One Chinese vegetable that I always miss when I’m in London is green garlic, which the Sichuanese call suan miao 蒜苗 and people in other parts of China call qing suan 青蒜. These leafy, pungent alliums are the most common vegetable accompaniment to twice-cooked pork 回锅肉, and are also traditionally added to mapo tofu 麻婆豆腐. In Hunan, they are often used in simple stir-fries, perhaps with some of the glorious local smoked pork 腊肉. It’s rare to find them in England, so imagine my delight to find them on sale just before the Chinese New Year! You can see them on the righthand side of the chopping board in the picture on the left. As you will notice, they look very similar to Chinese green onions (a.k.a. scallions, spring onions), but they have flat leaves, like leeks, and a hint of purple around their bulbs. In my Sichuan cookery book I recommended using baby leeks for twice-cooked pork and spring onions for mapo tofu because green garlic is so rarely available, but if you can find it, snap it up and use it instead! (it takes rather less time to cook than baby leeks, and marginally longer than spring onions). Continue reading…
Cooking
Chinese food culture, Cooking, Festivals, Sichuanese cuisine / 12 Comments
Last year I gave you a few photographs of Chinese New Year in Hunan, 2004. This year, here are a couple of photographs of Chinese New Year meals in the far north of the country, in a remote part of Gansu Province in 1995. They were taken in the village that is the subject of the chapter ‘Hungry Ghosts’ in my book Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper. (Please forgive the poor quality of the images! I may try to scan them properly another time!)
On the right, you can see a pair of fish (fish are an almost obligatory part of New Year’s Eve dinners because nian nian you yu is a phrase that can mean both ‘fish every year’ and ‘plenty every year’: so the dish is an auspicious play on words.) Continue reading…
In the last month of the lunar year, the Sichuanese often cure their own meats: spicy wind-dried sausages, smoked bacon and marinated, wind-dried pork (酱肉)。I was hoping to make some sausages this year, but didn’t have time, so I made instead some jiang rou 酱肉。 It is pork leg that is salted for a few days, wind-dried, marinated in sweet fermented sauce (甜面酱)，rice wine, sugar and spices, and then wind-dried once again. You can see some in the photograph on the left, hanging outside my kitchen window. The weather is perfect now: cold but not freezing, rather like in Sichuan. Tomorrow night I will rinse some of the meat, steam it, slice it and then serve it as part of my New Year’s Eve dinner.
Afterwards:
I wanted to show you a couple of uses for this home-cured meat. On the right you can see how I served it on New Year’s Eve: simply rinsed, steamed, cooled, sliced and served with a dip of ground chillies (you can add a little ground roasted Sichuan pepper too, if you like). The meat has an intense umami flavour, a little like ham.
Another scrumptious use for it is to chop it finely and use it to add an umami deliciousness to fried rice or eight-treasure stuffings. Below you can see the fried rice I made with leftovers from the dinner: a little home-cured pork; an egg or two, beaten; finely chopped gai lan (Chinese broccoli); a little ginger and garlic; and a whisper of sesame oil to finish.
As usual, some of the leftovers of my family’s Christmas turkey ended up in a Sichuanese dressing on Boxing Day (as mentioned in Time Out): tamari soy sauce, Chinkiang vinegar, sugar, ground roasted Sichuan pepper, home-made chilli oil and a little turkey stock. A scattering of toasted sesame seeds would have been a nice garnish, but I forgot to bring them with me to my parents’ house. We served it alongside ham, potato salad, green salad, Chinese kohlrabi salad, carrot salad, chicory with pear, walnut and blue cheese and other delicious leftovers. And then for pud, apple crumble, leftover Chinese mince pies (little mince pies made in 
the shape of jiaozi dumplings – a stop-gap invented one Christmas in Chengdu when there were no mince pie trays to hand, and used ever since), meringues and plum compote made with plums from the garden. Oh – and these marzipan and walnut balls, made in memory of my wonderful grandmother, who used to make them every year.
