On Gold Rush Dreams, a Chinese Temple, and Turkey Congee
An Interview with Lorraine Hee-Chorley of Mendocino
Welcome to the inaugural issue of The California Table newsletter.
This project was originally conceived as a community cookbook—an actual, physical book—that would incorporate the culinary traditions of as many different California communities as possible. I had even hoped that the proceeds from a book’s sales could serve as a fundraiser for some of the state’s food banks. (It’s appalling that in a state known as the country’s breadbasket, where growers export billions of dollars of food every year, many of the very people who help bring that food to markets and tables are often the ones who can’t afford enough for their families.)
But as I started talking with cooks from across the state, and learning their stories, I realized that the format of a book, with its short headnotes, could never really capture the full picture of our state, everyone’s histories here, and how those histories inform our many vibrant foodways. So I decided to take another tack. Eventually, perhaps, there will be a book too. And if this newsletter eventually makes any money (through donations or a subscription model), it will also become a fundraiser for food-insecure Californians. But for now, it is simply as a space to tell stories and share recipes from the home cooks I’ve been talking with over the past many months.
For my first letter, on this Thanksgiving week, I’m starting off with a quintessential California story: the story of 4th-generation Californian Lorraine Hee-Chorley of Mendocino, and her great-grandfather’s voyage here from China in the 1850s.
It’s a classic American story. When Lorraine talks about her great-grandfather’s journey, I’m reminded of my mother’s ancestors, who sailed to the American Colonies in the 1700s, and my father’s grandfather, who came to Philadelphia from Lithuania in 1902 and started the small business. This is how we all got here—but Lorraine’s family came straight to California and never really left. And her community’s story also touches on another important California food story: the beginnings of the north coast’s fishing industry.
The other reason I chose Lorraine’s story (rather than her cousin Denise Lee’s for instance, which we’ll get in a few weeks) is that Lorraine shared a fantastic post-Thanksgiving recipe with us—turkey congee. It’s the ideal dish to make with your leftover turkey carcass. But we’ll get to that at the end of the piece. First, my conversations with Lorraine Hee-Chorley, the trustee of the Temple of Kwan Tai, condensed and edited for clarity:
Lorraine Hee-Chorley
My great-grandfather sailed from China on a sampan. There were a total of seven sampans that started out to come to California because they had heard about the California Gold Rush. We know him a Joe Lee, but we know from historical records that the spelling always changed. He was a farmer from the northern part of Hong Kong. So he and his brother started out in one of these sampans, and they were going to sail to Monterey, because there was a Chinese fishing village there.
They got off course and landed up by Casper beach and discovered that there wasn’t gold just to pick up off the street, as the stories had said. So he ended up working at the Casper Lumber Company. Then he came to Mendocino where he worked and, at the same time, with another Chinese family, he built the Temple of Kwan Tai, in 1854.
The temple was constructed by Joe Lee and held in the family all this time and eventually was turned into a non-profit corporation. It’s one of six original Chinese temples left in California.
The county of Mendocino would not be where it is today—one could say that for all of California—if it wasn’t for the Chinese labor force. They introduced the fishing industry to the town of Mendocino. They’re the ones who let the community know, Hey, there’s edible stuff out there. They’re the ones who introduced red abalone to mainstream society. And also the abundance of the fish that was out there. And the sea algae. They made it into a business. They dried the sea algae, they dried the shrimp, they dried the abalone; they saved the shells, and they shipped those back to China. It was a big industry.
And then across from Big River, they rented land (where Stanford Inn is now) and they had commercial gardens, because they knew what could grow there. So they basically grew all of these vegetables and sold them back to the townspeople. And the very first cherry tree in Mendocino is planted on that property. The Chinese really introduced a lot to this county.
My father was born in Mendocino. He did a lot of things over the years. My understanding is that he went away for a while to work in the Central Valley, but most of his lifetime was spent working in the lumber industry. He was a cook for a short time but also was a lumber grader. In his younger years he had his own business; he had a sundries shop with a pool hall behind his shop.
