I'll be honest. It's not really big enough a deal for me to be actually offended: no one's getting passed over for a job, no one's getting beaten in the street. Maybe the writer happens to go to a traumatizingly gruff dry cleaner, and the racial stereotype wasn't even intended.

The (coincidentally) Australian arm of KFC took serious heat a couple of months ago for an ostensibly racist commercial that had a white man making peace with hostile black Caribbean cricket fans with a bucket of fried chicken. It wasn't really a fair controversy -- the racial stereotype of blacks as going goo-goo for fried chicken doesn't really exist in Australia or in the Caribbean. Sometimes totally innocuous jokes go over poorly in other parts of the world. Baggage sometimes gets found in translation.

But early Chinese immigrants in Australia did, in fact, work in clothes washing before graduating to other industries. (In the UK, as well; the piece was originally published by the London Telegraph.) Someone out there's going to be unhappy about this. I mean, could you imagine, "The cooks in that Jewish deli were so bad, it's like they were busy making loans, not pastrami!"?

And as a bonus, they're about the easiest things on the planet to cook: They take just minutes, they tell you when they're done, they make their own broth, and you can dress them up or down. And if you just remember a basic framework, you can make them in any number of variations.

Below is a phenomenal recipe, clams hot and fragrant with more black pepper than you ever thought possible, rounded out with a touch of sugar and Chinese oyster sauce. It's a presentation inspired by a traditional Malaysian way to serve crab, a dish I learned from Susan Feniger and Kajsa Alger, the chefs of Los Angeles' wonderful, globally inspired restaurant Street.

But the lesson of this recipe is in its basic elements: fat, aromatics, liquid, acid and fresh herbs, each of which does its own trick with the saline, earthy flavor of clams. The fat rounds the edges of the saltiness, the aromatics give fragrance and context, the liquid creates steam to cook the clams and dilutes their salty brine, the acid cuts through the heavy earthiness, and the herbs give the dish freshness, a brightness that lifts the flavor. In this case, we're using oil and butter for fat, garlic and black pepper for aromatics, water for steam, lime juice for acid, and cilantro for the herbal note.

But you can sub in whatever ingredients you want. A classic Italian way to steam clams, for instance, is to go with olive oil (fat), garlic (aromatic), white wine (liquid and acid), parsley (freshness), and sometimes a touch of hot chilies for more of the fresh, elevating effect. The dishes taste continents apart, but both follow the same basic principles. Once you read through (and, I hope, make!) the recipe below, you can pretty much make amazing steamed clams however you want, using this framework.

One last note about flavor: Like any bivalve, clams will taste different depending on where they're from, how much rain there's been, how they've been purged of sand after harvest, etc. One batch might be very mild and another very salty. So, while I usually believe in adding a little salt all through the cooking process, with clams I try to keep as much salt out of the dish until after they've given up their liquid and I know how salty it's going to be. If "Cuisine or Death" is the chef's motto, "taste and fix" is the cook's.

Malaysian black pepper clams
Serves 2 as a main course with steamed rice or noodles

2-2¼ pounds small clams, like little necks (If you're using little necks, that's about 2 dozen)
4 cloves garlic, minced (about 2 tablespoons)
2 teaspoons black pepper, freshly and finely ground. Measure after grinding. Yes, it's a workout
½ cup water
1 tablespoon sugar (palm sugar is great, if you have it)
2 teaspoons oyster sauce (usually available wherever you get soy sauce)
1 lime, halved
1 tablespoon butter, cold, cut into 2 pieces
4 sprigs cilantro, roughly chopped
1½ tablespoons vegetable oil

