Bonkers Food of the…

I’m not really sure what time period should be at the end of that sentence, my posts being so sporadic, but these particular sweet treats immediately inspired me. A couple of friends of Celia’s recently visited from Shanghai, who she met while volunteering there. In the best traditions of this at times pathologically generous culture they brought a few enormous boxes of snacks as gifts. Included in this confectionary aid package were some sweets. No ordinary sweets, however. These were cheese sweets. One packet contained harder sweets and one very soft sweets, both tasted of cheese, the former faintly and latter quite obviously so. Being ardent cheese fans we both liked them, but I’ve no doubt that they could for most people be an acquired taste. They apparently hark from inner Mongolia, so I’m not exactly sure what the provenance of the dairy involved is, but perhaps horse, cow or sheep. Inner Mongolia is famous for mutton hotpot, so the sheep option seems likely, although the sweets on the right say “cow’s milk” and have a picture of an improbably ecstatic cow, which could be a clue of some sort. Please have a look at the picture below.

Cheese candy and some tasty jerky. Beef, allegedly.

Shaoxing, Land of Lu Xun and Rice Wine

                                I recently returned from a trip to Shaoxing (绍兴), which is a fairly small city near Hangzhou in Zhejiang (杭州 in 浙江) province. Zhejiang province is famous for its spectacular economic expansion, with such axes of Chinese trade as Wenzhou and Yiwu. Shaoxing is of more classical importance, being the ancestral home of Lu Xun (鲁迅), the famous Chinese author, a man who is of great importance due to his role as a cultural bridge between the old and new China (he was active during the end of the Qing dynasty and the beginning of republican China in the early twentieth century). Shaoxing was of considerable importance due to its proximity to Hangzhou, which was the capital of the Southern Song in the early twelfth century and was, as the provincial government love to remind you, visited and written about by Marco Polo. Considering it is merely a subsidiary of a city many outside of China haven’t necessarily heard of, Shaoxing has a disproportionate amount of figures of historical importance, from the mythical Yu the Great, tamer of floods, to Ming dynasty artists and female revolutionaries during the late Qing era (Qiu Jin at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries).

                               My reasons for visiting were initially more pedestrian than wishing to pay homage to such people of historical importance. In a moment of cosmopolitan obsessive compulsion I felt the need to visit Shaoxing in an effort to dash it off my Hangzhou-to-do-list, something I’d felt unable to do despite previously living in Hangzhou for a year (it’s half an hour away by train). After reading a little about Shaoxing it quickly became apparent that it held rather more of interest than a way of satisfying my curious compulsion to go through life by way of lists. Importantly for this particular blog it became clear that there were a lot of culinary reasons to visit, a good way to satisfy my other compulsion, something of a genetic tendency toward gluttony assuming the form of cultural tourism.  

                                 Shaoxing is famous for the production of particularly fine rice wine of various sorts. This is made possible by the presence of a lake with unusually potable water, free of the usual green sludge that can often be found in lakes in this region. The most common type of wine is the yellow variety (黄酒), which can be bought in supermarkets across the country. Slightly less common, but rather more delicious, is the red variety, Nu’er Hong wine (女儿红酒), traditionally consumed by brides in honour of their new husbands. The presence of rice wine becomes immediately apparent, the heavy alcoholic odour pervades many of the city’s streets, whether this is from production or the saturation of wine shops is not clear. The ubiquity of rice wine spreads into the local cuisine, much of it is prepared in rice wine, either soaked, cooked or otherwise marinated in its vinegary alcoholic tang. The town also has the dubious glory of being home to one of China’s snacks most offensive to the olfactory organs, the aptly named stinky tofu (chou doufu 臭豆腐), of which I will report on shortly. Finally, the town’s cuisine is known for its use of dried fish and vegetables, to round off a pickled cuisine that I found at times delicious, but that others would perhaps find overpowering.

A glass of bayberry wine on the left and yellow rice wine on the right. A plate of weird dried soy beans behind, I think I'll stick to a packet of McCoy's, thanks all the same. 

