When she was trying to remember how to make it, she emailed her siblings: “Does anyone remember anything about that salad Mommy used to make? I think it was just blanched asparagus, cut up with a sauce of crunchy peanut butter and Tabasco? Was it based on some other dish or did Mommy make it up? It seems vaguely Southeast Asian, but sticks out as something weird in her repertoire.”
But she couldn’t get it just right. The dish tasted odd, as if the asparagus signed up for a blind date gone wrong. “My sister googled it and said the recipe came from the side of a Jif jar,” Lo noted. “But we were a Skippy house.”
“Even as a kid, I knew this recipe didn’t make sense,” she continued. “But the dish represents many themes important to my career. It was probably one of my earliest experiences seeing something creative in the kitchen. It was something different, an example of what immigrants do with flavors they grew up with and how food evolves, how it doesn’t have borders, per se. It is also Midwestern and of that era of the 1960s when quick recipes were taken off the sides of convenience foods like peanut butter.”
Lo, 53, was born in Detroit and raised in Birmingham, Mich., the daughter of Chinese immigrants. She’d go on to open her restaurant Annisa.
Her newest book, which Eater named its 2018 Cookbook of the Year, is “Solo: A Modern Cookbook for a Party of One” (Knopf, $29). It begins this way: “I put the ‘Lo’ in ‘solo.’ The A Lo in ‘alone.’ I’ve been dumped almost as many times as I’ve been in relationships — and I can count those on less than two hands. Spread over my fifty-year life span, that’s a lot of solo meals.” In her recipe for Valentine’s Day, “A Single, Broken Egg on a Bed of Torn, Wilted, Bitter Greens with Blue Cheese,” the last ingredient is “A healthy dose of self-pity.” “I always include something for the lonely person,” she writes.
‘Cooking chooses you’
When Lo was 3, her father, Lien-Fu Lo, died in an electrical accident when their home flooded; her sister was 5 and her brother was 8. Lien-Fu had been a pathologist, as was Lo’s mother, Molly Hayden. She continued working at a hospital outside Detroit, where Lo noted, “she made one-quarter of what my father made for the same job.”
Her mother remarried the next year, and by the time Lo was a sophomore in high school, she found herself boarding at Concord Academy in Massachusetts. “I kind of got kicked out of my house,” she said with a shrug. “I didn’t get along with my stepfather. My mother did well at providing for us, she pushed us in the right direction morally. But she was emotionally unavailable. Her one true love died and left her with three little kids, and all three of us were watching. It was a hard time. She shut down after that.”
After high school, Lo followed her siblings to Columbia. Before earning her degree in French literature, she spent the summer after her junior year in Paris. “At the time, I thought I would end up translating English to French at the U.N.,” she recalled. Then she spent a month at the legendary cooking school La Varenne. “I was learning to cook and loving it,” she said. “I went back the next year to earn a Grand Diplome at L’Ecole Ritz-Escoffier. It wasn’t necessary, but it was fun and for me, a breeze. I think cooking chooses you. You either have it or you don’t. And because French was translated to English there, I heard all the instructions twice.” She worked as an intern for both Guy Savoy and Michel Rostang before returning to New York, where she worked for David Bouley, then David Waltuck at Chanterelle.
What’s next
In 2000, she opened Annisa with Jennifer Scism, her girlfriend at the time. Lo made food that was rooted in French technique while incorporating other cultures. Her seared foie gras with soup dumplings and jicama became a classic, alongside her pan-roasted chicken with sherry, white truffles and pig feet. In 2009, the restaurant was destroyed in a fire and reopened the following year. It closed for good in 2017 once costs got too high. Also, Lo’s years on the line took their toll, and she had a knee replaced.
“I don’t want to own another restaurant,” she said, as her cat, Mika, strode across the table, neatly avoiding the laptop. “I’d love some long-term consulting. It would be great to open a restaurant and create a menu, then step away and check in every once in a while.”
Lo will stay in New York, though. “It’s home for me,” she said, “one of the easier places to be who I am. In the monochromatic culture of Michigan I was one of two Asian kids in a very large school, along with one African American. I grew up trying to distance myself from my Asian upbringing and Chinese culture. I came back to it through food, learning to enhance that part of me through cooking.”
In the kitchen, a second attempt at the asparagus-peanut butter recipe failed. And would she ever make this for herself? “Probably not,” she said. “I mean, I don’t mind it. I could make a more Chinese version with hoisin and peanut butter, more like a sesame noodle sauce.” She tasted it again. “Maybe it’s not the right recipe. My sister remembered a hot sauce bottle with an oval white label, and that’s not Tabasco, but that’s the one sauce I remember having.”
Some childhood memories just can’t be conjured. Lo seemed philosophical about letting this one go. After all, she learned early to be her own best company. “Although I have a soft spot for the depressed, jilted single,” she writes, “ ‘Solo’ is also for those who are happiest on their own, or those who are part of a fractured family, in whatever form. ... This book is also for those who have different tastes from their family or partner — why shouldn’t they eat what they crave?”
Witchel is a former staff writer for the New York Times Magazine and the author of “All Gone: A Memoir of My Mother’s Dementia.”