1. First, clean the clams: OK, so after I did my best on selling you on clams, I have to tell you that I live in constant fear of biting into one and finding sand. It's harrowing. Luckily, most commercially harvested clams these days are already purged of grit, so you can forget all those bits of advice like soaking them with cornmeal. But there will likely still be grit on the shells; soak the clams in cold fresh water for a few minutes, scrub or rub them with your fingers to get them clean, and pour off the water. Rinse a few times, and drain.
2. Choose a heavy pan with a snug-fitting lid, wide enough to fit most of the clams in one layer. In it, heat the oil over the highest heat until it's shimmery and nearly smoking-hot. Add the garlic and stir or toss. As soon as it gets golden, which will happen in a few seconds, add the pepper, stir to release its flavor to the oil, and right away add the clams. The water clinging to the shells may sputter for a moment, but be brave and toss the clams until they are all coated and glistening with oil.
3. Add the water; it should sizzle and come to a boil very quickly. Add the sugar and the oyster sauce. Cover with the lid and shake the pan. Give the clams about two minutes in their sauna, uncover and remove any wide-opened clams to a separate bowl; they're cooked, and letting them steam further would turn them rubbery. (If they are just barely open, give them a little more time until they really pop.) Cover the pan and give it a shake, which helps the shells open wide. Uncover again after 30 seconds and repeat until all the clams are opened. If there are any really stubborn ones, like, the rest are done and these are just straight loungin' in the steam for minutes, throw them out; they probably died before you started cooking, and aren't safe to eat.
4. Turn off the heat, squeeze half a lime into the sauce, and stir in the butter, giving the sauce a nice sheen. Give it a taste. How is it? Delicious? A bit heavy? Squeeze in more lime. Too salty? Try a little more butter or dilute it with a little water, or add a touch more sugar. You want a sauce that tastes balanced, where no one flavor dominates the others, with a seawater note and a lingering, warming burn of pepper. When it's ready, add the clams back in and stir to sauce them up. Finish with the cilantro and serve with plenty of steamed rice or noodles.

As I broke down barbecued ducks, smelling richly of fat and five-spice, Si-fu concentrated on the nearly inaudible crackle coming from the oven, waiting for the pitch that would tell him it was time to take another look. I heard the clack of the latch again, the grumbling of the rail, the tack-tack-tack of nails, the scratch of steel wool scraping at too-dark skin, the rustle of a basting brush. Over and over I would hear these sounds when he worked the pig, for hours at a time, breathing in thick heat.

I'd been working with Si-fu for a week at Ho Ho BBQ, a tiny shop in a nondescript strip mall in suburban Toronto, learning how to roast meats in the Cantonese style. It was work that was supposed to be steeped, for me, in flavors of childhood, in memories of Chinatown walks with my parents. But charming memories don't get you very far when you're pushing around carcasses hanging like heavy bags in a boxing gym.

The pig was done. It was a good one, meaning that the bubbles were all trapped inside the skin, making it crackly but also incredibly light, with a texture like Rice Krispies. It threw its heat around the room as Si-fu took a breath and hoisted, squeezing his bony frame through the narrow shop toward a display case. Ideally, he would have waited for it to rest, but the customers were wild-eyed and he came back to it with a big blade and intention. He knelt, only this wasn't a devotional act. He performed an awkward upward stroke with grace, cleaving one half from the backbone, and began cutting off customers' orders. The knife sailed through meat and skin, making a sound like walking on potato chips.

After the rush, he cut me a piece and I saw what all the work was for: crisp yet dissolving skin, tender meat, and lush, velvety fat. Textures in perfect balance and contrast. The flavor, too: Earlier, Si-fu had me cure the splayed-open pigs, massaging them with fistfuls of salt and sugar until the carcasses looked like snow at the moment you realize there'll be no school tomorrow. The cure has only a few hours to penetrate, giving each bite a heavily seasoned side and a clean, juicy side. The flavor was sweet, salty, complex, and then mild and pure, as fascinating as it was delicious. Si-fu looked at me. "Quality," he said.

When I was a kid, I'd ditch the TV and run to help my mother on the nights she brought home a Styrofoam box from Chinatown. Inside there would be duck like this, pork like this; half of it would be gone before the rice was cooked. It always felt like some kind of reward, but later I realized that it wasn't about me. It was about convenience. It was about being cheap and easy for Mom.

But the taste of that barbecue is mostly a memory. The places my mother used to go to have all either gone away or gone downhill. One night a few months ago, my great-uncle shook his head as we left Ho Ho. "It doesn't taste this good anywhere else anymore," he said. He talked about China as it was a half century ago, a place where everyone knew how to roast ducks so that they were as rich as these, how to roast pigs so that they were as crisp as these. I am never careful enough around nostalgists. I went back inside and asked Jacques Wong, the owner, to let me work with him for a while. He said yes so casually I didn't think he meant it. Then he said, "You know, it gets hot in here."

I learned a lot cooking at Ho Ho, but maybe most of all this: Whatever it was for Mom, none of this is easy. Not learning to see invisible bubbles or hear inaudible noises. Not standing in the heat of an oven twice the size of a refrigerator. Not butchering and butterflying whole animals. Not scalding ducks and pigs with heavy kettles of boiling water to tighten up their skins. Not hoisting pigs up the stairs, your knee hitting the backs of their heads and them hitting you right back. But Jacques Wong has been doing these things nearly every day for almost 30 years, the last 10 in this shop. I called him Si-fu, Cantonese for "master," at first out of convention, then quickly out of genuine respect.