                                On the evening we reached Shaoxing I was determined to try out some of the local cuisine, so we headed into a restaurant that was dotted with typical Chinese decorations, the omnipresent carved stones, subdued wooden sculptures and dark wooden furniture. I tentatively made choices from the menu which was all in Chinese characters, simultaneously quizzing the slightly bemused waiter. By Chinese service standards slightly bemused is equivalent to regal treatment. Eventually we chanced upon a fish dish with an unreasonably long name involving soy beans, some braised cabbage and a Shaoxing speciality; the famous Shaoxing chicken (绍兴鸡). The fish was delicious and didn’t have the almost inescapable muddy flavour that much of China’s tank-incarcerated seafood provides, the fishy flavours being punctuated by soy beans that had the unmistakably alcoholic bite of the local rice wine. Shaoxing chicken is probably one of their most famous dishes, it is served cold and tastes all but saturated with rice wine. I found it delicious, the spiky tang offsetting the soft fleshy chicken. It erred on the overpowering side of the scale for Celia, however, but perhaps my taste buds have been given immunity by my love of malatang.

Shaoxing chicken. Winey.

The tasty fish steamed with rice wine.

                                The abundance of fish in Shaoxing holds a particular position of cultural importance for the Chinese. Fish are a symbol of plenty in China, a country where much of the land is not farmable due to its mountainous areas or largely uncultivated barren west, stretching into the Taklamakan Desert, where China is at its most inhospitable. This is reflected in the presence of fish in Chinese tradition, from folk art to the pictures of fat boys with fish displayed around the lunar New Year, and as far back as the prehistoric settlements in Banpo (半坡) nestling in the Yellow River Valley, where it seems fish had pride of place as totem animals. Fish ostensibly represent plenty enjoyed from great effort, understandable in a country that has been racked by intermittent famines throughout its history, where a fish at times could represent the difference between life and death and at others could represent the outcome of successful farming. The area around the Yangtze River (长江) is often known as the land of fish and rice, providing a huge population with sustenance, and it is in this cradle of fertility that Shaoxing and Hangzhou nestle, having an undeniable effect on their culinary culture.    

                                 The evening brought some experimentation with the local brews, I tried a local rice wine and Celia tried a bayberry wine(杨梅酒), both of which were improbably strong and quite acidic. These are certainly not drinks for every evening, but were somewhat fuller in taste than previous rice wines I’d tried, which can taste quite watery. Mine was a jaundiced yellow pallor and, like all the best homebrew, had piles of sediment lurking at the bottom. It was at any rate somewhat more flavoursome than it at first appeared, although it certainly held a spiky vinegary aspect that is probably something of an acquired taste. Before our alcoholic experimentation I’d noticed a stall where a man appeared to be frying nuts. It turned out that he was making a local type of nut brittle, one was more like our European variety, a dark golden bar built on a lattice of peanuts; the other was thin and black, resembling a cracker and slightly less sweet than its European-style counterpart. The black one seemed to be made of sesame and tasted slightly more savoury, but still provided a good after dinner treat.

Nut brittle of two sorts.

                                The next day brought calm, beauty and a bus crisis. The calm involved Dong Hu (东湖), literally East Lake, a delightfully relaxing scenic area where we hired a boat. It was carved from the rock, originally as a quarry during the Han dynasty in the 200’s, but later turned into a lake for pleasure during the Qing dynasty, which was the final imperial dynasty, dating from the 17^th to the 20^th centuries. The boat journey was wonderfully pacifying, we were gently propelled through the placid waters by the boatman who curiously used his foot to paddle, apparently the usual propulsion method in this kind of sampan. This calm was destined to come to a crashing end, however, as it was the weekend. We had to wait for two buses, after which we were packed into a bus, seemingly antonymic of the Tardis, that time travelling police box that is bigger on the inside than out. Thankfully there was something to sweeten the deal at the end of the journey, a nai you xiao each. This small confection is about the size of a cupcake and has soft meringue on the top, and a custard filling encased in a crunchy baked base. I hadn’t seen one before and haven’t seen one since, so I assume they are a Shaoxing speciality (tesecai – 特色菜). The cake as a whole is enjoyable, however the filling promises a delectable custardy flavour, but delivers only a bland pasty mulch – something of a final disappointment. Perhaps an enterprising baker could make a small alteration to the innards of this partly delicious confection to help it fulfil its potential to deliver delectation. The final disappointing punctuation is a common theme in Chinese confections, such as the tendrils of pork floss lurking deep in donuts or the offensive sneeze of parsley topping a birthday cake. However, this difference in palate is something that must be embraced as a sign of the diversity that makes our world so full of endless fascination. But there is still categorically no excuse for parsley on cake.

