On the lefthand side of the board are garlic stems (known confusingly as suan tai 蒜薹 in Sichuan, suan miao 蒜苗 in Hunan and suan xin 蒜芯 in at least some Cantonese areas. In China, they are often sold complete with their little bulbs on the top of each stem; here in England, where they can be found in some Chinese greengrocers, they are usually trimmed and bulbless. Raw, they have a strong and forthright pungency, but when you stir-fry them they become sweet and mellow. They are heavenly stir-fried with cured meats or firm pressed tofu.

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.) You can also see home-reared chicken, and chunks of meat from the pig the household had fattened up in the last months of the lunar year, as well as steamed buns (hua juan) dotted with food colourings to make them look more festive. In the cold, arid north, particularly in rural areas like this, wheaten foods such as hua juan, man tou 馒头 (plain steamed buns), deep-fried dough-twists (麻花 ma hua), noodles and dumplings are normally eaten rather than rice.

On the left, you can see several of the ingenious ways in which local people transformed one kind of food (pork) into many different tastes and textures. In the centre there are chunks of meat, on the bone; on the top left a stir-fry of lean meat and green onions or chives; centre bottom a kind of meatball wrapped in eggskin, steamed and then sliced; bottom right some ‘pearly meatballs’ made from minced pork studded with whole rice grains; and on centre right slices of a jelly made from the skin, which I was given in every single household, and which was usually made in a few different colours, using food colourings. And on the top left, you can see a few steamed buns, which were eaten with the main dishes.

Anyway, I must stop writing and start cooking, because I have some people coming over for a New Year’s dinner and it’s getting late! On the menu: spinach with either a gingery or sour-hot dressing (haven’t decided yet), spicy cucumber salad, a stew of red-braised wild venison with beancurd sticks, Gong Bao chicken, stir-fried pork and yellow chives, steamed wild sea bass with ginger and spring onion, Chinese broccoli with ginger, fish-fragrant aubergines (I find it hard to do a dinner party without them, and they are often the most popular dish), and a couple of other dishes TBC. Oh, and some of the winter meats mentioned in my previous post, steamed, sliced and served with ground chillies and Sichuan pepper in homage to my beloved Chengdu. The stew is simmering away as I finish this post, wafting out lovely aromas of fermented chillies and beans, ginger, spring onion, venison and star anise.

Happy New Year!

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.

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!

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)

Stir-fried mixed mushrooms with garlic

Wild chrysanthemum tea from Hong Kong

Baby pak choy in chicken stock

Brown rice

A little fermented beancurd to go with the rice

The meal was a good example of the economy of Chinese cooking: we only ate a total of 150g meat between us, but, cooked like this, it was plenty. After eating the baby pak choy with our chopsticks, we drank the stock as a soup; and the fermented beancurd (eaten in tiny quantities) was absolutely delicious with the brown rice. The whole meal took just 30-40 minutes to make.

After dinner, we drank some wild chrysanthemum tea I brought back from Hong Kong, and ate tangerines and gianduja chocolates from Turin. Yum.

P.S. I’m afraid we had eaten almost everything before we thought of taking photographs, so y0u have to imagine what the dishes looked like….

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:

MOST VITAL
Soy sauce, light and dark (or an organic tamari soy sauce)
Chinkiang vinegar (Chinese brown rice vinegar)
Sichuan chilli bean paste (made with chillies and fava or broad beans)
Chilli oil OR – better – ground Korean or Sichuanese chillies to make your own chilli oil
Toasted sesame oil (pure and unblended)
Dried chillies (not small deadly ones – larger ones are milder)
Whole Sichuan pepper
Shaoxing wine
Potato flour (a.k.a. potato starch)

Groundnut or rapeseed oil for cooking

ALSO USEFUL
Fermented black beans (the dry ones with salt and ginger)
Sichuanese preserved vegetable – ya cai OR Tianjin preserved vegetable in jars
Dried shiitake mushrooms

My friend picked up my email on her Blackberry, and within the hour I received the photograph above!

Apparently the cooking session was a great success.