RUTH TAM

This is Dish City. I'm Ruth Tam.

PATRICK FORT
And I'm Patrick Fort.

RUTH TAM
We’re a podcast from WAMU, where we explore a city change through D.C.'s iconic foods
and we just wrapped up our first season. But…

PATRICK FORT
Surprise! We're popping up in your podcast feed to say Happy Thanksgiving!

RUTH TAM
We're super thankful for a lot of things this year, including you.

PATRICK FORT
We wanted to share a little something with you. When our season launched, a guy named
Charles reached out to us.

CHARLES DUAN
So, my name is Charles Duan. I'm a, I'm a think tank person. So, the most D.C. job
possible.

PATRICK FORT
Charles has been living in D.C. since 2012. And last year, he started a new tradition for his
Friendsgiving festivities.

RUTH TAM
We met up with him and wanted to share our conversation with you all.

PATRICK FORT
Like me, Charles had an internship in D.C. before moving here full time, and that's when
he first was introduced to local D.C. culture and food.

CHARLES DUAN
I was working at a nonprofit and the folks there were just into D.C. culture. So they showed
us around. They took us to Ben's Chili Bowl. They took us to the Black Cat, the 9:30 Club.
So, you know, got to see a lot of the more local aspects of D.C. The other thing that I did
kind of on my own was just go around to the Ethiopian restaurants over on U Street.

RUTH TAM
By the time Charles moved here full-time, he was ready to explore the Washington region
through food like we did.

PATRICK FORT
When you first came here, would you have considered yourself like a foodie type of
person?

CHARLES DUAN
So we, we were definitely people who were into food. My wife came down to visit a couple
of times and she just fell in love with the Ethiopian food. You know, just from from those
experiences. When we moved to D.C., we ended up buying a place in Adams Morgan,
largely because the place was about two blocks away from Keren. So, you know, the, the
sort of local foods have always been kind of a thing for us.
RUTH TAM
Yeah. Quick question. How much did you partake in Jumbo Slice your first summer here?

CHARLES DUAN
In Jumbo Slice … I actually didn't have too many Jumbo Slices the first summer I was
here.

PATRICK FORT
He knows enough. He knows well enough.

RUTH TAM
Dang it! …As someone who didn't grow up here, why did you want to get to know the city
via its foods?

CHARLES DUAN
So I feel like, you know, I've lived in a lot of cities at this point, and you really do just get to
know kind of what the local culture is based on the types of food. Because, you know, it
tells you a lot about the types of people who live there, the type of people who've
immigrated to the area. The thing about local foods is that they’re, they’re local foods not
because there's one place that makes them, but because there’s lots of places that make
them right. There are tons of Ethiopian restaurants or tons of pupuserias. And what that
means is that you get to try out all of these different places and kind of compare and learn
what are the similarities, where are the differences and figure out, you know, what you like
and what, what makes the food special.

RUTH TAM
You did something really interesting for your Friendsgiving last year. Can you tell us a little
bit about that?

CHARLES DUAN
We did. So we decided to do a D.C. local foods-themed Friendsgiving in which basically
we made all of the traditional Thanksgiving dishes but put a sort of a D.C. local food spin
on them. The idea, I think came up because of the fact that about a month before then we
had kind of come up, just, you know, just improvisationally, with a, with an interesting
injera-based stuffing. We made a green bean casserole that involved half-smokes. We
made… so I think the biggest hit was the was the Cranberry Mumbo Sauce. So we
basically made a combination Mumbo sauce, cranberry sauce. We made a chicken yasa
casserole. So that was kind of our turkey dish. And we made sweet potato pupusas, which
were a lot of fun to make.
RUTH TAM
Had you made the pupusas before?

CHARLES DUAN
So this was the first time we'd made pupusas. It was, it was a fun and interesting
experience. The interesting thing we learned about it, though, is that the technique for
making pupusas is actually very similar to the technique for making Chinese stuff buns.
The only difference is that instead of steaming them in the form of a round bun, you flatten
them out into, into the pupusa shape. But it ended up being that we can make them very
quickly because my wife is very skilled at making these buns. So she was able to
essentially make pupusas using the same technique. We had a lot of fun with that. And I
think the between the pupusas and the Cranberry Mumbo sauce, those I think were the
two biggest hits of the, of the meal.
PATRICK FORT
How many people did you feed with all of this?

