Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Regional Chinese Cooking by Deh-Ta Hsiung





Regional Chinese Cooking: the art and practice of the world’s most diverse cuisine
By Deh-Ta Hsiung

Old cookbooks provide such useful social and cultural insights into how and what people ate in a certain period in time. Regional Chinese Cooking is no exception: it’s not entirely that old, printed in 1979 but the pictures, commentary and ingredients used is fascinating and reading through it tells us how much China has changed. The author, Deh-Ta Hsiung is a self-taught cook, food consultant and ex film assistant director, born in Beijing, living in London for the last 50 years. He boasts a classical Chinese upbringing, his ancestors include a host of scholars and gourmets. His travels around China is well documented in his book, Regional Chinese Cooking.

The photographs capture the 70s where everyday people still wore the blue Mao uniforms, and the People’s Liberation Army’s green military-style uniforms. The photos speak of a time when agriculture and subsistence farming was practiced widely and of great importance to the Chinese population. Take photos now and China is a very different place, the skies are polluted in the big cities, motorbikes and cars are now overtaking bicycles, and subsistence farming is well, pretty much being phased out. Nevertheless the photographs and commentary provide an interesting glimpse into Chinese psyche 30 years ago.

The book is divided into the basics of Chinese cookery with essentials like common utensils, cooking techniques and ingredients. Cooking styles are broken into Peking or Northern school, Shanghai or Eastern school, Sichuan or Western school and Canton or Southern school. The book is by no means an exhaustive treaty on all the regional dishes available but it does provide a good cross section of food – a lot of which we don’t ever see in restaurants in Australia, let alone Brisbane.

There are even recipes from the Imperial kitchens of the Forbidden City. Thousand-layer cake (okay, only 81 layers!) for special occasions complete with lard and walnuts. Sharks’ fin soup also features – no traditional Chinese person worth their salt would consider having a grand banquet, or any kind of celebratory banquet without this status-symbol dish. We all know how wasteful and environmentally unfriendly this little piece of fin is but try convincing the sharks’ fin die-hards that this practice must be stopped.

Some dishes border on obsessive about the intricacies of colour and contrasting textures. ‘Mixed Three Whites’ is curiously indexed under ‘Vegetables’ when its major ingredient is chicken breast. I digress. The three whites here are: cooked chicken breast meat, canned (!) white asparagus and white cabbage heart. The three major ingredients are kept as white as possible with the addition of milk and cornflour. The obsession with white continues throughout the book. Another all white dish is the ‘Three Whites Assembly’ again complete with canned white asparagus, abalone and winter bamboo tips. And no, we haven’t accidentally ventured onto Krzysztof Kieslowski’s set of the Three Colours:White series.

The Chinese appreciate beautiful and poetic-sounding names for dishes – crystal sugar pork, plum blossom and snow competing for spring (a dessert dish of apples, bananas and milk), dragon and phoenix legs, bright moon and red pine chicken, three fairies in their own juice (poussin, duckling and pork in case you’re wondering) and perhaps, not the most flattering – ma pa tofu or its literal translation, ‘pock-marked woman bean curd’. Delicious though! Continuing on from the poetic dish names, Cheong Liew must have been inspired by the ‘stewed four treasures’ as inspiration for his upmarket version in ‘four dances of the sea’. Hsiung’s version is a much simpler but still complex stew of rehydrated fish lips, abalone, bamboo shoots, broccoli, rice wine vinegar and Chinese aromats.


The photo above is of the Stewed Four Treasures dish.

Kidneys feature highly on Hisung’s cooking radar; about four in total dedicated to the star ingredient, pork kidneys. Other offal are co-stars in his concoctions. How often do you see shredded kidney in wine sauce, five-fragrant kidney slices, stir-fried kidney flowers and hot and sour kidneys in your local Chinese takeaway?

You’ll discover in reading this book that monosodium glutamate reigned supreme in the 1970s. Judging by the recipes, it was used liberally in the restaurant industry. You probably won’t find any Chinese cookbooks now urging you to add a teaspoon of the white powder. I remember my grandmother using the msg brand of Ajinomoto liberally in my childhood – no bloody wonder the food tasted so good!

Chinese restaurants that pour commercial sweet and sour gloop all over chicken, pork and fish should be ashamed of themselves. They really give Chinese food a bad name. Here, in Hsiung’s book – you’ll find recipes for sweet and sour sauce. Wait for it – it’s not all red food colouring, chemicals and artificial thickeners. Authentic sweet and sour has a balance of sweet, sour and salty. Basic sweet and sour sauce is a combination of wine vinegar, sugar, soy sauce, rice wine and cornstarch with other modifications, or additions, depending on your choice of meat, etc. There really is no excuse for not making your own, especially if you’re a restaurateur with some shred of culinary dignity.

Last but not least, Hsiung gives helpful hints to the tea novice – how to pick what teas and the art of drinking and brewing tea leaves. And there’s no better time to drink copious amounts of tea when you’re diving into steamers full of dim sum.

This book is really interesting even if you don’t make anything from it – it provides a brilliant culinary time capsule on what was acceptable 30 years ago and how some of those ingredients are almost taboo now, i.e. the use of msg and sharks’ fin. The author’s done a fine job of knowing which popular dishes to showcase; juxtapositioning crowd favourites with more obscure dishes you don’t ever see in restaurants. It gives us a glimpse into how diverse and varied Chinese cuisine really is, and to start to eat like the Chinese, we’ve got to somehow demand for better and more interesting dishes from our Chinese restaurants.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for the recipe!!! Love it. Fresh or frozen local abalone is cheaper but will never give the same taste, flavor and texture as canned abalone. I love the flavor and taste of canned abalone and one day I want to eat abalone like 'abalone kings' do: braised in sauce and served whole, like a steak, washed down with a good white wine. Cut with a knife and fork of course. Meantime, it's still cheaper to slice abalone thinly and share with the family. I love this dish. It's such a special treat

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  2. I am in love with this book. The quality of the recipes and and the writing is unparalleled to any other I have read.

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