Anissa Helou beat me to it with her blog post about today’s culinary collaboration! Anyway, here’s mine. Anissa (a brilliant cook and food writer specialising in Middle Eastern culinary cultures) and I had been planning a joint Sino-Lebanese lunch for months, and we finally did it, sort of, because in the end it turned out to be Sino-Moroccan. I was in charge of the first course, Anissa of the main course and dessert. As I was cooking at home and planning a ‘Chinese takeaway’ delivery to Anissa’s place, it seemed like a good opportunity to use one of my Sichuanese cuan he ( 攒盒), the gorgeous lacquered boxes that are sometimes used for banquet appetisers. Each box comes with an ornamented lid – in this case a dragon and phoenix (see below), and a neat jigsaw of detachable compartments for the food. The smallest boxes have one central compartment with four others around: this is known as a ‘five-colour’ box. The one I used today is a ‘nine-colour’ box, although I cheated slightly because I only made eight dishes (as you can see, one is duplicated in two compartments).

These boxes bring a real sense of occasion to a meal, because you can present the box intact and then remove the lid with a theatrical flourish. With a small group, as we were today, you can just help yourself from the compartments in the box. If a larger number of people are gathered around a big round table, a waitress will often display the whole box, and then remove the compartments and distribute them around the  edges of the ‘lazy susan’ in the centre so that everyone can reach them.

Today’s menu was: spicy Sichuanese chicken (凉拌鸡), green soybeans with pickled ‘snow’ vegetable (雪菜毛豆), spicy cucumber salad (炝黄瓜), Shanghainese ‘smoked’ fish (熏鱼), kohlrabi salad (香油苤蓝), garland chrysanthemum leaves with firm tofu (豆干蒿菜), fish-fragrant aubergines (鱼香茄子) and pressed pig’s ear (顺风耳). I have my friend Jason’s mother to thank for the fish dish, as she taught me the recipe (see my blog post A Shanghainese dream). Fish-fragrant aubergines are normally served hot, but I think they are glorious served as a cold dish, like a Sichuanese reply to the Turkish imam bayildi.

After the Sichuanese phase of the culinary symphony, we had a scrumptious Moroccan lamb tagine with prunes, almonds and honey. The lamb was meltingly tender, the honey floral and aromatic, and the toasted nuts a fabulous textural contrast to the rest. (I have some leftovers to eat tomorrow – hooray!). We ate it with home-made semolina bread. (Should you wish to make this divine stew yourself, the recipe is now on FT.com). And then some of Anissa’s pistachio ice-cream with rosewater – mmmm. Anyway, as Anissa explains on her blog, we reckoned it didn’t really work perfectly to have entire courses of each nationality, so next time we’re going to try to serve dishes from the different traditions together, as part of the same spread. Can’t wait!

Clue: I was given it at the end of a grand banquet in Chengdu a few weeks ago, and I was the only guest at the table to receive one.

Good luck!

P.S. Apologies for my long absence from this blog. I’ve been busy in China… I’ll try to catch up now!

Photo by Damian Brandon

Chinese President Hu Jintao was honoured with a state banquet at the White House last night. Apparently he and his entourage had requested a ‘quintessentially American’ menu, and this is what they were given:

D’Anjou pear salad with farmstead goat cheese, fennel, black walnuts and white balsamic

Poached Maine lobster with orange-glazed carrots and black trumpet mushrooms

Lemon sorbet

Dry-aged rib eye with buttermilk crisp onions, double stuffed potatoes and creamed spinach

Old-fashioned apple pie with vanilla ice cream.

It would be fascinating to hear what President Hu actually made of the dinner. He grew up in Jiangsu, in the refined, rice-eating south of China, and has also lived in Gansu, Guizhou, Tibet and Beijing, though not, I think, abroad. I assume he’s had plenty of experience of foreign food on his international trips, and perhaps occasionally in Beijing, so perhaps he has cosmopolitan tastes. Many Chinese people, however, especially those of his generation, would be less than delighted with raw salad and goat’s cheese, and with the prospect of eating a whole slab of beef, even if the meat was well done (rare, pink-oozing meat is an atrocity in terms of Chinese gastronomy). The main complaint of Chinese gourmets when it comes to ‘Western food’, though, is that it’s simple and lacking in variety, as I’ve mentioned before. And, reading reports of the banquet, I couldn’t help remembering an article in the Guardian newspaper of former President Jiang Zemin’s visit to London in 1999, which mentioned that the personal belongings that had accompanied him to Buckingham Palace had included ‘boxes of Chinese food’. I had a sneaking suspicion that the poor man, subjected to days of unfamiliar food at unsufferable banquets, was expecting to have to resort to snacks of instant noodles every night before bed.

A Hunanese government banquet menu

By means of contrast, the menu on the right is from a provincial government banquet in Hunan that I attended in November, at the West Lake Pavilion restaurant in Changsha, the ‘biggest Chinese restaurant in the world’ (it can seat as many as 5000 in its various halls. I first wrote about this place in the Financial Times several years ago, and it was later the subject of a 3-part TV documentary). As you can see, the menu lists 24 dishes, if you include pickles and the final fruit platter: slivered bamboo shoots with preserved mustard greens, pickled sweet potato, radish skin, rustic mixed vegetables, peanuts in old wine, crisp ears with coriander, cold cooked beef, snake with chilli and ginger, secret-recipe turtle-meat, pig’s feet with pig’s stomach, West Lake head steamed in a bowl (can’t remember what this was!), large prawns with green chillies, ‘floating fragrance’

An operatic duet

aromatic duck, steamed Western Hunan smoked meats, mountain goat stewed with mung bean sheets, Hunan-style Dongpo pork, secret-recipe bighead carp, claypot Chinese yam, stir-fried smoked donkey, Liuyang mountain bamboo shoots in chicken stock, Liuyang yellow vegetable, blanched seasonal greens, West Lake steamed buns stuffed with meat, platter of cut fruit. The ingredients and the cooking methods are many and varied, and the menu showcases a number of famous local ingredients. It does, however, avoid the more extravagant Chinese delicacies, such as shark’s fin and sea cucumber, which might be seen as inappropriate at a feast held at public expense.

