Hot-Weather Comfort Food

Simone Tong was putting together a bowl of cold noodles, heap by delicious heap — salty ground pork, crushed peanuts, tiny mint leaves, florets of pickled cauliflower — a jumble of textures, lit up with vinegar and chile. It was a simple dish, and one she affectionately described as homey in an earlier conversation, when I told her that it was one of my favorite things, and that I wanted to learn how to make it at home.

At the restaurant she runs in the East Village, Little Tong Noodle Shop, Tong drops glowing charcoal into hissing oil, so that the oil is infused with its flavor. This way, she can add something close to the specific seared quality transmitted by a hot, seasoned wok, even to raw ingredients. She cures, smokes and dehydrates egg yolk, so that she can shave it in frills, simulating the umami of bonito, but with no tuna in sight. The shop seems cozy and informal, but that’s only because Tong is the kind of chef who doesn’t like to draw attention to her technique; you enjoy the food without realizing how much work has gone into it.
Tong was born in China and eventually came to the United States for college. During that time, she cooked for her friends at school and went back to Chengdu for the summers to work as a translator in her mother’s restaurant. A friend insisted she start watching some new television programs, and after streaming an episode of a food show that featured the chef Wylie Dufresne, Tong applied to a culinary school and hoped to extern at his restaurant, WD-50, which in time she did. She worked for him, and for other chefs, for years, all the while revising ideas for her own restaurant.

Tong is from Sichuan, but many of the flavors at Little Tong have roots in nearby Yunnan, a vast and diverse province, scattered with small family farms. Tong spent months there last year Airbnb-hopping, getting around through China’s ride-sharing app, Didi Chuxing, asking everyone she met, ‘‘What’s good?’’

In every town, there was a different answer: tarts filled with flower petals, eggs scrambled with young ferns, fresh cow’s-milk cheese dabbed with rose jam, beautiful dry-cured hams, marbled with fat. Tong tried mushroom varieties she didn’t have the words for, picked tea leaves to roast and realized it would be impossible to precisely replicate the food of the region back in New York. Instead she improvised, building the flavors of Yunnan into her menu like a guiding principle. ‘‘I wouldn’t say what I do is authentic,’’ she said, ‘‘and I wouldn’t want anyone to think that’s what I’m trying to do.’’

When I got home, I tried to make something similar, using whatever vegetables I had around, cooking it differently every time I made it. This could be another way of saying that in the kitchen I can be lazy, and cut corners, and I’ll do anything to avoid going food shopping at rush hour, which is often true, but Tong had encouraged me to swap and replace toppings according to mood and season. The essentials were pork, peanuts and herbs, she said, and everything else was flexible.
So I added what was around, what seemed compatible with vinegar-splashed rice noodles: chopped cucumbers, boiled soybeans, jarred pickled chiles, sliced watermelon radishes, leftover grilled corn, shaved off the cob. These versions were all a little different from Tong’s, and from each other, but delicious. On a particularly sweaty afternoon, my appetite and energy curbed by the heat, I had all the components ready, so I washed herbs and assembled lunch. It was a comfort, but a luxurious one, like an hour in an empty, cool movie theater on a summer day when the air doesn’t move and your thighs stick together and it feels as if the city is melting.