpreter of Chinese food for Western audiences. She has written five cookbooks, including "The Food of Sichuan" (2019), covering Chinese regional cuisines and home cooking, as well as a food memoir and a food history of China. "Five Tastes" focuses on the five most important flavors in Chinese cooking -- sour, bitter, sweet, pungent and salty -- and the myriad, artful ways chefs use them to highlight the essential qualities of their ingredients. To illustrate these combinations, her dishes introduce many unfamiliar ingredients to American readers -- fermented tofu, for example -- but the results are always delectable.
Ms. Dunlop's steamed sea bass with preserved lemon is a showstopper. The whole fish is seasoned with ginger, green onions, soy sauce and Shaoxing wine -- for "dispelling fishiness," according to Ms. Dunlop -- and then sprinkled with lemon peel before being put in the steamer. The lemon provided a perfect counterpoint to the sweetness of the fish. As a side, I served lettuce with fermented tofu made with stir-fried little-gem lettuce. This quick dish is seasoned with garlic, a few slices of fresh red pepper and a few squares of Chinese fermented tofu whisked into a cream. The tofu adds a creamy umami flavor to the dish, leading me to wonder why it isn't used in Caesar salad.
I was pleased to find one of my favorite Taiwanese dishes in "Five Tastes": stir-fried "flyheads." No, it doesn't contain actual insect parts. The name comes from fermented black beans, resembling you know what, which are sautéed with ground pork, bud-topped flowering garlic chives, garlic and chili pepper. Now I can make it at home, one of many dishes from "Five Tastes" that I will be adding to my dinnertime repertoire.
-- Mr. Coe's "American Bread: A History" will be published this month.