Why the Chinese Don't Count Calories (18 page)
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Authors: Lorraine Clissold
Tags: #Cooking, #Regional & Ethnic, #Asian, #CKB090000
‘Every ingredient has its own special qualities just as different persons are differently endowed. ’
YUAN MEI (1716. 1798)
A visiting chef once cooked pig’s feet for my children’s tea. I had asked him to teach me authentic Chinese dishes, so when the pink trotters emerged from his backpack there was no way I could say, ‘I don’t think so. ’ I didn’t pay much attention as he simmered the offending articles in a rich
hong shao
(red braised) sauce with its sugar, soy sauce and plenty of ginger, thinking that his other two dishes of chicken wings in red wine and pan fried tofu stuffed with prawns would be much more useful to me.
When the children arrived home the dish was on the table where I usually left a snack for them. Expecting cries of horror, I said nothing and to my amazement Christian picked one up and started to chew. When he asked me later if Mr Wang would be cooking for us every night, I asked whether he’d like that. He replied that the food had been tasty but ‘just a bit unusual’.
We are conditioned by our environment: I’m sure the average frankfurter contains far more unmentionable bits of pig than the trotter, but it is well disguised by processing with a good dollop of emulsifiers which make fat look like meat. The biggest difference between China and the West is not that the Chinese eat a simple diet based on rice and vegetables and we don’t, or even that the Chinese eat unmentionable things and we don’t; it’s that the Chinese approach rice, vegetables and unmentionable things – even pig’s feet – with confidence because they have the skills to make the most weird and wonderful ingredients into a dish full of balance and harmony.
The eighth secret, then, is to approach your ingredients and your cooking with creativity and confidence. If you can do so you will be able to revitalize your relationship with food. To teach you all the many technicalities of Chinese cookery is outside the scope of this book, and I have already explained that you do not need to eat a totally Chinese diet to benefit from the secrets of the Chinese food culture. But a basic understanding of principles of Chinese cuisine will help you to choose your ingredients, prepare them in your kitchen and cook them into meals that make your whole body feel good because they appeal to all the senses.
To cook but also to select
The Chinese word for cuisine is
pengtiao
, meaning ‘to cook’ but also ‘to select’. The first step in the selection process is a trip to the market. A Chinese chef would never take a shopping list, or start with a recipe. Instead, aware of what vegetables are in season at that time of year, he chooses the best produce on offer that day. Then he considers the qualities of the foods he has bought and decides how he will cut, season, cook and combine them.
Working from recipes is tedious and time-consuming. If you take the Chinese approach and start by buying what is fresh and in season then finding a way to make it taste good, either on its own or in simple combinations, you will gradually acquire confidence. Handling foods in this way is a very different experience from starting from a recipe and working backwards. Take courgettes, for example, something I have always used frequently in ratatouille or stuffed or in bakes, without really feeling I knew how to cook them or appreciate their many qualities. Then one day I overheard an exchange in the local market.
‘What do you call those?’
‘
Xi hulu’
(‘Western gourd’: they were still relatively new to China).
‘So how do you cook them?’
‘You can put them in soups or stews, but they don’t have much taste so are best stir-fried; halve them, cut them into slices and fry with ginger and dried chilli – they are good to eat. ’
The customer bought a bagful, as did several others who had been listening in to this exchange. I followed suit and cooked them as instructed; needless to say they were good to eat. You may not get such creative advice at your local supermarket checkout (I actually find that the store assistants usually ask me about the exotic vegetables that I buy) but there are other sources in the West. I subscribe to a local ‘box’ scheme, which not only delivers seasonal vegetables but also provides simple but tasty recipe suggestions, recovered, I imagine, from country kitchens.
In a food culture where nothing is wasted, Chinese cooks have had to be resourceful and inventive. But they have been fortunate to live in a society where expertise is still handed down from generation to generation, as well as having thousands of years of recorded history to help them.
Shi jing
, or food manuals, have been produced in China since ancient times. By the sixth century the Chinese government was sponsoring the distribution of these early cookbooks to help people make the best of local produce. Book printing, which was invented in China about 800 years earlier than it appeared in the West, made important information about food and diet easily accessible. The expertise of generations was accumulated and, as it is usual for extended family members to work together in the kitchen, this continues to be passed on.
