In 1987, I went to a floating restaurant in Bangkok that rocked every time a boat went by with what I can only describe as an extremely optimistic attitude and a carry-on bag that was slightly too large for the overhead bin. I was sixteen years old and under the impression that traveling alone would be romantic and character-building. It was sometimes those things. It was also frequently confusing, occasionally frightening, and once involved a misunderstanding about bus schedules that I will never fully recover from. But on the third day (or possibly the fourth; I had lost track of time in the pleasant way that happens when you have no meetings and no reason to know what day it is) I found myself sitting in front of Steamed Fish with Black Bean for the first time. I had not ordered it on purpose. I had pointed at a menu without fully understanding what I was pointing at, which is a strategy I recommend with reservations. The dish that arrived was not what I expected. I didn't know what I expected. Whatever it was, this was better.
Here is what I have learned about Steamed Fish with Black Bean after years of trying and failing to reproduce it: the dish has layers, and you can only understand each layer after you've already failed to execute it properly. The outer layer, the part that looks easy, is genuinely easy. This is the trap. You sail through the easy part feeling competent and even a little smug, and then you hit the middle layer, which is where the dish lives and breathes and where your confidence will be quietly dismantled. I have been dismantled by this dish multiple times. Each time I've learned something. The first time I learned that timing is not a guideline but a law. The second time I learned that substitutions that seem logical are frequently not. The third time I learned something that I cannot explain in words but that my hands now know, or think they know, though "think they know" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
I want to be specific about what makes the best version of Steamed Fish with Black Bean different from the adequate version, because the gap is real even if I can't entirely explain it. The adequate version is fine. It tastes like what it is. The best version is its own argument for existing: every element doing something necessary, nothing superfluous, the whole greater than the sum in a way that seems impossible until you're in the middle of it and then seems obvious. Frank, my dad's college roommate made the best version. I have made the adequate version. I am not sure the distance between them is fully crossable, but I intend to keep trying.
And this is the point in the essay where I would give you the recipe. The actual recipe, with measurements and times and the instructions that would let you make Steamed Fish with Black Bean in your own kitchen and experience, approximately, what I've been describing for the past thousand words. I had every intention of including it. I sat down today specifically to write it. But then I started with the story, which I thought would be a brief introduction, and then it was an hour later and I was emotionally processing my relationship with my family friend and I had run out of both time and, honestly, the kind of focused attention that a recipe requires. The recipe will be here next week. I am telling you this as a promise and also as a statement of aspiration that I have made before and will likely make again. Come back next week. Or the week after. The story will still be here either way.