A love letter to congee from a white woman in America
Are you sick?
Broke?
Either so depressed or jacked-up on GLP-1’s that food no longer brings you joy, and you need something delicious that you can just heat up and shovel into your face every day so that you don’t die?
If any of these things apply to you, then you might need congee in your life.
Congee, zhou, jook, juk, kayu, lugaw, bubur—it has different names and toppings depending on what part of Asia you are in, but at its core, it is a savory rice porridge. If you, like me, are an American millennial with no Asian heritage, your first encounter with congee might have been in the animated Disney movie Mulan in 1998. It’s that bowl of white soup-looking stuff with the bacon-and-eggs smiley face that Mushu force-feeds Mulan for breakfast. Eight-year-old me idolized Mulan and I remember asking my mother if you could really put bacon and eggs on top of oatmeal and, if so, could I please try it?
My actual first experience with congee was at a dim sum restaurant with a small group of friends in my early 20’s. This was almost 15 years ago, back when the only Asian cuisines that corporate America had sunk its greedy talons into and made mainstream were “American” Chinese food, sushi, poke, boba, and pho. If you wanted dim sum and didn’t live in a massive, diverse city like Manhattan, you probably needed to get in your car and drive thirty minutes to an Asian shopping center, then look for a family-owned restaurant that served real Chinese food.
The guy who invited us to the restaurant was Chinese and he went over the menu with all of us uncultured white folks to suggest what we should try first. We got peking duck, barbeque pork buns (the really good ones that are essentially meat-stuffed glazed donuts), an ocean of various dumplings, sticky rice in *lotus leaves, and chicken feet. It was all delicious, but I was breathtakingly hungover and had only left the house out of love for my friends. Like, I had the shakes. When I told him this, he said something in Mandarin to one of the cart-pushing ladies. As she walked away, he told me that I needed pork congee with century egg and that he had ordered me some.
“...Century eggs. Like, the fermented eggs,” I said.
“Yeah, the black ones,” he agreed cheerfully.
“Dude, no disrespect, but I don’t know if my body can handle fermented eggs right now.”
“Just trust me. This is the #1 hangover cure. And century eggs get a bad rap, but they make food taste good.” When I looked unconvinced, he put on this fake-offended face and said something like, “Oh, I’m sorry, is the food from my childhood gross to you? Are you hating on my culture? Are you like a fucking racist or something?”, because he was an asshole.
But he was right. It was pretty much medicine. The porridge itself had a very delicate flavor, but the bits of pork and century egg were umami bombs that elevated it into something incredible. It had the same “heartwarming” effect as good chicken soup—the homemade stuff that simmers in a pot all day until it has layers and layers of flavor. I loaded mine up with sesame oil, soy sauce, and chili oil and practically licked the bowl clean when I had finished.
My second experience with congee was about seven years later, when I was living alone in a tiny apartment in the city. COVID was in full swing and I was dirt poor and fucking sick. I had a hankering for congee and, after learning how simple the recipe was, I decided to make a ton of it to eat until the plague had been exorcised from my body. I only needed rice, ginger, garlic, water (or broth), and salt. I put it all in a big pot and kept it on a low boil for a few hours, adding more water periodically as it evaporated, until the rice had broken down in the water. Boom, I had congee. It definitely wasn’t as good as the stuff I got at the dim sum restaurant, but it was still warm and comforting. It gave me life. And I’m no good at math, but I’m pretty sure that price-wise, it’s the mother of all struggle meals.
It’s also versatile as hell. When it was on my rotation of broke bitch meals, I just fried an egg and put that on top, then dressed it with scallions, sesame oil, and soy sauce. It still tasted great. Later, I tried recipes with dried scallops (my new favorite), chicken thighs, and pork belly. It's all lovely. I could probably eat congee for a month straight and still be stoked when I see it on a menu.
So, not to be dramatic, but congee was the warm, sticky, savory answer to my life’s problems and it could be the same for yours. I made some today because I’m going through the aforementioned GLP-1 issue and decided I needed to rant about it. Thanks for reading this literal essay about my obsession with rice porridge, I guess?
Edit: Omg, I've absorbed so much congee-related knowledge in the past 24 hours and have a ton of new recipes to try. Thank you all for sharing your stories/recipes/tips with me!