Molly O'Neill's "Home for Dinner"

Jacques de Loustal, illustration for Molly O'Neill's "Home for Dinner"

I see Molly O’Neill died last Sunday (June 16, 2019). She wrote one of my favorite New Yorker food pieces – “Home for Dinner” (July 23, 2001), a profile of Sottha Khunn, a leading New York chef, who’d recently quit his job at the famed Le Cirque restaurant and gone home – back to Siem Reap, the town in Cambodia, where he’d grown up. O’Neill visits Khunn in Siem Reap. Her piece begins vividly:

One morning last winter, Sottha Khunn – the chef whose fourteen-year reign at Le Cirque earned him international fame and a four-star rating from the Times – sat on his mother’s terrace in Cambodia, wearing Yves Saint Laurent boxer shorts and peeling mangoes. It was not yet 5 A.M., the temperature was already ninety degrees, and the landscape was silent and still, as if swept by a hurricane that had long since moved on. Below, in the predawn light, was a jungle of a garden and a high locked gate; the trees that fringed the scrubby field across the road were violet silhouettes.

I read that and just kept going, absorbed in the narrative (a great chef trying to reconcile himself to his past with one perfect meal), devouring the delicious prose. Here’s a sample, a description of some of the dishes that Khunn’s mother, a key figure in the piece, cooked for him and O'Neill:

She made tiny spring rolls stuffed with crab, frogs stuffed with minced pork and lemongrass, curried fish with bamboo and water lilies. She made pork stewed in carmelized palm sugar, peppered beef with peanuts, and stir-fried chicken with pea-sized eggplants. She made vegetable broth with banana blossoms and fish balls, and pork broth soured with tamarind, thickened slightly with rice starch, and chock full of tiny shrimp and greens. She viewed the food she cooked for her firstborn as a mother’s conversation with an amnesiac. She often spoke about Sottha – usually within his hearing. “I wonder if food tastes like he remembers,” she said to me one day, “or if he doesn’t remember, or if the cooking changes because we change.”

O’Neill is gone now, gone too soon, at age sixty-six. But she lives on in her writings, including her wonderful “Home for Dinner.”

Culinary Quests

In conjunction with The New Yorker’s launch of its new Food & Travel Issue this week, the magazine’s online Archive spotlights eight classic New Yorker “culinary journey” pieces: Susan Orlean’s "The Homesick Restaurant" (January 15, 1996); Calvin Trillin’s "Where's Chang?" (March 1, 2010); Adam Gopnik’s "Sweet Revolution" (January 3, 2011); Elif Batuman’s "The Memory Kitchen" (April 9, 2010); Bill Buford’s "Extreme Chocolate" (October 29, 2007); Kelefa Sanneh’s "Sacred Grounds" (November 21, 2011); Jane Kramer’s "Spice Routes" (September 3, 2007); and Dana Goodyear’s "The Missionary" (January 30, 2012).

I relish “culinary journey” writing, particularly a subcategory I call “culinary quests,” in which the writer searches for, say, the perfect pumpernickel bagel (Calvin Trillin’s "The Magic Bagel," March 20, 2000), or a golden-brown Baumkuchen baked the traditional way (Mimi Sheraton’s "Spit Cake," November 23, 2009). My favorite New Yorker “culinary quest” piece is Molly O’Neill’s wonderful "Home For Dinner" (July 23, 2001), a “Letter From Cambodia,” in which O’Neill superbly describes Le Cirque chef Sottha Khunn’s return to his hometown, Siem Reap, to learn how to make the one quintessential Cambodian dish – “sea bass steamed over a broth of lemongrass and galangal (a gingerlike root), thickened with butter and enlivened with chopped tomatoes, chives, and basil” – that has always frustrated him (“He worked and reworked the dish, and it earned him critical praise, but he felt that some minute calibration between sweet and sour continued to elude him. ‘Not yet the perfect balance, the sensation that lets the customer taste the world as I taste it,’ he said”).

“Home For Dinner” ’s tagline (“A leading chef tries to reconcile himself to the past with one perfect meal”) neatly captures the story’s essence. If you enjoy culinary quests, as I do, you’ll likely devour Molly O’Neill’s great “Home For Dinner.”

Credit: The above photo by Hans Gissinger is from Mimi Sheraton’s "Spit Cake" (The New Yorker, November 23, 2009).