CHARLES DUAN
We probably had about 40 people in, in our condo. It was a lot of people. Well, so the trick
that we use is we invite all of the families. It's basically a way of getting other people to
watch our kids while we're cooking. And so, you know, we just had a ton of kids who were
running around.

PATRICK FORT
I feel like you had sort of an interesting challenge on your hands, too, because people
have such deep associations with this holiday and with the foods more than anything else,
really. And, in a way, you’re kind of like subverting that. You’re actually like, ‘We're just
going to ignore this whole part and then do our own thing.’ How did people take it when
they got there?

CHARLES DUAN
You know, the interesting thing I think about food is that it's a lot more acceptable to remix,
and you know, combine ideas. You know, you think about music. And, you know, people
love remixes of music, but you'll have folks who say, you know, ‘That's untrue to the
original style,’ or, you know, ‘That's copyright infringement,’ something like that. With food,
you really don't have that sort of sense. People are very willing to accept the idea of
taking, taking a dish and then transforming it into something else. So, yeah, you know I
don't think we got any pushback on sort of like, ‘Why aren't you making the regular
turkey?’ Or anything like that.

RUTH TAM
Patrick is not telling you this, but he actually doesn't really like Thanksgiving foods.

PATRICK FORT
I don’t like Thanksgiving foods. Yeah, that's my secret.

CHARLES DUAN
So that was actually part of the motivation behind this. You know, we didn't want to you
like just regular turkey, right?

PATRICK FORT
We're gonna take a quick break. But when we come back.

RUTH TAM
Char, my lovelies!

PATRICK FORT
My pretties!

RUTH TAM
So you used to work in tech and now you are at a think tank. Does anything about what
you do, you know, for your 9-to-5 job come out in the way that you cook or the way that
you experiment?
CHARLES DUAN
So, yeah, you know, that that's actually really interesting because you know what, in my in
my day job at the think tank, I mostly spend time thinking about intellectual property policy.
So patents, copyrights. And so what that involves is thinking about how to get people to be
creative. And one of the things that's interesting about this, you know, when you start
surveying the world of creativity, you see a lot of different fields where creativity is just it is
just kind of comes up from the grassroots. So, you know, a lot of times people are being
creative just because they feel that sort of urge and they feel that, that pride once they've
created something. And, you know, I feel like that's especially true in the, in the cooking
space. And especially the idea that with food more so than anything else, it's really
acceptable to remix ideas. You know, nobody expects a, you know, even the greatest
chefs to come up with new dishes just out of nowhere, right? They're always taking
influences from some culture, from some other thing that they've had, from the types of
ingredients that they have available. You know, the idea that's, that creativity in the food
space is really all about remixing, I think is it's really at its strongest when it comes to it,
when it comes to food

RUTH TAM
For sure, but people get upset when they see what they consider to be an appropriation of
culture in food. When there is a fusion thing happening that, what people perceive to be
like a disrespect in terms of not honoring a food culture’s traditions and its heritage, that
kind of thing. Even though all food, you know, is influenced by other things, you know, how
do you go about discerning where those lines are?

