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August 5, 2019
You’re Invited to Join the Cult of Dace
By: Leela Punyaratabandhu Photos: Alexa Bendek



LIKE SPAM, THIS FRIED FISH BATHED IN BLACK BEAN SAUCE IS HARD TO REPLICATE AND
OFTEN EATEN STRAIGHT FROM THE CAN.

An old Thai comedy novella depicts a scene of a destitute family eating at a
round table. Having recently fallen on hard times, they each have before them a
bowl of rice gruel—a handful of broken grains bought cheap and stretched using
copious water and deposited into a cauldron of insipid mush. Hanging from the
ceiling at eye level is a tiny piece of fried salted fish. It’s there to be
looked at, not eaten, say the parents to the seven kids, instructing them to
take a bite of the bland rice and mentally season it with a quick glance at the
salty fish. Trying to come to terms with their impoverishment, the family eats
in morose silence until the father, disturbed by the teenage son’s sustained,
longing gaze at the fish, bursts out, “Don’t stare too long, dammit—it’s salty!”

The story resonated with me most when I was a new international student studying
in Chicago, and I quickly realized upon my arrival from Thailand how difficult
it was to eat well in an expensive city where a blue-plate special at the school
cafeteria cost the same as ten hefty bowls of noodles in my hometown of Bangkok.
By the afternoon of my first day, when I found out my monthly food budget was
about how much my landlord spent in a week on his dog’s organic kibbles, a part
of me just wanted to go stare at some salty fish.

The anxiety stemming from the precarious state of my finance, and having found
out for the first time that I was capable of feeling envy for an innocent golden
retriever, brought a fierce creature out of me. Hawkeyed and with my senses on
alert, I was pacing the canned-food aisle of one of the many Asian grocery
stores in the heart of the Southeast Asian enclave in the city’s Uptown
neighborhood. While hunting for something inexpensive yet deeply flavorful to
eat with rice, I saw something I’d never noticed before: canned fried dace with
salted black beans.

In theory, the can, with its unusual oval shape and its label in strikingly
bright canary and crimson, should have turned me off, as scientists postulate
that the conspicuous coloration in prey animals has evolved to deter predators
who associate it with unpalatability and other aversive attributes. But what
scientists don’t know is that when a predator is broke enough, and the prey is
cheap enough—shy of $2, in this case—that theory crumbles. Besides, the fried
dace seemed popular; there was only one can left on the shelf. As I reached for
the lone can, a stranger behind me whispered in a mixture of Chinese and Lao,
“Ah, dou chi ling yu—an Asian best-kept secret.”



I don’t know if it was that comment delivered in a near-prophetic baritone, or
if it was the Baader–Meinhof thing at work, but suddenly I started spotting it
in nearly every Asian shopper’s cart. This really is an Asian secret so well
kept that even some Asians, like me, don’t know it exists.

I came back to my apartment, cooked up some rice, opened the can, and marveled
at the sight of fried dace (pronounced deɪs)—a type of freshwater carp—briny
with a bit of chew, their bones so tiny and tender you can eat them. The dace
came swimming in a pool of oil bedecked with the main seasoning: fermented whole
black beans, an umami powerhouse—politely pungent and soft enough to mash with a
spoon. And the oil—oh, the oil. I could have drizzled it over plain rice and
called it a good meal. I emptied the whole can right into my rice bowl. I took a
bite. The cherubim sang.

In the days that followed, I went back for more, and it was all I ate. I
couldn’t stop. With the cans being so affordable, my bank account was safe. My
self-control, though, was in jeopardy. Hoodwinked by my pride into thinking I
would never become an addict, I turned into Icarus, flying closer and closer to
the sun, one wiped-clean can of fried dace at a time.

People talk about instant ramen being the most loved Asian product worldwide.
Yet long before instant ramen showed its squiggly face on the food scene and got
all smug about being the most popular Asian export, the Asian diaspora in the
West ran on fried dace, produced since the late 1800s in the southern Chinese
province of Guangdong, and they’ve passed that love on to second- and
third-generation Asian Americans.

Why is fried dace with salted black beans so addictive? “It’s the umami,” says
Fuchsia Dunlop, author of Land of Fish and Rice, who is also a fan of this
Cantonese dish. “You’ve got fish and fermented black beans together in oil—an
intensely savory combination.”

The synergy of the three components may explain the addictiveness, but Los
Angeles–based food writer Jean Trinh thinks the black beans play the lead role
in this ensemble. There’s more to this game than the brininess and the funk. “If
you notice, the black beans have a bit of a burnt taste to them, which I love,”
says Trinh, comparing that to the smokiness of barbecued burnt ends. And this is
why the variation of the same product that comes with no salted black beans is,
to put it elegantly, meh.

But glorification aside, we’re still talking about a processed food here, and
that was why I had to work hard at overcoming my addiction early on. Kian Lam
Kho, author of Phoenix Claws and Jade Trees, hypothesizes that you can replicate
the product from scratch at home by deep-frying some dace fish, which are sold
fresh or frozen at some large Asian grocery stores (American butterfish would
work, too), until crisp to the bones, steaming them with ginger, garlic, and
salted black beans, then covering them with oil as a way to preserve them,
confit-style. Yet this could all be a futile attempt. “It’s like Spam—you like
it the way it comes out of a can,” says Kho. “You could try to make Spam at
home, and it could be healthier, but you know it won’t be the same.”


RECIPE: STIR-FRIED CHINESE BROCCOLI WITH FRIED DACE AND SALTED BLACK BEANS

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LEELA PUNYARATABANDHU

Leela Punyaratabandhu is the author of Simple Thai Food and winner of the Art of
Eating Prize, Bangkok. Epicurious has named her one of the 100 greatest home
cooks of all time.

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