Taikinapoika's Stand-in Visits Mini-Korea

For nearly three years now, the culinary skills of Taikinapoika's stand-in have boiled down to the magic words "May I have that to go, please". Life in Manhattan is a standard equation. On one side stand the boundless supply and relative cheapness of takeaway food and restaurants, on the other a tiny kitchenette, human laziness, and the cost and scarcity of good fresh groceries. Between them they have kept my cooking to a minimum. By my estimate I have made a proper hot meal at home three or four times since last July, the Christmas just gone included, even though I enjoyed cooking enormously when I lived in Finland. A couple of weeks as Taikinapoika's stand-in is therefore quite a challenge.

Besides the 50 per cent of our genes, Taikinapoika and I share a habit of talking about food all the time and an unending curiosity about what other countries eat. My brother used to hunt for goat meat in the halal butchers of Boston, and seemed to be testing every barbecue sauce under the Texas sky. What I enjoy most about New York is that the city is the larder of all nations. The painful trek home from a clogged airport is wonderfully eased by a meditative moment among dozens of kinds of olives and feta and buns dripping with ouzo at the Greek Titan Foods in Astoria. The heavenly pasteis de nata custard tarts and the guarana soda of the Portuguese Seabra's market do the same for the bridge and tunnel jams of the New Jersey Turnpike. And when the two of us travelled together last summer, one of the bright spots of the trip was a giant Mexican supermarket we came across in East LA. Each of us still has a souvenir from it, a molinillo, the Aztec-style wooden whisk for frothing cocoa.

Today chance offered a new opportunity to stock up for the coming week's attempts at cooking. An afternoon drive on Long Island, around the McMansions of Great Neck and Manhasset, culminated in the middle of Queens in an emergency stop and a swerve into the car park of a Korean supermarket. Inside was a maze of seaweed shelves and thirty kinds of sesame oil. The meat counter would have supplied fresh tripe, the fish department squid, and the vegetable section bracken fern and lotus root, which sadly stayed on the shelf this time. Of a huge share of the goods I could not even tell whether they belonged to the plant kingdom or the animal.

I have never been to Korea, but to my mind windy, foggy winter days are just the weather for the scurvy cure the Koreans came up with, kimchi, which is vegetables fermented with red pepper and garlic, most often cabbage, white radish or turnip. As I understand it, Koreans make the winter's kimchi in late autumn and by tradition bury the jars in the ground. My brother and I have both long dreamed of filling a cellar at home with kimchi of our own making, and once again nothing came of it. Why wait for days on the uncertain results of home fermentation, when a couple of dollars buys any of dozens of ready-made kimchis, each lovelier than the last, to be eaten at once?

I grabbed some bok choy kimchi and some radish kimchi, a tray of assorted sushi and, for dessert, brittle rice cakes that were sweet and salty at once. The cash register was decorated with blue and white cartoon characters. Boxing Day dinner was ready as soon as I had warmed a drop of sake to wash it down. The cleansing of the system from the artery-clogging remains of the Christmas table, the swede casserole and the beetroot salad called rosolli, may begin.