Chinese chefs and cooks recognize that each ingredient has an intrinsic quality: the chef ’s task is to find a way to bring this out. The first thing he looks for is
xiang
(fragrance), a characteristic associated with freshness. The food of the southern Chinese, with its abundance of greenery, is particularly known for being
xiang
; but any ingredient that needs only gentle cooking and light seasoning is worthy of the name.
The five characteristics of a Chinese meal
•
Xiang
– Fragrance
•
Wei’r
– Taste
•
Xing
– Shape
•
Se
– Colour
•
Kou gan
– Texture (literally ‘mouth feel’)
As we have already seen, the Chinese place great importance on eating a diet which represents the five flavours of food. The chef has to ensure that these are not indiscriminately combined and that each dish has a delicious overall taste, or
wei’r
. So when he is shopping he will look for ingredients that go well together. Chinese people use the phrase
hao chi
(‘good eat’) all the time, and are not averse to describing something as
bu hao chi
(‘not good eat’) if applicable. The Chinese cook strives, therefore, to make every dish tasty, either by bringing out the natural flavour of an ingredient or by appropriate seasoning.
Sour tones sweet, and is toned by pungent
Bitter tones pungent, and is toned by salty
Sweet tones salty, and is toned by sour Pungent tones sour, and is toned by bitter
Salty tones bitter, and is toned by sweet
8. How the Five Flavours affect each other.
I have already introduced many of the classic combinations, but the control cycle of the Five Elements is a useful reference when it comes to considering how the various flavours work together (see page 115).
Each flavour has a promoter and a consumer; so, bitter creates a desire for sweet but an excess of bitter masks sweet. The overlying sweet nature of many snack or breakfast foods call for a cup of bitter strong coffee, as the water element (bitter) struggles not to be consumed by the wood element (sweet). Chinese people prefer to complement sweet flavours with pungent ones. If a dish is too pungent, small amounts of salt and sugar can tranform it. Chinese cuisine features a lot of fermented pastes and pickled vegetables, which add salty and sour dimensions to many dishes. Bitter herbs are also used in stews and soups. But good Western cuisine is not without effective flavour combinations: take skate with black butter (sour and bitter) and capers (salty) or a honey and mustard dressing: sweet, pungent, salty, bitter and sour.
Controlling the flavours
So, according to the control cycle, each flavour is best enhanced or tempered by two others. These do not have to be exclusive, of course – in the Five-Element scheme of things all the flavours have a role to play in maintaining balance and harmony. Also remember that balance applies not only to the individual dish but also to the whole meal (see page 116).
The sour flavour naturally enters sweet and is beautifully offset by the pungent flavour that enters sour. Hence the overwhelming popularity of the hot, sweet-and-sour
gong bao ji
ding
in my cooking school. And the same flavours are found in
dhansak
or
patia
Indian curries. Some of the combinations in the Five-Element control cycle are not easily accessible to the Western chef. If you are fortunate enough to live near an area with specialist shops you may be able to buy
ku gua
, the Chinese bitter melon that looks like a light green cucumber, and fermented black bean paste. In China the sliced bitter melon is stir-fried with the black bean paste and sliced green chilli, resulting in an amazing bitter, salty and pungent dish. Much simpler, but equally delicious, is grated kohlrabi with chilli oil and salt. Good traditional Western food can feature the control cycle too: take liver and onions (slightly bitter, pungent and salty) and the many sweet and sour chutneys that English country cooking was once famous for.
It is not difficult to incorporate the flavours in home-cooked dishes. Look for traditional recipes that use sour fruits such as redcurrants, rhubarb and of course lemons; and use the rind, too, for a bitter touch; or experiment with Indian and other flavoursome Asian ingredients using new and different spices.
You will find that if you understand the relationship between the flavours you can remedy mistakes in cooking by adding
small amounts of the controlling flavour. Thus, if a dish is too sour, something spicy might make it appetizing (Thai cooks add chilli to grapefruit and other underripe fruits); too bitter, add salt (this is how we make many greens palatable), and too sweet add something sour (a well appreciated combination). A touch of bitterness can offset spiciness in a dish, though, failing that, sweet, the creator of pungent, also works well. And a sweet flavour can do wonders to mask an excess of salt.
