Fuchsia Dunlop

Last night I cooked a 60th birthday party dinner for my uncle and his family. As you might guess, it was mainly Sichuanese, although I did include a few dishes from other Chinese regions, such as a Cantonese steamed sea bass.

As usual, I asked the fishmonger to leave the head, tail and fins of the sea bass intact, and simply to remove its guts and gills. As he’s always done this properly before, I didn’t think to check. But when I was ready to marinate the fish (in a little salt and Shaoxing wine, with some crushed ginger and spring onions in its belly), I was dismayed to find that, while leaving the head, he had mutilated the tail, and sliced off the fins! Somehow he had destroyed the beauty and the balance of the fish, as I’m sure you’ll agree when you look at the following picture:

One of the things I like about cooking is the beauty of ingredients: a red pepper, a lemon and a dark purple aubergine on a plate together; the delicate laddered crispness of a fresh bamboo shoot; the pewtery gleam of a fish in my hands. And this fish – it just looked wrong, although I knew that it would taste as delicious as ever.

I wondered if, after steaming, the final scattering of slivered ginger and spring onion, the hot oil and the soy sauce would cover up its stumpy tail – but realised it would still look lopsided. I considered cutting a false tail from coloured paper or cardboard, but didn’t like the thought of its becoming soggy and leaking nasty dyes into the sauce.

Finally, I came up with a solution: a tail and fins cut from the skin of an aubergine (eggplant)! I shaved a thick curve of skin from a spare aubergine with my cleaver, and then cut it into shape. I steamed the pieces alongside the sea bass, and reassembled it on the serving dish before I added the finishing ingredients. It worked fantastically! I didn’t manage to take a decent picture of the final dish, but here is one of the raw fish, aesthetically enhanced:

In October, I posted something on this blog about unsavoury flavours in Chinese cuisine (‘Stinky to sublime’, 17 October 2008). And last week a New York Times journalist who was researching an article about science and superstition in the kitchen emailed me to talk about them. This is the piece he wrote; it was published alongside one of the recipes from my Sichuanese cookery book. The recipe, for a whole fish braised in chilli bean sauce, has a particular resonance for me, because it is the first Sichuanese dish I ever attempted to cook! This was some time before I went to live in  Chengdu, and I made it from a recipe in Yan-kit So’s Classic Chinese Cookbook. Little did I know how important this kind of cooking would become in my life…

The other day I went out fishing in a lake in Zhejiang. At the edge of the lake I met an old man and his wife who were living on a sampan. They were sitting at either end of their boat, patiently hooking tiny worms at intervals onto two long, long fishing lines. Apparently this takes them several hours every day. The old man had a mug of tea to sip as he worked, and a pack of cigarettes. In the small living space in the well of the boat were their simple possessions: rolls of bedding, a few clothes in a bundle, a calendar, an old-fashioned wireless and a clock. Some half-shelled soybeans were lying in a bowl on the floor.

The fishermen I was with say that just a few decades ago the only way to get around this area was by boat, along the canals and through the lakes, and that boat-dwellers were fairly common. These days there aren’t many left. The old man I met, who grew up on a boat, said his three children were all migrant workers in cities – he’s the last of the line (if you’ll forgive the pun).