Afternoon Delight
A simple can, a superb afterschool snack. Recipe writer and food stylist Vivian Lui shares her favorite canned-food memory.
As told to Lisa Butterworth
Photos by Andrew Bui
Prop styling by Nidia Cueva
Food styling by Caroline Hwang
My parents are from Hong Kong; that’s where they met before moving to the U.S. in the ’70s. I’m first-generation, and I grew up in the suburbs of Berkeley. My mom and dad worked, so my sister and I were latchkey kids, but we always ate dinner together. My mom made a home-cooked meal every night, and we’d sit down at our mid-century modern table from Scandinavian Designs. The TV would be on, but we were never in front of it—you could hear Jeopardy! or whatever the nightly baseball or football game was. There’s a dish my mom always made: diced dark chicken meat mixed with two cans of cream corn and those little Chinese straw mushrooms out of a can over rice—very Hong Kong–café food.
After school, though, we were left to our own devices. I think that’s where a lot of my snack exploration came from. Our pantry was a mix—Maggi soy sauce, Spam, Miracle Whip, condensed milk. On the weekends, we would make toast with butter or margarine, and drizzle condensed milk on top. Once we saw what American kids ate at school, that’s what we would request—potato chips, Bagel Bites, Kraft singles. All I wanted was a ham and cheese sandwich, not the foil-wrapped salt-baked chicken drumstick in my lunch. When you’re young you want what everyone else is having, but by high school I was like, oh my God, yes, I want the fried rice instead of the random cafeteria food.
Our after-school snacks ranged from frozen Foster Farms corn dogs to Marie Callender’s chicken pot pie. On the complete opposite end, my mom would make us fold store-bought dumpling wrappers with homemade filling that she would freeze. My sister and I would heat those up for an after-school snack, too.
But my favorite was Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, the condensed kind you had to mix with water or milk. I know Americans use it to top off chicken or green beans for the holidays, but I loved it as an after-school snack. We had a very ’70s kitchen with linoleum flooring that was different shades of brown and a coil stove top my parents would line with aluminum foil for easy cleaning. They had really shitty thin sauce pots, and I’d put the soup on and those electric coils were hard to control. I’d turn it on high because I didn’t want to wait, and the milk would boil over every time. My mom would come home and be like, “Did you make cream of mushroom soup today?” “No, I didn’t.” And it’s like, the evidence is fully caked on, crusted, and dried.
I haven’t had it recently, but for Thanksgiving I did a mushroom gravy with mashed potatoes, and somebody said, “This definitely tastes like a really good, creamy mushroom soup.” I was like, Oh, see, deep inside, that’s what I’m always thinking—my full love of cream of mushroom soup. There’s nothing like the things that remind you of your childhood favorite foods to set you right.