Quality was the first thing Si-fu talked about when I arrived at Ho Ho BBQ. It's an idea that has a grip on him. He insists on buying nothing less than the best ingredients, on doing things the hard way, the right way. He tells me about the steps others will skip, the cheaper meats others use. But he is fixated on quality, and I suspect it's because his skills did not come to him easily.

When Si-fu fled China for Hong Kong, he learned to cook from chefs who kept secrets. For years, he plied them with food and drinks in return for lessons, sometimes spending a fifth of his meager pay. A sated cook would show him how to marinate meat; a hungry one would send him scurrying to scrub ovens. There was no complaint in his voice when he told me this, but he also said: "Of course, you have to end up better than your si-fu. You have to take what they teach you and add to it." His dedication to technique, to quality, is fueled by a fierce pride.

Customers came in spurts, and in the slower hours Si-fu had time to chat with them, handing out extra tidbits—a hock here, pieces of tofu there. Earlier I had watched him drop blocks of that tofu into the fryer with speed, showering his arms with hot fat. Now he's just giving it away. A regular came in for some bright red cha siu pork and offered Si-fu a lemon cake she'd baked. Si-fu cut himself a slice and urged others to do the same. "You should try some," he said to a customer who claimed not to like Western sweets. "You don't have to eat it if you don't like it. But you should taste someone else's culture." He offered to buy coffee for his staff, to go with the cake, and reached into a Styrofoam cup he keeps filled with cash for just this purpose. He reached in again for a little more to buy a lottery ticket.

Once, while waiting for a pig to start sizzling in the oven, Si-fu asked me why I hadn't written a book about Chinese food to coincide with the 2008 Olympics, when everyone would be interested. I admitted I hadn't thought of it. He shook his head with gentle disappointment. "You can't be lazy," he said. "You always have to be thinking if you want to make money."

But his own numbers seem hard to figure out. He pays a lot for his pigs, he admits, but he likes the quality he gets. "The guy I buy from's got a family to feed, too," Si-fu said. "Hell, maybe he has a couple of them." But after all the cutting and the curing and the scalding and the resting and the lifting and the roasting, if he manages to sell the whole thing, he nets $30.

It's a cruel irony that people are increasingly willing to shell out for artisanal foods, and yet for so many cooks plying their traditional crafts in immigrant communities, the numbers don't really add up. For Si-fu, it's a brutal calculation, and it's fine by him that his children don't want to take over when he retires. He doesn't want them to, despite his pride in his work. "You see how tired I am," he said. "This is not what my children go to school for." He just told the story of the immigrant in one sentence.

Still, I protested. What about all your hard-earned experience? Who will carry on this craft that you've learned? He smiled and pointed toward the notebook in my hand. "Besides, I learned to cook," he said. "When I retire, I can just relax and cook for myself and my friends. Cooking for them is the most satisfying thing I can think of to do." Then, I understood why he cut me good pieces from the pig all day long, why he hands out the tofu. His work is hard, but he also gets to give.

Back in the basement, I stared at 40 pounds of pork in the sink before pouring on the marinade that will turn it into cha siu. It was like a kiddie pool full of meat. I dug in with my hands, intensely aware of the cold pork, the salty grit, the slippery liquid. I tossed and folded at first, as if working a delicate dough, but then with an animal urge sank down to the elbow and stirred with my arm. I could feel my biceps warming, grinding through the resistance. I could feel my muscle working in this muscle, heard with satisfaction the sloshing and gurgling of so much meat and moisture. Behind me, Si-fu hauled out a massive propane stove and set water on to boil.

I ran upstairs to deliver a chicken and noticed that the case was nearly empty. There was hardly any pork left, a few bits and pieces, and I ran back down to report. Si-fu looked at the clock, a few hours from closing. He leaned on the table and thought. "Let them sell out. We'll just close up." He took a beer from the fridge and got back to work, showering hanging pigs with boiling water. Then he added, "It's not worth the gamble." By that he meant roasting one now and risking its not being sold. He doesn't sell leftovers. "I only sell fresh. You have to do things 'number one' if you want people to come back," he said. "That's why every step matters. That's why how you season matters. How you brush on the sauce matters. Sewing the ducks up so no marinade comes out matters."

Just then, I noticed one of the ducks springing a slight leak from its braided flap and pointed it out to him. He took a swig of his beer, his eyes glassing over with tiredness, and aimed his kettle full of water at another pig. "To hell with it," he said. No, I thought, his kids are not going to school for this.

