28 NOVEMBER 2019
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A Cook and a Book The musician behind Japanese
Breakfast cooks through a new Crescent City cookbook.
By Charlotte Druckman
YOUR FIRST CLUE THAT 30-year-old musician and writer
Michelle Zauner is into food is the name of her band: Japanese
Breakfast. She named it in 2013, when it was a pet project she
started while focused on another band. “At the time, a lot of the
blogs that I followed were [about] anime food,” Zauner says. “I
grew up watching a lot of anime, and Japanese breakfast was
always this very homey, cozy image, and I thought it would be
a good moniker.”
In 2014, her mother died, and not long after that, Zauner’s
side gig took off and its name became “slightly more confus-
ing to people,” she says. “After my mom passed away, I started
exploring Korean dishes and writing about it a lot. People were
going, ‘Well, why?’” But it was too late to change it, and besides,
Korean Breakfast “doesn’t have quite the same ring.”
She has written about the impact her mother’s death con-
tinues to have on her and how she has used food as a means of
coping with her mom’s absence. She addressed it in an essay
titled “Crying in H Mart” for the New Yorker, which led to a
book deal for her memoir, inspired by that piece.
Now, she cooks all the time—four or five nights a week, when
she isn’t on tour. And it’s always Korean food.
All the same, she’s looking forward to giving chef Justin
Devillier’s debut cookbook, The New Orleans Kitchen: Classic
Recipes and Modern Techniques for an Unrivaled Cuisine,
a try. It was the seafood recipes that piqued her interest,
so Pumpkin and Shellfish Bisque with Pumpkin Seed Pistou
(recipe p. 32) and Blue Crab Beignets (p. 32) were on the after-
noon’s agenda.
“I feel like a real American now that I’ve toasted pumpkin
seeds,” the native Oregonian says as she gets started on the pis-
tou, which is a pesto seen through French eyes. Standing at the
counter of the small, open kitchen in the Philadelphia apartment
BOOK REVIEW
photography by GREG DUPREE
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