Aaron Reiss writing for the NYTimes about the oldest tofu shop in New York City and its sequel of sorts:
Paul Eng decided to confront a reality he had been facing most of his life: He was the heir to a tofu tradition who had no idea how to make tofu.
Mr. Eng’s grandfather learned the trade in the 1930s from fellow immigrants shortly after he arrived in Chinatown. He went on to open up a small tofu shop on Mott Street, called Fong Inn Too, and developed recipes that would become well loved in Chinatown for more than eighty years. When Mr. Eng’s parents closed the shop in 2017, the recipes, never written down, disappeared with it.
At one point, while trying to recreate those recipes, Mr. Eng asked one of his parents’ former employees how much baking soda a particular recipe called for. He said, “A cup.”
“A cup, like eight ounces? Like a U.S. standard cup measure?”
“No,” the man said, “a cup.”
“Like a coffee cup?”
“No, this one cup that we had at the shop.”
The cup, naturally, had been thrown out.
We all have been or will be there. This bit is coming for us all someday:
Fong On was known not only for its tofu but also for soy milk, rice cakes, grass jelly and a dozen other traditional products. Mr. Eng didn’t know how to make any of them, and he had almost nothing to work with. “We had dismantled all the old equipment and nothing was written down.” Not even his family members could recall enough detail to recreate their old specialties.
I once had a friend whose grandma made a shortbread crumble cake using odd cups that had been collected throughout the years for the measurements. This friend told me it was the only thing she wanted if her grandma passed away.
In Chinatown, the craft was often passed from more established immigrants to those more newly arrived.
Born in New York in 1966, Mr. Eng was part of a different generation — so he turned to YouTube.
And naturally, vegans in NYC are already stopping by Fong On. The article even mentions one of my favorite food-lovers in NYC, Crystal Pang aka @veganeatsnyc, who of course has already found this spot.
I love that articles like this help share the story and history of tofu. I know we’ve all had bad experiences with tofu, and stories like this help people appreciate the work that goes into it — and hopefully take the time to see how to prepare it, whether plain or like Yotam Ottolenghi’s perfect Black Pepper tofu recipe from Plenty.