 Dong Hu

Nai you xiao

                                     As our trip came to a close we felt it necessary to try some of the nasally challenging local snack stinky tofu. This name is not a bastardisation in any way, it’s an almost direct translation from the Chinese (chou dofu – 臭豆腐), it’s presented in cubes that are fermented, spiced and deep fried in a wok. Thankfully they do not deliver on their olfactory threats and are a rather tasty snack, the hardened skin crunching with a salty tang to deliver a soft pillow of warm tofu within. This snack was allegedly created by accident by an old lady in Shaoxing who had some herbs, spices and (presumable off) tofu left over, so decided to throw it together and see what happened. The culinary experimentation of a little old lady with a frugal nature seems to be as good a creation myth as any for this dish, and so it’s generally accepted. We visited a small street food area, but it paled in comparison to Hangzhou’s enormous avenue of appetising snacks. One treat I also picked up before we left was a bottle of Nu’er red wine (see above), which turned out to be as delicious as I’d hoped, a lot fuller than its yellow counterpart, delivering a sweet flavour somewhat reminiscent of port or sweet sherry.

 Pongy tofu

 Marriage wine 

                                In a final bid to taste all the best Shaoxing food has to offer I tried a large beef stew for our final lunch, which was filled with slices of beef and chopped pickled vegetables. I believe they were rehydrated examples of the local dried vegetables (gan cai – 干菜), they delivered a delicious piquancy to the round fatty flavour of the beef and left behind a quite delicious pickled broth. In a final rushed bid to try the dried fish of Shaoxing I bought a few vacuum packed pieces of dried fish at the train station. In China it is possible to buy almost anything dead in a vacuum packed snack portion. Everything from chickens’ feet to pigs’ feet to pigs’ snouts to pickled vegetables and of course fish and squid. I’m reserving the dried fish for a day when I feel suitable famished or adventurous (either will do), and will report back as to my findings on such a date. With that promise for the future we bade a full farewell to Shaoxing.

Thanks for reading, 谢谢 and 再见 for now.

 Beef stew with a strong pickled flavour.

Dried fish

Bibliography/further reading

I’ve decided to include a bit of further reading so that if you found this interesting you can read a bit more.

These are the books I’ve used or learned from to help me write this piece:

The Rough Guide to China, this series won’t need much introduction to any travellers out there. It has excellent historical and cultural information about many cities in China and has been invaluable during my time here. So invaluable in fact that some pages have fallen out and I can’t provide publishing details just now, but if you want a copy just search the net or have a look at www.roughguides.com .

The River at the Centre of the World (Simon Winchester, Penguin, 1996) is an excellent and absorbing account of a trip up the Yangtze River, for which I owe any knowledge about Da Yu Ling, the Tamer of the Floods. I didn’t have to write more about this, but I heartily recommend this book to find out more.

The True Story of Ah Q (Lu Xun, translated by Gladys Yang and Yang Xianyi, Chinese University Press, 2002), a modern classic in China, an excellent piece of satirical fiction which will be imbued with much meaning for anyone who’s spent time living in China. A great introduction to Lu Xun.

Tecknens Rike (Cecilia Lindqvist, Bonnier Fakta AB, 1989), this is a Swedish book about the history and meaning of Chinese characters and is absolutely fascinating for its information about Chinese history, prehistory and language.

Tiger Head Snake Tails (Johnathan Fenby, Simon & Schuster, 2012), and absorbing and fairly exhaustive account of modern China and the challenges it faces, both economically and politically (economics does however dominate).

I used several websites for some pieces of information, the sometimes infamous www.wikipedia.org, which while not usable for academic works is very useful for general little bits of background. For information about and proofing of Chinese characters I used the excellent and free www.mdbg.net , an endless mine of information and incredibly useful if you’re studying Chinese or living in China.

I hope these resources prove useful for anyone who wishes to further their knowledge of China.   

Some boatmen by the school Lu Xun attended, which is now a museum.

Music of Late

I haven't posted anything musical of late, so I'll just quickly mention a few things I've been listening to recently. My brother recently asked me about suggestions for four-four dance music (for example: house, techno, etc.), which reminded me of a mix I've enjoyed over the past months by a chap called Pearsall. This prompted me to visit his website, of which the URL was listed on my MP3 player, at www.sonicrampage.org. Apart from having a name fabulously evocative of pounding bass, Pearsall provides us with a bewildering array of different mainly dance music mixes, from drum and bass, to techno, to house, to trance and many other genres in between. Each mix is completely free and is accompanied by a post about what prompted him to make that mix, it's a highly entertaining website with plenty of good quality mixes, although beware of the olfactory presence of a particular French dairy product in some of his musical tapestries.

