#1: Letitia — Food, Cooking, San Francisco

How a Masumoto peach connected me to a foodie's foodie

I started “Mia’s Queue” to pass the baton to the friends who inspire me every day with their passion for sniffing out the best music, art, food, books, podcasts, TV, etc. These people are the secret weapons among us! They don’t care about growing their social following or becoming a “name” — they’re too cool for that. They’re thoughtful, curious and fun, and I couldn’t live without them or their recommendations. 

First up is Letitia. I know Letitia because of a delicious peach and a coincidence. Letitia and I were visiting a mutual friend up in Sonoma but missed each other by 24 hours. Letitia had left behind a crate of Masumoto peaches as a house gift. It was the most perfect tasting peach. I had to know who brought such an amazing offering. We were connected by text, and the rest is food friend history.

Letitia is rabid about Good Food, and I adore her devotion to quality. Her Instagram is curated to the hilt such that she stays up on restaurant openings, pop-ups, and condiments and other food products that look worthy of a try. So far, she has turned me on to barley tea, yuzu hot sauce, and restaurants like Rintaro and Good Good Culture Club. My life would be so much more bland without Letitia!

Letitia ready to dig in in Copenhagen

You and I have bonded a lot over food. Why are you so passionate about it?

This is probably something I'm sure you've heard from many people, but food is part of my family experience. My paternal grandmother, who basically raised me, was like the most amazing cook. My whole family absolutely loves food. That's how we connect.

My dad lives in the south of Taiwan, in a small city called Tainan, which is the historical capital of Taiwan. [When I visit], all we do is basically just go out and eat. Ever since I was a child, food was very much a way my family showed love. Every time I would talk to my grandmother on the phone when I was older, the two questions she would ask me is: 1) Are you eating enough? 2) Are you dressing warmly? It was her way of making sure that I was being taken care of.

What did your grandmother cook that resonated with you?

I mean, what didn't she make? It was the care and the pride she took in the craft as well. 

There's something that's like “Taiwanese tamales” but instead of using cornmeal or masa, it uses sticky rice, and instead of using corn husks as the wrapper, they use bamboo leafs. It's incredibly labor intensive and you can buy all ingredients pre made, but she basically prepared each ingredient from scratch, basically. [For example], days before my grandmother would buy raw peanuts, stew them, shell them, prepare them, put them aside, but did that with like every single ingredient…like two dozen of them! 

There was this notion that there is a right way to do things, to take the care to actually prepare everything and that the end product would actually reflect that. 

A segment of Letitia’s cookbook shelf.

And then once you left home, how did your love of food develop? 

[When I was in grad school at Columbia], there was a woman who was very influential in my life as well, who was an old friend of my mother's; they worked together for 30+ years at Columbia. I call her my French godmother. Her name was Françoise Levinthal, and she was amazing. She also had a great love and appreciation for food as many French do and so I would spend a lot of time with her cooking. The things she did weren't necessarily fancy; they were actually pretty simple in retrospect. But I also learned from her that there is a right and a wrong way to do everything in the kitchen. So there were just some really important women in my life who had a love of food and used food as a way to bring people that they cared about together. 

It does feel good to share food with others! Since I've known you, I’ve been struck by your generosity in this area. What are some of your favorite things to gift to others?

It's not my recipe, but there is a granola recipe that I discovered from Samin Nosrat. She has a granola recipe which she took from somebody else (and she gives that person credit; she doesn't pretend it's her recipe). But I have made this granola and shared it with people and people said, ‘you should start your own granola company.’ I'm like, It's not my recipe.

I am not a huge baker, but there was a year or two where I decided I was going to conquer baking. We were obsessed at the beginning of the pandemic with making these TEFF oatmeal raisin cookies. 

What would you recommend for condiments? You're my condiment guru and soon to be Head of Research for our condiment club. :) 

So, you know, usually people will just have the basic red chili flakes. But I found this at Rainbow:

 I don't know why I bought it. But I love coriander. And the fact that it has an extra spices in it. So when I have pizza, instead of just putting regular red chili flakes on it, I will use that. It's just much more flavorful. 

Another recommendation is limited edition and you can't get it anymore, but you know Red Boat? They make artisanal fish sauce. But this was a collab they did with Stuart Brioza of State Bird Provisions: their own spice blend called spice garden salt. 

There is also this amazing spice shop, La Compagnie Française des Poivres et des Épices, in this cute little square in Paris called Place de Furstemberg. There is a really great spice shop [there] and they have like 50 different types of salt. This one is their Viking salt from Denmark. It’s like the salt equivalent of the smoked olive oil that you bought me. 

What are some of your favorite restaurants in San Francisco? I know one of them: Rintaro.

Rintaro, obviously. 

For Italian, Ragazza, which is related to Gialina. And then for Italian that is a little more highbrow, Cotogna.

What about your favorite cookbooks?

Oh, that's really hard. I don't have just one. Cookbooks that I've made a lot of recipes from and repeatedly do so: Ottolenghi. I mean, the man is a genius, and he has a way of blending flavors that are just perfect. Jerusalem has some go-to recipes that are just absolutely phenomenal that I've made time and time again and are always delicious. Plenty is one of his earlier cookbooks, which is mostly vegetarian, and also has the most incredible recipes. So he has a version of baba ganoush, which is just mind-blowing and not a difficult recipe. 

And then there’s Mimi Thorisson, whom we got our dogs from. She has a couple of cookbooks, with some recipes that I've made time and time again. So there's a duck confit parmentier, which is basically like a fancy French shepherd's pie. So it's duck confit, shredded up, and then a layer of mashed potatoes on top and browned. 

There's something called a chou farçi, which is basically a fancier version of stuffed cabbage, where instead of rolling the cabbage, you make it into a cake shape. And you layer meat and cabbage and eating cabbage and you literally slice it like a cake.

From a Japanese perspective, I really have started enjoying cooking in a donabe, which is like a traditional clay or earthenware pot. And so like I have a whole cookbook that I'm staring at right now, which is just about cooking in a gentle way. 

Have you done any online cooking classes that you'd recommend?

There's this woman named Sonoko Sakai, who lives in the LA area. She teaches a lot of great classes. I took a soba making class with and then I signed up for a miso making class with her. 

Also: Dumpling Club. It’s founded by this wonderful woman in San Francisco, Cathay Bi. She worked at Google for years and got sick of corporate and so she quit and started a dumpling company. Growing up, I always had frozen dumplings in the freezer. So I subscribe and I get dumplings from her three times a month for three weeks. She taught a class and got me back on the dumpling making train, something I also did as a kid.

---

In case you haven’t noticed, I love people with good taste! In fact, I have a podcast about it for Flipboard. Take a listen if you haven’t already, and please drop me a comment if you have an idea for a guest for the show (or this newsletter).