Why the Chinese Don't Count Calories (23 page)

‘The later sages then arose, and men [learned] to take advantage of the origins of fire. ’

FROM
LI CHI
(
THE RECORD OF RIGHTS
)
, ZHOU DYNASTY TEXT (1027. 221 BC)

I once chose a ‘house salad’ in a small restaurant by the side of a lake in one of Beijing’s many parks. The waitress had excitedly proffered a ‘Western-style’ menu, and so as not to disappoint her I chose what appeared to be the safest option, a house salad. Tim opted for the tuna sandwich. When my dish arrived I was horrified to find that, rather than a dish of crunchy greens, I had ordered a mixture of cubed carrot, peas and sweetcorn, tinned peaches and cherries, all bound in a sickly mayonnaise. Tim thought this extremely funny – until he bit into his sandwich, advertised as ‘tuna and salad’, and found it was full of mashed potato.

‘Why don’t Chinese people eat salad?’ Newcomers to China are quick to notice that while international hotels offer sumptuous salad buffets, these are spurned by the local population. The Chinese have always considered the ability to use fire to cook food as one of the foundations of their civilization and something that separated them from the neighbouring barbarians. By learning to cook food, mankind has been able to expand its diet to include a whole range of plants that might otherwise have been harmful. With new foods come increased nutrients; with increased nutrients comes better health, stronger, fitter bodies and even heightened brainpower. Most grain foods, and many roots and tubers, cannot be easily digested unless cooked, and most civilizations were founded on a carbohydrate of one kind or another.

Yet in modern Western societies, raw food is becoming more and more fashionable. Salad is cheap and simple to prepare, so restaurants and supermarket chains can make it readily available. And everyone knows that raw foods have a higher concentration of vitamins than cooked foods – at least recent research points that way. But what isn’t taken into account in the laboratory is the effort that the body has to make to extract these vitamins. Lightly cooking foods can make their nutrients more easily accessible to the body, so that it can preserve its
qi
for more important tasks.

Cooking brings the whole Five Element process into play. By taking a piece of broccoli (
wood
) and, using heat (
fire
) to boil
water
in a
metal
receptacle and adding salt from the
earth
, we use all Five Elements in order to create a more palatable form of nourishment. Many vegetables are completely indigestible or even toxic when eaten raw; others are just not that kind to the stomach,or not particularly nice to eat. Chinese cooking methods have been refined over the years to ensure that maximum nutrition is extracted from all foodstuffs while making even the most bizarre of ingredients taste good. And of course any nutrients that are leached into cooking water are then drunk in soup.

Cold mixed beancurd stick

Liang ban fu zhu

Dried beancurd sticks (
fu zhu
) are quite readily available in Chinese and Asian supermarkets in the West. Their chewy texture makes them very different from other beancurd products, and those who find regular beancurd too slimy may prefer this variety. They can also be stir-fried or used in braised dishes, but this simple treatment is the most commonly known in Beijing.

100 g/3½ oz/1 cup dried beancurd stick
50 g/¾ oz/½ cup raw peanuts
1 piece star anise
pinch of Sichuan peppercorns
3 sticks celery
1 large carrot (or two small)
2 tsp sesame oil
½–1 tsp salt

Soak the beancurd stick and the peanuts (separately) overnight in warm water.

When you are ready to make the dish, drain the peanuts and beancurd. Bring a pan of water to the boil, adding star anise, Sichuan peppercorns and a pinch of salt. Add the peanuts and boil for ten minutes.

Drain and remove the spices.

In a large saucepan bring more water to the boil, plunge in the beancurd sticks and simmer for several minutes. Drain (you can reserve the water for the vegetables), cool, and pull each stick into two or three shreds before cutting into lengths of about 2cm.

Cut the celery stalks in half vertically then chop into pieces about the same length as the beancurd. Peel the carrot, cut into thin slices on the diagonal, and then halve lengthwise.

Bring some more water to the boil. Add the carrot and then the celery. Bring back to the boil, then remove with a slotted spoon. Plunge into cold water (this will preserve their bright colours). Shake excess water from all the ingredients and mix together.

Add salt and sesame oil.

There is no Chinese word for salad other than a modern transliteration,
shala
. There are numerous
liang cai
, which are cold, usually cooked, dishes. Hygiene is one of the reasons that ingredients such as beansprouts, celery and carrot are lightly blanched, but the crisp and colourful mixtures lightly seasoned with ginger, sesame oil and salt, and sometimes a splash of vinegar, are also easier on the digestion and more satisfying than a mound of raw leaves. If you emulate these in your Western cooking you can use one of the cold-pressed oils now recognized to be full of essential fatty acids.