I've been having a bit of a renaissance of hip-hop enjoyment of late. In particular I've been listening to a mix by DJ Moocha, also known to me for excellent selections of jungle, this mix includes many fine examples of UK and US hip-hop, mainly harking from the late nineties onward. Some of my favourite raw producers are on there, from Rodney P and Jehst to Wu Tang Killa Bees and various classics that I know from nights out in London but whose names escape me. Jehst is an English artist, who does a lot to dispel the image of hip-hop as all about gold and misogyny with his lyrics about all manner of topics including, oddly, Charles Bukowski in "Alcoholic Author". I'd suggest listening to "High Planes Drifter", an EP that has many of my favourites on, a great showcase of Jehst's lyrical poetry and commentary on urban life in the UK. Rodney P is somewhat rowdier, one for a party mood, I've been listening to "The Future" of late, his debut album that has some heavily produced tracks on it, often tinged with reggae or dancehall influences.

For DJ Moocha have a look at https://www.mixcloud.com/tag/dj-moocha/ or http://www.illfm.net/browse/show/7/1.html , the latter is my old favourite, the Ill FM internet radio station site.

Jehst - "Alcoholic Author"

Some of Rodney P's Caribbean influenced hip-hop sound.

Something recently reminded me that I also wanted to listen to Fela Kuti, the famous pioneer of Afrobeat music from Nigeria and political activist, most prominent during the 1970's. It is to this soundtrack accompanied by the patter of oriental rain that I type. I can report that his music is very listenable indeed, I'm really enjoying "Shakara - The London Scene", it's very brassy soul-tinged music, with an unmistakably gravelly voice providing a commentary in what is presumably Nigerian language. I heartily recommend giving Fela a listen.

"Shakara" by Fela Kuti, described here as iconoclastic (!).

Thanks for reading.  

Tea Eggs 茶蛋

Another breakfast follow up

                                                   During my post about Chinese breakfast, I completely neglected to mention that typical Chinese food the tea egg. Needless to say, alongside the mantous, baozis and paper cups of fresh dou jiang sits a steaming, sometimes bubbling, always brown and mysterious rice cooker full of eggs. They sit wrapped in their shells in a dark brown liquid, dyed as such by a mixture of herbs and spices and left all day to simmer or just to be kept at a warm temperature. They do not look especially appetizing, but they are a quite flavourful and a good way to either supplement your mantou or give you a little snack during the day. Under their shells the flesh is dyed a soft brown colour, akin to a milky cup of instant coffee. When bitten into the flavour is fairly salty, with a hint of that pervasive Chinese spice flavour, a hint of aniseed and various other tastes too numerous to pick out. They are eaten as breakfast items or as snacks, which are known as 小吃, which literally translates as “little eats”, another pleasing linguistic titbit from this endlessly entertaining language.  

Israeli Breakfast

This is just a quick follow up to my previous post about Chinese breakfast. After reading said post a friend of the family emailed me with this delightful example of Israeli breakfast. 

"The whole breakfast bit made me think of my jaundiced attitude to big breakfasts, but if it is what you like, you should know that Israel has a tradition of enormous breakfasts. Perhaps it's the legacy of British rule, the influence of Arab hospitality, and the impact of Jewish maternal guilt. Not sure why, but a regular breakfast at a decent hotel will include:

6-7 kinds of yogurt, labneh, cottage cheese

gigantic fruit plates

enormous dried fruit plates (figs, raisins, dates, apricots, etc.)

eggs in every form

sweets, pastries, halvah, danish, bagels

hummous, babaganoush, matbucha

fried vegetables (cauliflower, eggplant, mushrooms)

waffles, pancakes

jams

coffee, tea, espresso"

Thanks for that, Nancy. This is now on my must-try list, I'll be wearing the fat pants for this one. I didn't even know there were 6-7 kinds of yoghurt. 