CHARLES DUAN
It's interesting because I remember about a year ago there was a I think it was a Swedish
official who made a public apology for stealing the meatball from Turkey. I think the theory
was that they had imported the kofta into Sweden and had turned the meatball into like the
national dish. And, you know, the article that I wanted to write was: Don't apologize for the
meatball, right? What you've done is you've taken the meatball and you've made it into
something that's very special to Sweden. You know, it's not the same meatball that you
have that you took from Turkey. But the fact that you're referring to it, I think, honors that
culture, in addition to reflecting the fact that you can add something to it and make it your
own. All of the D.C. dishes, that we've talked about --pupusas, Ethiopian food, Mumbo
sauce-- they’re, they're all imports into into D.C. But what makes them special about D.C.
is the fact that so many people have worked with them. They've tried out different
variations on them. You know, there are all of these different little restaurants that are, you
know, putting their own special little twist on it. That's what makes the food local to D.C. in
a sense. It's not the fact that we invented the pupusa, right? Everybody knows that the
pupusa is Salvadoran, but we've added our own sort of special twist to it. And I think that
that's kind of the line between, you know, between honoring somebody's culture and
disrespecting it. Where you're taking the food and you're making it clear that you recognize
the fact that this is something that you borrowed, but you've also done things that make it
your own. You know, we're not improving upon them. They're not, you know, the things
that we're making aren't better than the original culture, but they're different and they're
adaptations that make sense for our particular place, our particular time. If we had called
this, you know, this is just like our random cranberry sauce that we invented, I think that
would be kind of unfortunate because we wouldn't be referring to that tradition of Mumbo
sauce, which is where we came up with the idea. The fact that we called it Cranberry
Mumbo sauce tells me, well yeah, you know, we're borrowing this from the Chinese
takeout places and from the soul food restaurants that have really perfected this dish. And,
you know, we're adding our own twist to it. But we're not ignoring the fact that we did
borrow, and we did take advantage of all of that's all of that cultural knowledge that's gone
into this one dish.

RUTH TAM
I love that you just like embrace risk and like, you know, danger and, you know, anything
that's unpredictable.

CHARLES DUAN
Well, luckily, there are not too many lives at stake when it comes to making pupusas.

RUTH TAM
Not a high-risk Friendsgiving.

CHARLES DUAN
Mostly the worst thing that can happen is you just have to order a bunch of Jumbo Slice.

RUTH TAM
Yes, Jumbo Slice is your backup plan. That's such a good idea. Great. I'm going to do that.
If and when my Friendsgiving falls through. I'm just gonna have Pizza Mart on speed dial.
Thanks so much for coming in, Charles.

CHARLES DUAN
Thanks for having me.
RUTH TAM
We got Charles to write down his recipes for us and we had WAMU’s Thanksgiving potluck
coming up. So Patrick and I got together to try some of them out.

PATRICK FORT
Ruth, what are you working on over here?

RUTH TAM
We are tackling the mushroom injera stuffing and I've got about a pound of mushrooms
and they need to be minced.

[chopping noises]

PATRICK FORT
I suppose I could get started on the Cranberry Mumbo sauce.

[grating noises]

In this bowl, we have grated ginger and a crap ton of ketchup and it smells exactly like
Mumbo sauce. Alright, into the pot…

[dishes clacking]

…goes things that make this Cranberry sauce Mumbo sauce.

RUTH TAM
I really taste all the elements like I taste the ginger, I taste the soy sauce, I taste a hint of
the hot sauce.

PATRICK FORT
So we're done? We're calling the cranberry sauce done?

RUTH TAM
I think it's great. I think you nailed it.
PATRICK FORT
Cool. Good job, team.

[Oil simmers in a pan]

Look at this. I mean, you can't see it cause it’s on the radio, but listen to this.

RUTH TAM
Char, my lovelies!

PATRICK FORT
My pretties!

PATRICK FORT
There’s a lot of butter in this. Eh, whatever it’s Thanksgiving.

Oh wait, this is when the whiskey goes in too, isn't it? That's a shot?

RUTH TAM
That's a shot.

PATRICK FORT
OK. Ehhhh there you go.

RUTH TAM
That's two shots!

PATRICK FORT
No, it’s not.

RUTH TAM
It’s Thanksgiving!

PATRICK FORT
It’s Thanksgiving!

Does it coat the back of a spoon? Yes. Oh, that's a lot of bourbon. Nine minutes from our
sausage green bean casserole thing.

RUTH TAM
I didn't think that I wanted the injera to be like in such small pieces. But like given what
stuffing is supposed to be …

PATRICK FORT
It’s really good. We made food!

RUTH TAM
You can try Charles's D.C. Thanksgiving dishes yourself. We put his recipes up at
DishCity.org/Thanksgiving.

PATRICK FORT
For more stuff like this episode, follow us on Twitter and Instagram at Dish City. There we
share our favorite food articles and also fun photos of us reporting and cooking. Thanks.
See ya!
RUTH TAM
Bye!