Ho Ho BBQ 3833 Midland Ave., Scarborough, Ontario (416-321-9818)

For further stories on Si-fu Wong and his son, click here.

"Excuse me," I said. He came out of his Close Encounters of the Third Kind stare and I realized I willed myself to say something before I knew what to say. So I went, "Uh ... can I help you?" sounding like someone trying not very hard to sell him a television.

"Oh, hi," he said. Then, realizing why I was approaching, he said, "Oh, I live here. I'm just waiting for my girlfriend to toss some takeout at me."

"Excuse me?" I asked. "Someone is going to throw dinner at you?"

Just then he looked back up, and out of the glare of the security lamp, I could see the silhouette of a woman's head poke out from a window. She waved. "Hi, Babe!" she called in a dulcet tone while dangling a package much larger than I am comfortable seeing seven stories above my head.

When she let go of it, I felt that slight, disembodied panic you feel when there is something very strange happening right in front of you, but you kind of can't believe it's for real. The bag sailed down, more leisurely than I thought it would. Caught by the wind it bounced off the security lamp and landed - ploosh - into a small bush.

"We order takeout a lot," the man said to me. "And I hate having all these plastic containers piling up that the city won't recycle. So we bring them back and reuse them. I like the Thai place around the corner."

"Yeah, their papaya salad is great," I said.

He started walking away. "Yeah, we get it every time."

And if I were a cala, I would want Poppy Tooker teaching the world about me.

Poppy has the energy befitting a woman with three pugs, she wears earrings shaped like red beans, and the handles to her cupboards are fashioned like forks and knives. A native white New Orleanian, she's made the preservation of a cala -- a nearly forgotten treat with deep roots in Africa and the black communities of New Orleans -- a lifelong mission, ever since a customer bit into one and started weeping, telling her how they reminded him of his mother.

She learned how to make them from an old Creole chef, and since she is regarded as being largely responsible for their resurgence in the tradition-obsessed cuisine of today's New Orleans, she generally gets around questions of "authenticity."

But there is one somewhat controversial aspect of her recipe: Poppy uses baking powder. When calas were invented, who-knows-when in West Africa, they were leavened by letting the batter sit out, collecting natural yeasts overnight and fermenting. They probably had a bit of tang. And later, they were made by adding packaged yeast, like many bread doughs, and allowed to rise for a few hours. So there are those who insist on these methods. But, as Poppy says, "If using baking powder, which was invented before the time of the Civil War -- and being able to have calas for dessert from the rice you just had for dinner -- is just too modern and convenient for you, all I can say is 'sorry.'"

She has a point.

I personally have a real sensitivity to the taste of baking powder, which I find to be weirdly tinny and hot, but most people are fine with it in quantities much greater than I prefer. If you have a similar thing going on, the brilliant pastry chef and blogger Shuna Fish Lydon recommends Rumford brand, which has a subdued flavor. Or, even better, make your own, which takes about 15 seconds.

But either way, Poppy doesn't mind however you make calas, so long as you make them and eat them.

Calas
Makes 12 (you can double the recipe, but not more than that per batch)

2 cups cooked, cold rice
6 tablespoons flour
3 heaping tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
Dash nutmeg
2 eggs
¼ teaspoon vanilla
Vegetable oil (for deep frying)
Powdered sugar, for dusting

1. Set a large pan, at least 3 inches deep, over medium-low heat with about 2 inches of oil. You're just getting a head start on warming it up.
2. Make sure the rice is cold or at least room temperature. If it's hot, the sugar will dissolve into it, and the calas won't hold together. Working with a spoon or your fingers, break the rice up in a large bowl so there are no clumps. If you're not using an oil thermometer, take out a few grains, maybe 5 or 6, and reserve them. Add all the dry ingredients and mix them well into the rice; as you do so, the powders will stick to each grain making them look cartoonishly fat. It's kind of a strange, wonderful sight. (Or unnerving, if you were traumatized as a child like I was by the movie "Poltergeist.")
3. Crack in the eggs and vanilla and mix them in thoroughly, so there are no dry spots. Poppy uses a smearing motion with the back of the spoon to make sure the egg is totally incorporated. This is your batter. That's it. Easy, huh?
4. Check your oil. If you have a thermometer, you want it to be about 360 degrees. If not, drop in a grain of rice. It should be just hot enough to make that rice pop right up and sizzle immediately, but it shouldn't be incinerating it. Adjust the flame to get the oil to the right temperature, and then turn it to medium.
5. Form the calas into quenelles with two large tablespoons (here's a video for the method) and drop them in by tipping the head of the spoon toward the oil and pushing the batter off from the back, rounding it into a cute egg shape. When the calas go in the oil, they should sink to the bottom and the heat should be enough to make them come right back up, carried on a float of sizzling bubbles.
6. "It's an obedient food," Poppy says. By that she means that once one side has puffed and browned, it will roll itself over and the bottom will cook. If they don't, though, give them a gentle nudge. Work in batches, being sure to give them plenty of room to float around. Fry them until they are the color of good donuts, just past golden brown, but not much darker.
7. Remove them with a slotted spoon or tongs, drain them well on several sheets of paper towel, and dust them generously with powdered sugar. Serve hot, calling, "Belle calas, tout chaud!" 