I grew up in Mendocino as well. I’ve been there basically my entire life, with the exception of going to school.
My mother was German and Irish. She felt like the cooking was her job, and she basically cooked meat and potatoes. Unfortunately, she wasn’t a great cook. My mother’s past was kid of shaky. Her own mother wasn’t around a lot. She was out and about a lot and was married several times.
My dad would cook on special occasions, and he would like making jook—that’s one of the things he taught my mother to cook. We never had chop suey or chow main. We had really traditional dishes. He would use the fermented black beans to steam his fish in. He was always using five spice seasoning and the other thing he had access to. But because of where we were located, our supplies were somewhat limited. When I was young, we would take a trip to San Francisco every few months to stock up. My father would buy hundred-pound sacks of rice, and we would buy like five to twenty gallons of soy sauce. And he would buy thousand-year-old oysters and dried oysters. And all those things would be stored away until it was used up.
We basically had Cantonese dishes, like egg foo young, which is a standard dish. And we knew how to do wonton soup. When we got together for Chinese new years, my dad would cook all the unusual dishes we didn’t have throughout the year. That included duck, and the lap cheong Chinese sausage, and then we’d have some dim sum that we may have had in the freezer, like the char siu bao, the roasted pork buns.
I was cooking at a very young age, and so were my brothers. The one thing that we all knew how to do by the time we were five years old was to make fried rice.
Because I grew up as one of seven kids, we had rice with every meal. It didn't matter if it was Christmas or if it was Thanksgiving; we may have had the mashed potatoes to meet my mother’s need for American food, but we always had rice. And one of the great blessings of this was whoever woke up early the next day is the one who got to the rice to make their fried rice for breakfast. And so that's one of the recipes that we learned to make—fried rice—not necessarily with pork, but with leftover turkey and chicken.
When I went off to college, I joined the American-Asian Alliance at Humbolt State University. It was the first official Asian-American organization. When I went to school, Humbolt State was actively trying to recruit minority students to attend their campus. In the social functions, I was exposed to lots of other kinds of Asian foods.
And then, in graduate school, I ended up working for a Chinese American restaurant in Humbolt County. And again my palate was enlarged by the dishes they cooked. When they had their dinner breaks or lunch breaks, since they knew I was Chinese as well, they invited me to join them.
* * *
The things that I really have fond memories of, from childhood, are two major soups that my dad would cook. And it would take all day to cook them.
There was one soup that he made. I didn't discover until I went to China, in 1992, that it was congee. I always knew it as Turkey Rice Soup.
When Thanksgiving was done, or Christmas—we had turkey then as well, because it was a cheap meat for a big family—there were always leftovers. And what he did is that my dad took the carcass, and he would boil down the turkey carcass with the meat scraps on it. And then, once he removed the carcass, then he would drop rice in, and then add various vegetables. And that's what we ate, off and on, for the next couple of days. It was a meal that could be stretched.
The current version of congee is really thick, and you have all these condiments that you can add to it. But we didn't have that. We just had the luxury of having turkey meat in it and then throwing green onions in it, and maybe some fried eggs on it, if you wanted to add that. But it was a very basic and simple soup.
And there's another one, which I I haven't seen since I was a child. My dad's philosophy was he would make this special soup for us when we had the flu or whatever. You took a pork butt, and you boiled it. And because meat in those days was pretty tough, you boiled it all day with the bone and the soup, and the meat would fall apart.
But what he would add to that soup—and it would be cooking all day—is some dried oysters. Because it changed the flavor. And dried bean curd. You need to boil those a whole day as well. Those two main ingredients were thrown in the pot with that pork butt, and that cooked all day. And then in the evening, that was the soup that he would serve us if we were ill.