When I first visited the Chinese markets and tried to buy a lettuce I was surprised to find that stallholders were unwilling to sell me one, but instead tried to thrust several into my hands. It was only after studying a few restaurant menus that I realized why. Generally lettuce is served cooked in China, lightly steamed and topped with oyster sauce, stir-fried with lashings of garlic, or even shredded and added to soups. Cooked green leafy vegetables can be consumed in much greater volumes than raw, so the total nutrient intake is likely to be greater than from a bowl of salad, while the seasonings create a balance of flavours. Whereas Western salads are often vacuum packed or refrigerated for several days, most leaves used for Chinese cooking are fresh from the fields.

A few vegetables are eaten raw in China, including radish, both the long white one known by its Japanese name, daikon, and the large red
xin li mei
(beauty in the heart) vegetable, but they are dressed with heating ingredients to help maintain a balance in the meal. Cucumber is sometimes served raw with lashings of garlic and chilli, but more often pickled or used in cooked dishes. A southern vegetable called
you mai cai
has recently become fashionable in Beijing. It looks and tastes a bit like a cos lettuce and is sometimes served raw but always with a spicy, sweet and sour dressing (see
guair wei’r
, or ‘strange-flavoured sauce’ recipe on page 118).

Raw vegetables need spicing up because Chinese cuisine seeks a balance of
yin
and
yang
, both of flavours and of their heating and cooling energies.
Yin
and
yang,
and all opposing forces, always contain a small amount of each other. So
yin
celery is served with
yang
ginger and spring onion; crumbled dried chilli, which is hot, is added to cucumber, which is cold;
yin
ingredients such as bamboo shoots, beancurd, and mung bean noodles partner
yang
meats in stews. If the
yin
/
yang
balance is not found in the dish, it will be evident in the meal as a whole. Remember, anything that upsets the perfect balance between
yin
and
yang
in the body will damage
qi
.

A good Chinese diet provides a natural balance. As I showed in Chapter Five, generally meats and bright-coloured fruits and vegetables are
yang
, as are all the spices and seasonings, while white and light green fruits and vegetables are more likely to be
yin
, or neutral. Satisfying all five tastebuds also helps achieve a balance of heating and cooling energies in the body.
Pungent
flavours are generally hot,
bitter
ones cold;
sour
and
salty
flavours are generally cool, and
sweet
flavours tend to be warm, or neutral. But because many foods combine more than one flavour the prevailing energy is not always obvious.

9. The heating and cooling energies of some everyday foods
¹⁴
.

10
. The Five Climatic Conditions, the Five Elements and the
Five Organs.

The problems with cold and raw foods

Watercress is a very cold vegetable. It is hard to come by in Beijing and only sold by certain traders who specialize in vegetables from the south. I would always buy a bunch if I saw it, since during my fourth pregnancy I had learned that watercress is a good source of folic acid. One day I asked the stallholder how Chinese people usually cook it. ‘Only ever in soup, usually with pork,’ she explained firmly. ‘And you must bring the water to the boil first or it will taste bitter. Then simmer on a low heat for up to three hours. ’ She was obviously concerned by my look of amazement: ‘Oh, and add some tangerine peel; it’s a very cold vegetable you know. ’

Never would watercress be eaten raw in China. Firstly, its cool properties need to be balanced by the warming orange peel in the soup and, secondly, Chinese dietary therapy teaches that too much raw food, especially cold raw food, is damaging to the stomach because the body has to produce excess
fire
to digest it.

According to the Five Elements cycle there are Five Climatic Conditions:
wind
,
heat
,
dampness
,
dryness
and
cold
, which exist outside and inside the body. They each have a special relationship with one of the elements and the organs and, as with other manifestations of the Five-Element cycle, it is important that they are kept in balance.

11.
The Five Climatic Conditions in the Five Organs.
Solid lines show the promotion and consumption cycle, broken lines show the control cycle.

When somebody eats a lot of cold or cooling foods the body reacts by creating heat (usually described as
fire
) to consume them; if they are raw, even more heat is needed; effectively to cook them before the body can use them. If this pattern of eating becomes a habit, too much
fire
enters the stomach, which then becomes too hot and suffers from a syndrome known as
stomach fire
. If you find you cannot tolerate or do not like hot drinks, especially tea and coffee, and are often thirsty, then you are probably suffering from stomach fire. This condition can also be responsible for unaccountable hunger pangs and a host of irritating symptoms including bad breath, bleeding gums, toothache, headaches and nosebleeds.