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.

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!!

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!

Chef Zhang in the CIA kitchens

Recently I went with the head chef of Barshu, Zhang Xiaozhong, to give some presentations at the Worlds of Flavour conference at the Culinary Institute of America (generally known, amusingly, as the CIA). As we were driving back to San Francisco after the event, I asked Chef Zhang about his plans for the Chinese New Year, and he replied with this wistful little poem about the life of the chef, slaving away over a hot stove while everyone else celebrates with their families:

他人家中聚   Other people gather in their homes

我望锅中油   I gaze at the oil in the wok

妙手烹万物   Using my subtle hands to cook ten thousand

ingredients

厨房度春秋   Working in the kitchen as the seasons pass

Anyway, I put out a call for ideas on Twitter. One kind person did a Google trends search which showed that the overwhelming majority of searchable texts on the internet call it tofu, while ‘beancurd’ and ‘bean curd’ are both minority usages. Gary Stephens pointed out that his Google searches brought up 36 million hits for tofu, 1.6 million for bean curd; and only 331,000 for doufu! Andrea Nguyen, whose new specialist book on the subject, Asian Tofu, will be out in February 2012, said she’d pondered exactly the same issue and ended up plumping for tofu as the one most suitable for her readership.

Personally, I still find it a little weird calling it tofu because I’m used to saying dou fu in Chinese, so tofu doesn’t feel quite right. And as someone writing about Chinese food and culinary culture, shouldn’t I be advocating a Chinese-derived term when describing a foodstuff that has its origins in China? I suddenly noticed how many of the terms used by English speakers for Asian foods are derived from the Japanese: edamame rather than mao dou 毛豆 for green soybeans in the pod; daikon for luo bo 萝卜 white radishes; umami rather than xian 鲜 for delicious savouriness (although in that case, I have to admit that the Japanese may have been first to come up with the whole umami concept); yuba for beanmilk skin (which has various different names in Chinese); and now konnyaku or konjaku for mo yu 魔芋. In all these cases of introducing Asian food culture in the West, it seems that the Japanese simply got there first.

In the end, though, I capitulated. If tofu has become established as the standard English translation worldwide, and is the most recognisable term for those unfamiliar with Chinese cookery, it probably makes sense to use it in my recipes and my writing. I could try to run a one-woman campaign for dou fu or beancurd, but this might be at the cost of winning converts to the pleasures of Chinese food, which is, after all, the main point of what I do. So tofu it is. Hrrumph.

What do you all think?