Look at this beauty! It’s a tiny Sichuan pepper tree! It was a present from Richard S., a friend of the Oxford Food Symposium’s, who managed to track one down in a specialist nursery in the UK. He told me he’d give me one a long time ago, and here it is! The leaves have some of that bewitching pepper fragrance if you squeeze them between your fingers. I have no idea how long it will take to bear fruit, but I hope it will eventually – I have seen one fruitful Sichuan pepper tree growing in Oxford, so I know it’s possible in the English climate! At the moment it’s sitting in a pot on my sunny, south-facing windowsill, but I hope to transplant it to my parents’ garden in Oxford before too long, where it will have more room to grow.

As those of you who have read my ‘Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper’ may know, I have never quite got over abandoning a tiny Sichuan pepper tree from Hanyuan at Beijing airport a few years ago. I had transported it very tenderly all the way from the mountains of Hanyuan to Beijing, but Britain was in the midst of the foot and mouth epidemic, with widespread paranoia and tight restrictions on agricultural imports, and I chickened out at the last moment and left it behind.

Yes, many of you guessed correctly, the dagger is a fishbone! To be precise, it’s a bone from the head of the Ya fish (雅鱼, a type of carp also known as 丙穴鱼), which is a speciality of the western Sichuanese town of Ya’an. (you can see a picture of the fish here). The fish, which is often made into a claypot stew, is famously tender, with few bones and delicious savoury flesh.

On the left, you can see a Ya fish, presented dramatically in a cloud of dry ice in its raw state, to be cooked in the dining room, in the pot on the left-hand side of the photograph.

My hosts that night mentioned some colourful legends about the knife in the fish’s head, and I’ve done a little research today. There seem to be a few different versions of the story. Some say that the bone was formed when the creator goddess Nu Wa 女娲，while patching up holes in the sky, let her double-edged sword fall into the waters of the river at Ya’an, far below. One tells of an evil river demon who demanded that a beautiful girl be given to him as a bride, threatening calamitous floods if the people of Ya’an failed to oblige him. A young woman volunteered to save her community by offering herself up as his wife, and she challenged the demon with a double-edged sword. All the fish in the river, so the legend goes, decided to commemorate the bravery of her sacrifice, by forming an image of the sword in their heads, and using it to suppress the river fiend.

If you are interested in this subject, I heartily recommend this extraordinary book by the Victorian Englishman Vincent Holt, which deploys powerful, rational arguments in favour of eating insects – and offers some recipes that sounds rather interesting. It’s a delightful, amusing and provocative little book. You might also like to read my thoughts on the subject in a piece for the FT a few years ago, which is on this website. The photographs that accompany this post are of some of the ingredients (raw and cooked) on the menu of Zou Haikuan’s restaurant, which is mentioned in my article.

I certainly agree with Vincent Holt that it’s completely irrational to eat shrimps and oysters while rejecting creepy-crawly insects and slimy snails – don’t you?  And do any of you have any promising insect recipes, or insect-eating tales?

A delicious tangle of octopi!

I was just looking through one of my notebooks, and found a rather endearing story. It was in Ningbo, at the end of a fabulous dinner that had involved, among other things, divine little octopi (served whole), crunchy jellyfish, salted raw crab, white shrimps and red-braised pork with sea moss, and the chef was telling us all about a culinary conference he’d attended in a nearby city. ‘You know, everyone at the conference agreed [he sighed as he said this] that Western science was very advanced and developed, but that Western food didn’t amount to much. Whereas China might not have such advanced science, but the Chinese had really moved their brains 动了脑筋 when it came to food.’

It’s not the first time I’ve heard Chinese people blaming gastronomy for their country’s decline in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries*, but I loved the way he expressed it!

*In my ‘Shark’s Fin’ book I think I mentioned the Xi’an taxi driver who picked me up from the Banpo Neolithic village, and who moaned on the way back into town about the fact that the Chinese had invented steaming in the Stone Age, but had only applied it to cooking, leaving it to the British, many centuries later, to invent the steam engine.

A geng

It’s funny how the UK’s weird and inconclusive general election result has brought out the food metaphors! The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, spoke of a future coalition government as a sausage, in which the meat should be Conservative. And the BBC’s political reporter said on the radio at lunchtime that any government proposed by our current prime minister, Gordon Brown, would be a difficult cake to mix, because it would have to involve too many ingredients!

