The book's back cover touts its author's 'layered perspective'...and that's the key to the book's strength, too – it examines food not as static, finished recipes but as evolving conversations between cultures and generations ... Lee is consistently willing to dive into unfamiliar places and challenging conversations to get stories that haven't yet been told, and the reader emerges from Buttermilk Graffiti richer for his efforts ... In short: Lee talks a lot, but he listens more. More than anything, Buttermilk Graffiti represents exactly the kind of inquiry that helps create a vibrant national food scene.
What readers think they know about America is sure to be challenged in Buttermilk Graffiti, an altogether eye-popping collection of essays that crisscrosses the United States and pulls back the curtain on what’s really being cooked in America today—and who is doing the cooking ... In the end, Buttermilk Graffiti is as much about politics as it is about food ... Using food as the way in, Buttermilk Graffiti is a timely and important work that reminds readers that America’s melting pot is alive and well in the most unexpected places.
Lee finds hope and joy in visiting ethnic communities all across the nation’s breadth ... He gathers recipes and inventively adapts them to his own tastes ... Lee’s most touching prose comes with his recounting of his Korean War–veteran father’s favorite food, an outlandish concoction of soy sauce, Korean chili paste, kimchi, tofu, fried bologna, and ramen noodles, topped with poached eggs and American cheese.
Thinking over the similarities of various plates of fried rice, [Lee] invokes Leibniz on the identity of indiscernibles, and moves on to Immanuel Kant. But suddenly he stops all his reflections, telling us 'I’m so full my eyelids start to flutter.' Which is why this book is such a success ... [Lee] is quick to dismiss mediocre food, but is also, like all great food writers, always on the verge of declaring the thing he is currently chewing on to be among the greatest things he’s ever eaten ... While reading Buttermilk Graffiti, I often found myself designing menus for [Lee] (would he like my deviled eggs with salmon roe and pork rinds?) and thinking of places to take him. He’s so amiable that as you read the book, you can easily imagine that he’s a friend, that your place is the next stop on his list.
...[an] excellent collection of culinary travel essays ... Lee is an eager mixer of styles and traditions ... It’s a sweet and heady mélange of travelogue, in which Lee plays the eager investigator chasing down cooks to figure out how or why they cooked a dish he ate ... Lee celebrates unexpected confluences of cuisines while refusing to be limited by definitions of 'authenticity.'
With plenty of lyrical appreciations of an impressively wide variety of cuisines, the author leaves readers craving the food he describes while also ready to attempt the advanced recipes at the end of each chapter ... A few hard transitions and seemingly unrelated stories may cause some confusion, but the author ultimately leads readers to a better understanding of the dishes he experienced and the recipes he provides ... A heartfelt and forward-thinking book in which Lee’s experiences and travel accounts successfully create an eager appetite.
