Perhaps the solution is to revive the old Manchu and Mongolian habit of carrying around a personal set of chopsticks and other implements. The one pictured on left and right, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, is a rather fine ornament that can be attached to a belt, and it contains not only a pair of bone chopsticks, a knife and a file for sharpening, but also (not pictured) a tiny bone toothpick and an ear scoop! Of course the set pictured is rather elaborate and unnecessarily heavy, but imagine a funky, well-designed set of chopsticks in a little holder you could slip into your handbag…  (Actually, I remember on my very first trip to China, and indeed to Asia at all, I carried round my own pair of plastic chopsticks because I was paranoid about hygiene, and just rinsed them after use.)

And talking of reusing things rather than chucking them away, every time I see people drinking coffee out of those incredibly wasteful cardboard cups with plastic tops, I remember a restaurant kitchen in Shaoxing where every chef had a metal tea mug which was stored on a shelved labelled with everyone’s names (see picture below). Why don’t we all do this in our offices?

(P.S. thanks to @taniabranigan and @raykwong for drawing my attention to the LA Times piece on Twitter…)

I am trying to figure out whether there is any way to reduce sodium in these
recipes, though. Like many Americans, I have high blood pressure and am trying
to manage it through diet modification. That means really watching salt intake.
I see that my soy sauce has nearly 1600 mg of sodium per tablespoon. It tastes
fantastic, but wow! That's a huge number. And that's hardly the only source of
sodium in Sichuan and Hunan cuisine.

Eat salty dishes like this...

Thanks for writing to me, Tom! This is actually quite a common question about soy sauce and Chinese cuisine in general. I think the important thing to remember is that salty and strongly-flavoured dishes are used in China to ‘send the rice down’ 下饭 – which is to say that they are normally eaten with quite a lot of unsalted (and usually completely unseasoned) rice, noodles or bread. So although a dish or a relish in itself may be salty, it is actually eaten in fairly modest quantities.

So what I would suggest for you and others with similar concerns about salt intake, is to reduce the amount of salt, soy sauce and other salty seasonings in dishes if you can do this without sacrificing flavour, BUT also, and more importantly, to make sure that you serve salty dishes with plenty of plain rice or noodles, and other, lightly-seasoned dishes – for example, you could serve General Tso’s chicken or Mapo doufu with plain, unsalted

...with plenty of plain rice...

rice (brown rice if you want to be really healthy – I often do this when cooking at home), and one or two very lightly-salted stir-fried vegetables. You can also remember that Chinese dumplings are often dipped in vinegar rather than soy sauce (Chinkiang vinegar is very good for this), and that Chinese people traditionally eat far more fan 饭 (rice or other staple grain food) than cai 菜 (accompanying dishes). So if you eat in the Chinese way, a dish like General Tso’s chicken, served with some simple vegetables and rice, can be shared by 4-5 people – which means that the salt will be spread very thinly around!

...and lightly-seasoned vegetables

Do also make sure you rinse your fermented, salted black soy beans and salty preserved vegetables before using them in dishes like twice-cooked pork and dry-fried beans, since they can carry a lot of excess salt.

Personally, I prefer to adjust my salt intake in these ways, rather than buying ‘low-sodium’ products, just as I prefer to eat a little bit of rich and glorious real butter to some synthetic ‘low-fat’ spread.

I do hope this is helpful. Any blog readers have any other suggestions?

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?

This is part of what he said:

“I am staying in a modern flat in Beijing over the summer and one of the great things is being able to cook on a high-powered burner. I can actually get some smoking happening quickly, and attempt to flash-fry things.

“I’m sure this is nothing  compared to restaurant kitchen stoves, but it would be great to cook like this back in England, and it makes me realise how puny my UK cooker is. I guess it might be possible to buy Chinese stoves in England, but even then is out domestic gas supply suited to them?

“I know Chinese restaurants in the UK must be able to do it, and I saw the guys from Yang Sing in Manchester do a cooking demo last year, and instead of using the outdoor kitchen provided, they rolled in their own can of propane with a wok-holder attachment fitted to the top! Great, but I’m guessing this isn’t very wise (or probably legal) in the UK to have indoors.”

Thanks Graham! Frankly, I’d like some advice on this too! At home I have a supposed ‘wok burner’ on my gas cooker, but it’s not really satisfactory. At the moment I’m considering more high-powered models, and the possibility of an induction cooker, which I saw being used in the kitchen of Neil Perry’s Spice Temple in Sydney. Not traditional, but extremely hot, fast and effective.

I realise that it’s not possible to have the volcanic heat of a Chinese restaurant burner in a London flat, but what are the best options around? I suspect this might be a useful discussion for many of us…

Shanghai fried wontons in London

What’s the appropriate food for a quick picnic in Holland Park before the opera? As I’d been experimenting all day in the kitchen, I took a Chinese first course: garland chrysanthemum leaves with roasted pine kernels (松仁蒿菜）and Shanghainese pot-sticker wontons （干煎馄饨） filled with minced pork and spinach (spinach as a substitute for the traditional shepherd’s purse greens 荠菜) served with a dip of Chinkiang vinegar with a little soy sauce. The wontons, wrapped in foil and stored in a plastic box, were still warm when we ate them. And then we had strawberries and cream.

I’ve also started using a Twitter account – name fuchsiadunlop – still only a fledgling tweeter, but getting the hang of it…

The pictures show Xiao Wei wrapping zongzi (top), Xiao Hua making tangyuan (right), and one of the guests trying his hand at wrapping jiaozi (below left).