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). Continue reading…
An August Saturday night in a flat in Wapping, East London… and I was privileged to share the best Chinese meal I’ve ever had outside China. A Shanghainese friend emailed me some time ago to say that his mother would be visiting from China and cooking dinner, and would I like to come? Now, anyone who has lived in China could tell you that the best home-cooked food can be better than anything you can taste in a restaurant, but this was extraordinary. My friend’s mother had flown over from Shanghai with a suitcase full of dried vegetables and seasonings. When we arrived at the flat, the table was already covered in little dishes of Shanghainese appetisers: sour-and-hot Chinese cabbage, green soybeans with ‘snow vegetable’, fried sea moss and peanuts, home-made pickles, wheat gluten with shiitake mushrooms (烤麸), pig’s tongue steeped in fermented rice liquor… an incredible array. So the five of us began to eat, and every few minutes my friend’s mother would emerge from the kitchen with another dish: pieces of deep-fried grouper with a vinegar dip; stir-fried prawns; steamed pork belly with Shaoxing dried vegetables; sea bream in a sweet-and-sour sauce; stir-fried spinach… And everything, just everything, was utterly delicious, expressing the essential nature (本味) of the ingredients, perfectly balanced and perfectly cooked. After we’d enjoyed the main dishes, there were noodles in spring onion oil, pot-sticker dumplings and a delicate soup. I counted 23 dishes in all, which would be a large number in a restaurant, let alone in a private home. And aside from the food, the company was delightful, and we drank beautiful wines, and, as a digestif, a fine Taiwanese tea. As I assured my hosts would be the case, I have remembered that dinner ever since almost as a dream…
After the second, exhausting day of a three-day photo-shoot in my home, I ended up this evening, as I did yesterday evening, with a fridge full of freshly-cooked Chinese food: some Hangzhou broad beans with ham, some garlic stems with bacon, Dan Dan noodles, a delicious soup of mustard greens, and five or six other dishes. Frankly, after a day at the stove, I didn’t feel like eating any of it, and was too burnt-out to contemplate an impromptu supper party. I also knew that I’d have a whole host of new dishes the following day, so I sent an SOS message to a few friends in the neighbourhood, offering a Chinese takeaway in return for a little light washing up. Within the hour one neighbour had popped in, done the dishes and returned home with several boxes of food. Later, another friend cycled over and relieved me of the rest, leaving me with enough room in the fridge for the remains of the chicken stock and some space in my head. They both seemed very pleased. There are pop-up restaurants and underground supper clubs all over London now: could a pop-up Chinese takeaway be the next hot thing?
The only problem is that now… I’m hungry! I think I’ll have some buttered toast with cheese before bed…
Sichuanese black garlic
“Hmm, this black garlic is delicious.”
“Actually it’s made from the single-cloved garlic of Sichuan.”
“Is that like the wild elephant garlic of Iran?”
Such is the conversation when you invite the cookery writer Anissa Helou over for a quiet Sunday night supper. I’d promised her something very casual, but ended up thinking about the menu all weekend, of course. This is what we had:
A sweet, treacly black garlic clove each: these were a gift from the Sichuanese chef Yu Bo.
Smacked cucumber with a Sichuanese chilli-oil dressing.
Stir-fried venison slivers with yellow chives (made with superb venison from the Wild Game Company at Broadway Market in East London) Continue reading…
Every so often, I have an SOS telephone call from a friend in desperate need of information about some aspect of Chinese food. Usually they are out for the evening in central London, have a sudden and overwhelming urge to have dinner in a Chinese restaurant, and want to know where to go. One friend called me to ask me which restaurant I could suggest; a little later, seated in the restaurant I’d recommended, he called again to ask for tips on which dishes to order; and a couple of hours afterwards he called once more to give me a report on the meal!
Another time, an old college friend who lives near Washington DC left a message on my mobile phone saying that she and her husband were about to drive past a Chinese supermarket, and thought it would be a great idea to stock up on all the ingredients they’d need for a serious Sichuan and Hunan cooking session based on recipes in my books, so could I please remind her what they should buy? Luckily I picked up the message soon afterwards, so I zapped off a short list, as follows: Continue reading…
Dinner at home to mark the start of the Year of the Rabbit: lotus root salad and preserved duck eggs to start; then Cantonese steamed sea bass (年年有余), Sichuanese red-braised wild rabbit, garlic stems with shiitake mushrooms, Shanghai-style braised water bamboo, Dongpo pork, Shanghai green pak choy with quail egg ‘rabbits’. The picture on the left shows the quail egg ‘rabbits’ before the meal. Aren’t they sweet!