The ironic thing about grand Chinese banquets, though, is that it’s almost impossible to appreciate the food, as you might guess from my very sketchy account of the menu. Banquets in China are about so many things besides food, including, depending on the occasions, social relationships, business, face; hierarchy, sycophancy, bribery, festivity… Like President Hu’s state dinner at the White House, the Hunanese banquet was a formal occasion, and the guests had very little time actually to eat. The festivities commenced promptly as 6.30pm, and finished promptly at 8pm. In between, as the dishes came

Orangeade, red wine, baijiu and tea - all you need for toasting!

thick and fast from the kitchens, there were speeches, acrobatic performances, songs and dances performed on the grand stage at the front of the hall. For much of the time, the guests milled around the tables, toasting each other as individuals and in groups, with tiny cupfuls of bai jiu (strong grain spirits), red wine or (for the teetotallers) orangeade. The general manager of the restaurant, Qin Zhong, who was so kind to me when I lived in Changsha, took to the stage for a stunning operatic duet with a chef from Beijing (she used to be a professional singer). A Hunanese celebrity chef who lives in Japan gave a brilliant performance of a karaoke song on stage. I was press-ganged into making a very brief speech, but absolutely refused to sing a song! Meanwhile, about five hundred guests milled around, toasting, exchanging pleasantries, smoking cigarettes,

Cover girl

and trying to snatch mouthfuls of food from time to time.

For me, the funniest moment of the whole evening, and probably my entire trip, occurred during a conversation with the government official who was sitting next to me at that dinner. He had seen my photograph on the front page of the local Party Daily, Hunan Ribao, which had featured the food conference which we were all attending. ‘Ms Fu,’ he said, ‘I hope you realise that even senior leaders struggle to get their pictures on the front page of Hunan Ribao’. One thing I never thought I’d be was a cover girl for a communist newspaper.

As usual on such occasions, I left entertained but still hungry, and needed a midnight feast before I could sleep. I was reminded, as ever, of the Qing Dynasty gourmet and food writer Yuan Mei, who went home after a 40-course banquet and needed a bowlful of congee to fill his belly.

A midnight feast in my hotel: congee, buckwheat buns etc

Top wines have become a prestigious gift among business people in China; a bottle of famous claret is now an essential part of entertaining government officials, Chinese merchants said. Among the middle classes, Bordeaux is also seen as a sophisticated and healthy alternative to Chinese wines, which can contain up to 40% alcohol.

The piece quotes a Hong Kong investor, Sam Yip, as saying ”Everyone in China is thinking Lafite,” he said. “It is seen in the same light as Louis Vuitton, Prada and Gucci.” I can’t say I’ve ever been offered a glass of Lafite at a Chinese banquet, but I can see that it would sit rather nicely on the kind of table described to me by one Chinese chef, at a feast an entrepreneur threw for local government officials (read into that exactly what you will), alongside the abalone, shark’s fin, bird’s nest and humphead wrasse. That particular banquet, as described to me, cost the equivalent of about £8000 for one round table – so I’m sure a few grand on a bottle of wine would have been acceptable. Perhaps they were drinking Lafite anyway – the chef I spoke to only knew about the menu and the cost of the food.

Any of you got any tales of the bling factor at Chinese banquets? Or of expensive Bordeaux wines in China?

While I was writing it, I came across a page I tore out of the South China Morning Post in October last year. It includes a letter from Dr Choo-hoo Giam, a member of the animals committee of CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. What is particularly interesting about the letter is that Dr Giam points out the extent to which it is not only the Chinese and their notorious shark’s fin soup that are to blame for the devastation of worldwide shark stocks. The main points Dr Giam makes are as follows:

1. The notorious practice of ‘finning’ (where fishermen slice the fins from live sharks and discard the rest of the creature) does take place, but it is not the norm.  Most fins are removed from sharks after their deaths.

2. Many sharks are caught as bycatch by fishermen chasing tuna, swordfish and prawns – Dr Giam quotes a WWF source as saying that 100,000 sharks are caught as bycatch every year in the Mediterranean alone.

3. Many poor artisanal fishermen (and it’s artisanal fishermen who catch 80% of the world’s sharks) are too poor to throw away the bodies of the sharks – which are sold onto local markets.

4. Shark is widely eaten, including in Britain as ‘rock salmon’ or ‘huss’, in Germany as sea eel, and in Australia as ‘flake’. Indeed, ‘sharks are caught by all nations and races, for their meat. Fins are a valuable by-product.’

Dr Giam ends the letter by saying: ‘Campaigning to change the Asian palate is wrongly conceived. Shark’s are dying because of universal consumption and they will continue to die and deplete.’

Frankly, the last statement looks like a flimsy attempt at justification: it may be patronising for Westerners to blame the Chinese for eating shark’s fin when they eat shark meat, tuna, cod… and countless other endangered fish themselves, but that’s hardly an argument for everyone to go on eating shark’s fin soup. And, of course, the letter was published in the main English-language newspaper of Hong Kong, which is the world HQ of the shark’s fin trade, and where eating fins is very much part of banquet culture. But the letter as a whole certainly puts Western campaigners’ ire about shark’s fin into some perspective.

What do you blog readers think?