I haven’t had it in a while, because when I go to the markets, I don't remember really seeing dried oysters. In Chinatown, the stores that I went to as a child no longer exist. I realize that the owners they were already in their forties and fifties when I was a little girl, and I'm 60-something now, so I know that a good majority of the stores that I have gone to over the years, they all want to retire. So they're disappearing really quickly.
I don’t have recipes, I just have fond memories of them. I know what the basic ingredients are. And the way my dad would cook—as well as I—is partly by taste.
These days there are certain things that I cook, like pork with the five spices. And one of the things that I do a lot of is making my own version of won ton soup, and the basics, like egg rolls. Those are ones that I kind of do a lot of.
I also do fried rice all the time. I try to do it with brown rice, which I'm not real thrilled with, and trying to do it with a cauliflower now, it's like a whole different world, right? We're all trying to eat healthy. And so it goes.
Recipe: Turkey Rice Soup (Turkey Congee)
Lorraine makes this turkey congee a little bit differently than her dad did. She starts by sautéing some vegetables in the pot before boiling the carcass, and she sometimes adds some turkey-flavored bullion to bump up the flavor. She also uses a relatively small amount of rice, compared to traditional recipes, so that there’s a higher protein to carb ratio. But she goes all-in on the toppings, roasting some salt pork or pork belly with five spice the night before, and adding scallion greens and fresh ginger. “I may even add a little zucchini,” she said, laughing, the day she showed me how to make this dish.
Lorraine also noted that her father basted their turkey with soy sauce and put a bacon rind on it while it roasted. But any way you roast your turkey, this congee is delicious. (I tried it out a few days ago, after roasting a turkey leg and some wings with just olive oil and salt, and it was one of the most comforting dishes I’ve had in a long time.)
Total Cook Time: 3 hours
Active Cook Time: 45 minutes
Ingredients:
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
4 celery ribs, diced
2 carrots, diced
½ yellow onion, diced
1 turkey carcass with about 2 cups meat (the meat can be on the carcass or cut off)
Up to 3 tablespoons Better Than Bullion, roast turkey flavor (optional)
Salt, to taste
Ground white or black pepper, to taste
1 ½ cups jasmine rice
Optional Toppings:
Eggs, fried or scrambled
Pork belly seasoned with Five Spice (a small piece, roasted for about 45 minutes at 350°, until golden brown)
Scallion greens, cut into ½” long pieces
Ginger, peeled and minced
1. Heat the vegetable oil in a large stock pot, and sauté the celery, carrot, and onion until soft, about 5 minutes. Add the turkey carcass and meat to the pot, and add 10 cups of water.
2. Bring the water to a rolling boil, then turn the heat to low, and simmer the soup, covered, for about 2 hours.
3. When the soup is done, remove the turkey carcass. Pick off the meat, and put it back in the broth; discard the bones. Taste the soup and add bullion, salt, and pepper to taste.
4. Bring the soup back to a rolling boil. Put the rice in a sieve and rinse it under running water until the water runs clear, then add it to the soup.
5. Bring the soup back to a boil, and cook, stirring the rice frequently, until it is very soft but hasn’t lost its shape. “You have to keep stirring the rice so that it doesn’t clump together and it becomes really fluffy,” says Lorraine. “You don’t want it to sink to the bottom and burn.”
6. After about 25 minutes, the rice will be fully cooked and soft. Taste the congee and add more seasoning if necessary.
7. Serve the turkey congee in bowls with the topping on the side, so that people can add their own.
More California Stories to Read, Watch, and Listen To
I first interviewed Lorraine for an SFGate.com article about the remnants of Northern California’s oldest Chinatowns. If you want to know more about these pieces of the state’s history, check out the article HERE. KQED’s The California Report Magazine recently did a show about their favorite local food stories from the past decade or so. Listen HERE. And if you haven’t seen it yet, check out my dear friend Elizabeth Poett’s new show about ranching and cooking in California’s Central coast, Ranch to Table, streaming on the Magnolia Network.