It reminded me of that age-old Chinese metaphor for the juggling of rival political interests: the seasoning of a stew (or, to be precise, a geng 羹, which is a kind of soup that is thick with cut ingredients – as opposed to a tang 汤, which is a lighter, more soupy type of soup). As David Knechtges says in a fascinating essay on this*: ‘In the Chinese classics, the proper seasoning of food is a common analogy for good government… The comparison of the perfectly blended stew with the art of good government is a commonplace both in ancient and later literature.’

The best known of Chinese culinary-political allegories is the lecture given by the legendary cook Yi Yin 伊尹 to his king in the sixteenth century BC (as recorded in ‘The Root of Tastes’ 本味篇, an essay by the merchant Lu Buwei that dates back to the third century BC). This is an extract from it, as published in my ‘Shark’s Fin’ book:

‘Harmonious blending depends on the sweet, the sour, the bitter, the pungent and the salty. But as to when each is added and in what quantity, this is a matter of extremely subtle balancing, for each has its own effect. The transformations that occur in the ding [cooking pot or cauldron] are so supremely wonderful and delicate that the mouth cannot express them in words, nor the mind comprehend them. They are like the fine-tuned skills of the archer and the charioteer, the fluctuations of yin and yang, the passing of the seasons.’

I wonder kind of stew we’ll end up with in Britain? Which of the main party leaders (if any) is the sweet ingredients? Which the sour, the bitter, the pungent or the salty? And which of them is the better cook, in political terms? Might we end up with a final sprinkling of green spring onion in the form of a Green Party MP? Let’s hope it’s a harmonious stew, anyway, given that it has to fortify us for a very bumpy road ahead…

*’A Literary Feast: Food in Early Chinese Literature’, by David R. Knechtges, published in Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 106 No. 1, pp46-63, Jan-Mar 1986

Known in Chinese as 雪蛤 (xueha), and in English as hasma, hashima, snow frog etc (see this article by Jacqueline Newman in Flavour and Fortune), it’s one of those Chinese delicacies that is baffling to Westerners. It’s usually described as frog fallopian tubes, ovarian fat or ovaries – I’m not sure exactly what is is, but it’s the waxy looking amber-coloured stuff that encloses the eggs of dried snow frogs from the northeast of China. After a long soaking, and steaming, small pieces of this substance expand miraculously into flubberous, transparent clouds of tasteless texture. They are often served with papaya, or in soups that may be slightly sweetened.

Extracting the ovaries

I can’t remember where I first tasted xueha, but its precise origins were mysterious to me until I came across some women dissecting dried frogs to extract it in a medicinal store in Hangzhou (see photographs). Curious, I bought a small amount, and it remained in my fridge until yesterday.

I called Zhang Xiaozhong, the head chef at Barshu, for advice on how to cook it. He told me that I hadn’t really allowed enough time to soak it in cold water and steam it, so he suggested that I speed things up a bit by soaking it in warm water and cooking it slowly over a small flame.

In the end I served the xueha in hot water with a few crystallised violet petals that I bought ages ago in Salzberg – which is why the finished dish has an eerie purplish colour. Everyone was slightly surprised that such a delicacy had no inherent flavour. One guest said the slimy, slippery ovaries resembled bogies from someone’s nose.

Fortunately they were more impressed with the other dishes, which included crowndaisy chrysanthumum leaves with sesame oil among the starters, Dongpo pork, steamed wild sea bass, fish-fragrant aubergines and so on.

Apologies to regular readers, by the way, for my long silence on this blog. I’ve been in China, and when I’m in China I always plan to write many posts, but always end up too busy, or lacking decent internet connections…

The whole ovaries

Xueha as sold

After soaking for a few hours

As served to my victims

Personally, I’ve never understood how people can be horrified at the idea of eating dogs, while happily eating pigs (which are also intelligent creatures).  Both are equally gruesome, when you really think about it.

So why are the Chinese thinking about a ban? Is it really the result of the increase in numbers of people who keep dogs as pets, and can’t bear the thought of them? Or of concern about the role of the dog trade in ‘causing social problems’, as one lawyer quoted by the Guardian alleges. And if it’s partly about disquiet at the maltreatment of farmed dogs, have the campaigners ever seen what happens in a factory farm producing beef or pork?

The other explanation, of course, is that the Chinese are growing increasingly sensitive to Western pressure on the subject. If Westerners think dog-eating is barbaric, is it time to ditch it?

What do you think?