An older black gentleman picked one up, walking away. He came back a few moments later, weeping. "My momma used to make these when I was a boy," he said to her. "I forgot all about them until now."

Poppy was intently inspecting her frying oil for heat as she told me this story from clear, easy memory. But then she looked up sharply. "You know," she said, "that calas brought that man's mother back to life for a moment."

But why had he forgotten about them? And why, despite being a life-long New Orleanian, had Poppy never heard of calas herself? So she looked into their history, and ever since, she has given lectures and classes with missionary zeal on how to make calas, and why we should celebrate their place on the American table.

"Calas came to New Orleans with the slaves from Ghana, where they grow rice," she told me. "Today, if you go there, you can still see people frying them, and they call them cala."

"Starting in the 1700s, calas vendors would stand outside St. Louis cathedral, waiting for church to let out. They had a call," Poppy said. She opened her mouth wide, as if singing, and recited, "Calas, calas, belle calas. Tout chaud!"

"She stood there, selling the calas from baskets perched on her head," she continued, visualizing the scene, describing the colonial class coming out of church in their Sunday finery, buying these treats. As Poppy told this story, I marveled at how she imagined herself into it, how she spoke as if she knew the calas ladies herself. But I guess being on the quest to spread this story for nearly 25 years will do that to a person.

"And here's why it's important. Before Louisiana became American with the Louisiana Purchase, it was the Code Noir that regulated all the roles and relationships between whites, free blacks, and slaves. And in the Code Noir, there were two important rules. One, all slaves had to have Sundays off, so many women would spend the day making and selling calas in the street.

"The other was that if slaves approached their owners and demanded to pay for their freedom, the owner had to accept. So it was with calas money that many slaves freed themselves," she said. "So this is an important dish! But during World War II the calas vendors disappeared because of food rationing, and they were mostly forgotten unless you had them at home."

I smiled, gladdened by this story, but later I learned that perhaps the history of calas and slavery was not so tidy. "This is slavery, dear," the scholar Jessica Harris said to me. "Histories of slavery are rarely tidy. It's complicated in this case, because there were lots of free people of color; not all calas vendors were enslaved. And the ones who were often sold them for their mistresses. If they were lucky, they were allowed to keep a portion of the money, or perhaps have it go towards their freedom."

The Code Noir, I also learned, was hardly a warm-and-fuzzy slave code, despite containing such charmingly progressive directives as forbidding owners from feeding their slaves a diet consisting only of rum. (Also charmingly, the first article in the Code Noir basically says "NO JEWS ALLOWED.") And it was technically not under the Code Noir that slaves bought their own freedom. "Remember," the writer and filmmaker Lolis Eric Elie reminded me, "for much of the colonial era, New Orleans was under Spanish rule, and the Spanish slave codes included the practice of Coartacion, which is what gave slaves the right to buy their own freedom. So there were calas vendors who freed themselves. (That stopped when Americans took over, though, who proposed instead that free blacks choose a master and re-enter into slavery.)"

Still, while the story might be somewhat less neat than suggested, for Poppy, calas also contain a larger truth.

"Lolis denies this," Poppy told me, "but he once said to me, 'I think if you have the calas tradition in your family and y'all think you're all-white folks, you have to look a little harder in your background.'" 

I confess to wondering, when she said that, why this white woman had made the renewal of the calas her personal mission, even with its fascinating story.

"Two years ago," she said, "I was making them for a convention here, and a chef came to help me. Afterwards, he said, 'These brought me right back to my childhood!' I looked at him, surprised. He was as white as me! But then he said, 'My grandmother was black.'"

"That's the thing," Poppy continued. "Here, we're all so commingled. You would never know." I looked at her posters celebrating Rex, the King of Mardi Gras, and I understood what she meant. Sometimes blackness and whiteness matters less than being of this place, of New Orleans.

Check back tomorrow for Poppy's calas recipe.