Claypot Rice & Generational Cooking

In preparation for celebrating Chinese New Year with my extended family, I practiced making Hong Kong style claypot rice. I've never made it before, but my dad cooked it all the time for my family when I was growing up.

It's a simple everyday street food. The thing that truly makes this dish is the scorching of the rice at the bottom of the pot. It gives the rice multiple textures and a slightly burnt aroma that you can't get with a standard rice cooker. 

It was meaningful to watch my dad make it and hear his advice, knowing he grew up eating it in Hong Kong. In true immigrant style, he uses no measurements and follows no recipe. He relies almost entirely on felt sense and intuitive judgment. Since the clay pot’s lid was opaque, you could not see how quickly the dish was cooking. You couldn’t “measure” the cooking either. I was told, "You can't rely on a timer to know when to turn off the stove, because there are too many factors. The way you know it is finished is when you just start to smell a faint burning. Or to listen for the sound of crackling."

To me, that is a wild way to cook. It’s also deeply decolonial. Clever in resources. I imagine my dad as a child, in the alleyway streets of Hong Kong, crouched near his dad’s clay pot, listening closely for the sounds of crackling.

There is something poetic about needing to rely on the other senses. The smell of burning. The sound of crackling. In this way, cooking becomes a multisensory, embodied process—requiring you to be intimately observant of its nuances and inflections. It's relational. A dialogue between bodies. I am engaged with a pot of rice with a similar level of sensitivity as when I am engaged with a close friend.

I grew up in a house where the kitchen was a place for very good food, only made possible by high-stress conditions. I only recently started to enjoy cooking as a process for curiosity, connection to material, an offering. It is a humble and simple gesture, to make food for others and to receive food in kind. It is the most fundamental display of love.

It brings me joy to be able to offer my dad the food of his own childhood. Like a generational cycle completing itself.