#backfiles

There are easily half a dozen wipeout files floating around out there. 

get neither, so expensive ToT

butbutbtubtutbubtbut 

but is it worth it 

(that's subjective) 

The people who run Smitty’s were echt Germans once, the same as my people. One of my forefathers was a teenaged stowaway on a steamer from Bremerhaven that docked in Galveston; before long he lived in the Texas Hill Country as did his descendants. We don’t actually know much about that part of the family, except that they drank.

I so wish that they were eaters, not drinkers: Brisket Germans, not Beer Germans. Then they would have been the kind of Germans that these Schmidt and Mueller and Kreuz people were, the people of Lockhart, Texas.

This is a tale of black and white, of bitter and sweet, of East and West in a tall, thin glass.

My first real ca phe sua da came on a street corner in Saigon. I had arrived in Vietnam 12 hours earlier, spent the first night huddled in the dark corner of a vaguely depressing club, and suddenly felt a hot mess of ambivalence closing in on me. I sat down on one of the tiny plastic stools used by every street vendor in the country and pointed at what the other stool-squatters had before them: a small French-style filter on top of a glass with an inch layer of sweetened condensed milk. The coffee, thick and black as crude oil, drips one drop at a time into the white puddle below, a striking juxtaposition that doesn’t disappear until you remove the filter and plunge the whole solution into a glass of ice and stir.

The French may have introduced the coffee bean to the Vietnamese back in the 19th century, but the Vietnamese soon made it their own:

Whoever said hip-hop was dead clearly has never been to Burma. In this sweaty stew of political dissidence and reclining Buddhas, baselines and break beats are king. Billboards display hooded MCs striking aggressive alpha poses, radios bump familiar American instrumentals laced with thunderstorms of Burmese lyrics, and fans are so familiar with their favorite artists’ bodies of work that when electricity goes out at concerts—an inevitable event in this power-thirsty country—they rap the rest of the song a capella.

Tacos aren’t something Mom makes on Wednesday night with the help of the Old El Paso Express Kit. They don’t come covered in pre-shredded four-cheese blends and they don’t crunch when you bite down. The taco is a union of warm crushed corn, savory filling, and spice-charged condiment. They are soft and drippy and four-bites big, a love letter waiting for you on every street corner in Mexico. Few fillings escape the tortilla’s grasp: rosy char-grilled chunks of carne asada, crispy curls of fried pork skin, spicy tangles of roasted peppers and cooked cream, squishy mounds of slow-simmered eyeballs. But no tortilla has ever known a better friend than the spit-carved, chile-rubbed pork at the heart of the al pastor taco, perhaps Mexico’s most heroic hand-held food.

Last December, we were fortunate enough to spend time with Naomi Duguid, a longtime hero of ours and one of the foremost experts on Asian cuisine. She was in Yangon, wrapping up research on her newest book, Burma: Rivers of Flavor, and took some time out to give us the full rundown of Burmese cuisine at one of the central markets.