We also ordered the Three Delicacies of the Earth ( 地三鮮, translated here as ‘sea spiced three vegetables’). Whenever I’ve had this dish before, it’s been greasy, heavy and unappetising: here, the aubergines, potatoes and peppers in a soy-dark sauce were certainly rich, but delicious with plain white rice. The undisputed piece de resistance, however, was the ‘Deep-fried pork in sweet and sour sauce’ (鍋包肉). Forget all those sickly-sweet, bright red sweet-sours you may have tasted in other Chinese restaurants, this was glorious: large, very thin slices of pork that had been lightly coated in batter and deep-fried to a perfect crispness, before being tossed with some slivered vegetables in a sophisticated, well-balanced sauce. Whoever was in the kitchen last night (presumably head chef Feng Yanshuang) was on top form, and fully in command of his fire (火候) and his flavours (調味).

The place, which is run by the folk behind the Leong’s Legends chain, is nice too, with its bookshelves and old black-and-white photographs of Manchuria on the walls, and we found the service good and friendly. Prices were very reasonable too: frankly, the amount of food we ordered could easily have fed three or four people with a little more rice on the side, and the bill came to £56.00, including a couple of glasses of wine. As something of a southern Chinese food snob, I really didn’t expect to be so won over by a Dongbei restaurant!!

Fortunately, I was able to sneak out of the hotel, where I passed a mobile 烧烤 stall where a man was grilling everything you could think of on bamboo sticks, and then found a whole row of little eateries selling dishes made with goat, a speciality of Jianyang (简阳), a town to the southeast of Chengdu.

The extensive menu at the place I chose included every part of the goat you can think of, made into cold dishes, hot dishes, snacks and nourishing soups. Some of the dishes were versions of mainstream classics such as twice-cooked pork and red-braised pork, but made with goat. Since I was on my own and had eaten a rather large dinner a few hours before, I avoided the large platters of fragrant-and-hot goat ribs and feet, and the goat blood in a fiery soup, but I did have a rather lovely bowlful of noodles topped with a spicy stew of pickled yard-long beans and – you’ve guessed it – minced goat. A perfect midnight feast, soothing and stomach-warming.

The garden of the Master of the Nets

You can read my article about Suzhou cuisine in today’s Financial Times Weekend.

Here are a few photographs from my various trips there: one of my favourite garden, the Garden of the Master of the Nets (网师园)；one of the Wumen Renjia restaurant courtyard, and other of the wonderful Mrs Sha, who runs it; and a couple of food.

Wumen Renjia

Mrs Sha Peizhi

Some appetisers

Delicious eel and pork noodles at Zhu Hong Xing

The Party Secretarys Wifes version

According to a report in the Daily Telegraph, a local government in Hunan is issuing precise instructions for making Mao’s favourite dish, Red-Braised Pork (hong shao rou 红烧肉), in an attempt to stem the flood of imitations. They are also attempting to standardise recipes for other dishes enjoyed by Mao, including stir-fried pork with peppers (nong jia chao rou 农家炒肉) and steamed fishhead with chillies (duojiao zheng yutou 剁椒蒸鱼头).

I was particularly amused by this because in the course of research for my Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook I was shown two different versions of this in Mao’s home village Shaoshan alone: one, made by the wife of the local Communist Party Secretary, was a simple dish of braised pork belly, cooked in lard with dark soy sauce to give colour, a dash of vinegar and a little sugar; the other, made in the kitchens of the Shaoshan Guesthouse, where I’d just had lunch with Mao’s nephew, was a more sophisticated dish, coloured with caramelised sugar (糖色), spiced with dried red

The Shaoshan Guesthouse version

chillies, star anise and ginger, and enhanced by some juices of fermented beancurd. Who can say which is truer to Mao’s own tastes?

The other thing is that local officials have said that true hongshao rou can only be made with the meat of some rare breed of pig from Ningxiang County. This I found hilarious, because of all people, Mao Zedong, a notorious lover of coarse grains, wild vegetables and robust peasant food , seems unlikely to have been concerned with the precise sourcing of his ingredients. I’m sure he would have left that to the refined, bourgeois gourmets he so despised.

You can hear me talking about this story on the BBC World Service this afternoon, here – it’s the last item in the programme.

Anyway, Francis’ article does suggest an explanation, which is that two other chefs in New York, David Keh and T.T.Wang, who had trained in Chef Peng’s Taipei restaurant and adopted many of his recipes, started calling the dish ‘General Tso’s chicken’, two years BEFORE Chef Peng opened his own restaurant in New York. Did Chef Peng adopt their translation for his own NYC menu?

Does this make sense, Francis, Ed Schoenfeld, Jennifer 8. Lee, my fellow General Tso sleuths?

(The photo on the left is of Chef Peng clinking glasses with Henry Kissinger in his New York Restaurant)

The roots of this prejudice must surely lie in the fact that one of the main selling points of Chinese food in the West, in the early days of Chinese immigration, was its low price. In his new book, Chop Suey, Andrew Coe writes about the ‘all you can eat for a dollar’ meals offered by Chinese restaurant in North America in the 19th Century. And Chinese cooking was always best known in the UK for the cheap takeaway.

In London, a turning point in the fortunes of Chinese food was the opening of Alan Yau’s Hakkasan in 2001. Finally, here was a Chinese restaurant so deeply glamorous, so utterly cool, that people were willing to pay European-food prices. He made things a lot easier for other entrepreneurs, including the owner of the restaurant for which I act as consultant, Barshu.

But do westerners in general see Chinese food, even at the highest levels, as something that should be cheaper than, say, French or Italian?

Discuss.

N.B. I’m reminded, here, of the astonishment of three Sichuanese chefs at the price of a simple lunch in the Chez Panisse cafe in Berkeley a few years ago. They couldn’t believe anyone would pay so much for ‘simple, homestyle food’! I’ve no doubt, however, that they would have been willing to shell out a fortune on a shark’s fin or some aged pu’er tea.

Mango pancake at the Sea Treasure restaurant in Sydney

I was intrigued while in Sydney to find ‘mango pancakes’ an apparent staple of Chinese restaurants there. I’ve never come across this speciality anywhere in China, even in Hong Kong (which some chatters on the Web suggest is its place of origin). For those of you who haven’t come across them, mango pancakes consist of a normal sort of pancake stuffed with whipped cream and chopped fresh mango – delicious, but not typically Chinese at all.

Is the mango pancake the General Tso’s chicken or the fortune cookie of Sydney (or the whole of Australia), i.e. a Chinese diaspora creation that has become an indispensable part of a particular immigrant Chinese culinary culture?

I’d love to hear from any blog-readers out there who know more… Has anyone seen this kind of mango pancake anywhere else in the world? Hong Kong? Other Australian cities? Anyone have any idea when it started to appear in Sydney Chinese restaurants? Do all Cantonese restaurants in Sydney, or Australia, serve them, or just a few? Please let me know!

]]> http://www.fuchsiadunlop.com/the-mystery-of-the-mango-pancake/feed/ 16