by Josh Ajiwibawa ’25
Mr. Lum is an instrumental part of the English department here at Bellarmine, teaching a variety of courses ranging from film composition to creative writing. He is an alumnus of the Bellarmine Class of ’02, and has worked as a film writer in addition to his teaching career. Outside of the classroom, you can typically find him working with the Bellarmine Theatre Arts program, where his talents are directed in musicals.
But in addition to his work in visual arts, Mr. Lum boasts a remarkable depth of expertise in the culinary arts. At the recent Golden Bell Auction, one of the most sought-after items was Amuse Bouche, pictured in the cover, with French Onion Tart, Beet Profiterole with Goat Cheese Mousse, salmon crudo with a sauce of apple cider, saki, and oolong tea. The meal was sold for nearly 11,000 dollars!
This week, the Bell Online sat down with Mr. Lum to interview him on his history with cooking as well and his diverse repertoire, with a philosophical twist.
Q: How did you get into cooking?
A: As a child, I always did the family’s dishes because my mother and father had a rule in our household that the person who does not cook cleans. One day, I told them that I wanted to cook dinner. For those next two days I made box mac and cheese and ice cream sandwiches, where I essentially took two cookies and put ice cream between them. My parents then changed the rule. They told me that if they could make dinner better than me, then I couldn’t cook.
In my mind, a gauntlet was thrown down just then. My father is Chinese, born and raised in Hawaii, and cooks primarily Asian cuisines. My mother is Irish, born and raised in Kansas City, and so she makes a lot of American comfort food and Irish food. I took what I knew to start learning cuisines they didn’t make regularly. Because Food Network didn’t exist at the time and the internet wasn’t easily accessible, I watched cooking shows on PBS to learn how to cook. I was influenced by Lidia Bastianich, who cooked Italian, and Jacques Pepin, who cooked French, and so I began to make French and Italian food that my parents couldn’t cook better, because they didn’t know how to make them!
Q: What is your most memorable cooking experience?
A: This past year, Bellarmine decided to auction off a five-course dinner that I would make, and I would work with Ryan Smith of the Bell Class of ’05. He is a sommelier, and he partially owns Enoteca, the wine store and restaurant, and so he would pair the dishes, and I would cook in Enoteca. I gave the family that bought the meal a survey, and I designed a meal around their preferences and executed that meal.
I also hosted a mentors’ dinner for two of my mentors when I was here at Bellarmine: Jim Harville and Tom Alessandri. Mr. Creech was also at that dinner, and it was a very memorable experience. On top of that, I cook for the alumni volunteers that help out around Bell every year at my house, preparing a multi-course meal for them.
Q: What is your favorite dish you’ve ever made?
A: I don’t have a singular dish that is my favorite, although I lean towards Italian cuisine. If I had I had to pick a type of food that is my favorite within that category, that would be homemade pasta. But while I can’t say it’s a single dish because there are so many different types of pasta, pasta is that go-to thing that I absolutely adore.
Q: Is there a cuisine you find most difficult cuisine to cook?
A: I think that different cuisines have different cooking philosophies behind them, and understanding those philosophies make dishes easier to cook. It’s not so much that one cuisine is more difficult to cook than another. Chinese cuisine doesn’t have one famous book that is the heart of their cuisine that no other major cuisine has. Italy has The Silver Spoon – a book that goes into Italian food philosophy and has so many of the major Italian dishes contained within it. French cuisine has the book from Cordon Bleu with its famous iteration of what the five French mother sauces are. On the contrary, in China, recipes are kept secret by families, and when they’re given to others, they’re usually given incomplete so that a person can never completely replicate that dish. So if I had to choose philosophy, it would probably be this type.
My experiences cooking Chinese stem from my receiving recipes from my great uncle, who owned a restaurant. However, I would always feel like I was doing them wrong when my food didn’t taste as good, until I learned that he wasn’t giving me the actual recipe. The secretness of that type of cuisine in particular and the lack of a way to explain the philosophy that’s contained in that seminal text or something makes it more difficult in my mind to cook. Another cooking philosophy that I am not familiar with is Indian cuisine. It’s not that I find Indian food necessarily difficult, but I just don’t understand the philosophy of how flavors go together. I understand the idea of toasting spices in Indian food before you begin, but in terms of dry and moist spices, and which to choose, I don’t completely understand.
Q: Do you have any tips for beginners who want to learn how to cook?
A: We live in a day and age with such extraordinary resources that can be used to learn how to cook. There are so many YouTube channels that I think are great, like Binging with Babish – a great example of a person who’s made it their occupation to teach people to cook.
There are also great cookbooks in circulation. One of my favorite cookbooks to recommend to people is Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home. Jacques Pepin is a legend in the industry, and of course, Julia Child is one of the starring chefs of all time, introducing French technique and cuisine to American culture. Their book is really fascinating to me, and one of the texts I grew up with, because not only is it a straightforward book with detailed explanations on how to do things like deboning a chicken, but there are columns on the side that are Jacques’ way and Julia’s way specifically, where they will disagree on how to cook something. It gives you both perspectives on the dish, and it helps you to understand that there’s not one right way to do things. Learning that, exploring both of their techniques, and seeing which works for you is a fantastic way for young people to start out.
For beginners particularly, I would never suggest doing something like starting with Julia Child’s famous cookbook on French cuisine and just cooking out of it. Some of those recipes take multiple days to do and involve techniques that are really difficult to pull off. But the Jacque and Julia cookbook, you can make pretty much every recipe in it.
This interview has been condensed and slightly modified for clarity.
Image obtained from gourmandfilmwriter.com, Mr. Lum’s website, with permission. Check it out!