|
What
Chinese food is really like
 |
|
At Chonwu, Dec. 2001
|
On my plate sits what appears to be a toy octopus.
It's dark red and black, with tiny tentacles curled back, suction
cups and all, toward a bulb-shaped head.
Except it's not a toy. It's a cooked squid. The
Englishman beside me and I have each placed one with our chopsticks
on our small white plates, and now we have to do something with
them. We look around to see what our fellow diners are doing.
The old Korean scholar with the friendly smile confidently pops
his toy into his mouth.
Well, here goes. I clench my squid in the tips
of the wooden chopsticks, gripping it by the tentacles since neither
I nor the Englishman can quite bear to grab a squid by the head,
shove it quickly into my mouth, and chew. It's rubbery and has
the familiar Chinese smoky-fish flavor. Not bad.
My son Jack and I have been in Shanghai, where
I am teaching literature on a U.S. Fulbright grant, for about
three months. And we have seen some odd-looking things on our
plates. But while often strange, most Chinese food is quite tasty,
once you bend your mind around its appearance and get it into
your mouth.
At a formal Chinese meal, the guests are seated
at a round table, on which is a turntable covering half the surface.
Wine glasses, small plates and bowls are arranged neatly at appropriate
intervals, with a napkin folded delicately like a fan. Unhurried,
pleasant waiters and waitresses fill our glasses, offer tea and
Coke, sometimes both red wine and Tsingtao beer.
Soon the dishes start to arrive, placed one by
one on the turntable, and the guests push the food around affably,
selecting cooked celery, a strip of roast pork, slices of cold
beef or chicken. The meat of fowl is cut directly across the bone,
so your bite-size chicken or duck may be crunchy.
One dish at a time. It's not unusual for small
pastries to appear midway through the serving in Shanghai, city
of sweet food. Farther south and west, around Guangzhou (formerly
known as Canton) and in Sichuan province, is the land of spicy
foods.
Usually a carp or perch is brought -- whole, split
along the middle, glazed eyes upturned. The meat is sometimes
cut in thin strips, sometimes left for the diners to flake from
the bones. You take a little with your chopsticks and move on.
More vegetables come. Tofu in cool white slabs, covered in a thick
clear sauce with chopped chives. Sliced cucumbers, lightly cooked
in another clear sauce. Shredded pork in a red sauce with small
chilis or even diced vegetables as in some American restaurants.
Where we usually have soup first, the Chinese have theirs to end
the meal -- an egg-drop soup perhaps, with ingredients often unidentifiable
to Western eyes, or hot-and-sour soup with bits of mushroom, pork,
tofu.
Less formal, brightly decorated eating places, with
a half-dozen hostesses in tight red dresses waiting by the door,
are everywhere in Shanghai, which must be the restaurant capital
of the world. Tiny cafeterias are hidden in every other entryway,
it seems. Old women sit with steaming pails of corn on sticks
and brown "tea eggs." Open-air grillers singe kebabs
of pork or squid over glowing charcoal.
At night in less chic parts of the city, white-clothed
cooks set up large tables on the sidewalks, bring metal pots with
steaming noodles, rice, fish and meat, and stacks of bowls and
plates. Passers-by stop for supper, sitting on folding chairs
beside the pots or standing in the city bustle with bowl in one
hand, chopsticks flashing in the other.
In the morning in our neighborhood near Fudan University, the
tables are set up right in the street, inches from the sea of
bicyclists, pedestrians and creeping, honking taxis. Women with
aprons deep-fry twists of flour and spread egg batters thinly
over large portable grills to create a sort of omelet pizza. Others
sell fried cakes dotted with sesame seeds.
The Chinese have a saying about the elements of
good food: se, xiang, wei -- color, scent, taste. Even the most
bizarre-looking food is usually good. I've eaten, for example,
things that exactly resembled eyeballs, with silvery, veined,
translucent outer coverings and dark centers that looked just
like irises, but turned out to be sweet bean paste inside a gluten,
tasty.
Once we had what looked like brown withered grass,
but was actually shredded dried beef. Another time, a dish of
what appeared to be miniature Lufa sponges faced us. Our Chinese
friends were eating them up, as it were, so I plucked one from
its broth -- it was just rubbery enough to be firm, tasted woody
and pleasant. What was it? A porous mushroom grown in long slabs
and cut to size.
Once we were treated to a Chinese "hot pot"
dinner, in which a metal cooking pot was brought to the table
and a little sterno fire lit under it. Soon assorted sliced vegetables
arrived -- potatoes, Chinese cabbage, crunchy lotus root. Then
a raw fish, shredded in thin strips. When the water in our pots
was boiling, we dropped in slices and cooked them to taste. Midway
through this, our smiling waitress brought shrimp -- 6-inch shellfish
wriggling and trying their best to flip off the plate. Our hostess
dropped one with her chopsticks into the pot, popping the cover
on to keep the meal from bucking out.
To Jack and me, this was a bit much, but we moved
on. We didn't know that two months later an Australian friend
would report that in Guangzhou he'd eaten his prawns, lightly
braised in wine sauce, while they were still twitching.
In Beijing we had pan-fried dumplings like the ones
to be had in Maine, with a similar delicious soy sauce. We've
had the recognizable "Shanghai rice," fried rice with
peas and wispy strips of scrambled egg. "Western-style noodles"
were a salty, drier approximation of the lo mein we're accustomed
to, and the Sichuan-style dan dan mein, or noodles with hot chili
sauce, were excellent.
We've learned to beware of menus with English equivalents
-- the language barrier here is strong. Once an American friend
ordered a "Western steak," and was brought an unidentifiable
piece of flaming chopped meat surrounded by bubbling tomato sauce.
We normally invite Chinese friends to accompany us to restaurants.
A meal can cost anywhere from $25 per plate at
the best hotels, to just a few dollars. Recently at The Red Wall,
a small, homey restaurant in our neighborhood, four of us had
spicy eggplant, eel fillets fried in a rich sauce, two plates
of sauteed greens, three plates of Shanghai rice, a pile of pork
and spinach dumplings, white rice, nearly a half-gallon of an
excellent hot and sour soup, a Coke and oolong tea for about $8.50,
total.
Sometimes, I confess, the food defies the courage
of my palate. Several times I've had golden-brown chicken's feet
plunked on my plate by well-meaning fellow diners. The Chinese
call it the phoenix, traditional food of the emperor. I watch
my colleagues gnaw at the bone and gristle, but still can't discern
exactly what they ingest, and so I quietly abstain. Another problem
is the revered green tea, which tastes very good, but is drunk
in glasses, not cups, with a fistful of wet leaves floating on
top.
The Chinese, in their good nature, are relaxed
in their table manners and find our apprehensions amusing. They
don't mind a bit if we leave a chicken's foot or, as my English
colleague decided to do, a scale-model octopus on our plates.
They just as apprehensively, and politely, decline a cup of coffee.
Please contact us
if you would like to submit your own story and/or photographs.
|