Just a quick explanation of some of the less well known things: halvah is a sweet, fairly hard cake of which there are two kinds. My favourite is the one made of nut butter and has pistachio nuts embedded in it, the other sort is made of flour. Babaganoush, also known as poor man's caviar by some people, is a paste made of barbecued aubergine (eggplant), where the skin has been peeled from it and the innards have been mashed into a pulp. This dish fully deserves its name, it tastes rather smokey and is absolutely delicious. Labneh is a yoghurt from which the whey has been strained, leaving behind something like cottage cheese. I had to look up matbucha, but Wikipedia.org easily provided answers. According to Wikipedia it's "a cooked dish of tomatoes and roasted bell peppers seasoned with garlic and chili pepper". It sounds pretty good, I think I'll have to try this enormous repast at some point.    

Chinese Breakfast

                                Before I start let me just apologise for not blogging for so long. I’ve been quite busy looking to the future and what I’ll do in China and abroad after finishing my contract here and rather forgotten about my love of blathering on about food and music. I’ve still been listening to a lot of music and eating a lot of food, however, a fact which should surprise no one. I wished to write this post some time ago, but I’ll do so now instead by way of slowly easing myself in again. Hopefully I’ll be somewhat more regular with my narrative ramblings from here on in, next on the medium term agenda is a multi-post retelling of my attempts to munch my way through Chengdu (rest assured Panda steaks will not be making an appearance, for anyone with entirely reasonable concerns about my adventurous eating habits). In any case, as so often is the case I digress from the business at hand.

                                Britain has a somewhat historically shaky reputation when it comes to cuisine, displaying such crimes against cooking as luncheon meat (bizarrely easy to get in any Chinese corner shop), fried bread and devilled kidneys. However, Britain can be said to have held its own in one key area, that of breakfast. The everyday is unremarkable, the ubiquitous bowl of cereal or piece of toast ever present, but Britain really shines when it comes to the big breakfast, a plate of which will typically have enough calories to feed an entire rowing team after a starvation diet (say, in the region of 100,000 calories). I exaggerate to make a point, but I feel the point is well made, for more on this see my earlier post about the delights of English breakfasts. Having grown up in England and being a self-confessed glutton I have rather high expectations, or at least highly calorific, when it comes to a proper breakfast. I feel the only nation that comes really close to Britain when producing spectacular breakfasts is the USA[1], but I like to keep an open mind and I certainly found it necessary to find out about the morning consumption habits of the great Middle Kingdom, in fact on some days as a matter of gastric exigency (or because I’m bloody starving, if you prefer).

                                I wasn’t particularly confident about Chinese morning food, which is the exact name of breakfast in Chinese (zao fan – 早饭). I’d heard all kinds of horrific tales about far eastern morning habits, involving mostly cold noodles and fried rice. It is with great pleasure that your gluttonous correspondent in China can report that, while English breakfast it isn’t, there are plenty of tasty morsels to be had when you get up in this country. The first rather curious thing is the lack of a standard caffeinated beverage in the morning, this is particularly surprising given the national tendency to get up at stupid o’clock and do things like blow up artillery outside my bedroom window, though perhaps this stands in to give them that much needed kick in the morning. Many people have of course picked up western norms and drink coffee or red tea 红茶 (what they call black tea here, more on this in the future) in the morning, but the local hot beverage seems largely to be hot soy milk, or dou jiang 豆浆 . I can’t quite bring myself to be so culturally genuine as to give up my non-explosive cup of kick in the morning, but I do sometimes buy a cup of this as well on my way to work, as it is quite delicious and fairly filling. When I do buy this it’s generally from the baozi 包子 (roughly pronounced bow-zer) shop outside my apartment block. I buy it here because they make it fresh, a delightful and cheap beverage (usually the equivalent of about 20p) that’s available in many places here. All it involved is a spoonful of sugar, some soy beans and a cup full of hot water made into a thick and nourishing liquid in a blender, much nicer than all the unpleasantly thin milk alternatives available in the west.

                               

                         “What is a baozi shop?”, you may well ask. Baozi are steamed buns filled with a large variety of possible fillings, from the most common minced pork (zhu rou – 猪肉[2]) filling, to red bean paste, to vegetable and even rice noodle fillings, among many others. I even heard someone suggest the one could fill one with an English breakfast, perhaps this would be a super-sized baozi, if anyone with the culinary nous out their wants to have a go please do, then invite me round to give it a taste test and my infinite admiration. Since I’m often on the run in the early hours when buying things from hear I usually opt for a sweet mantou 馒头 , a somewhat simpler and more digestively forgiving roll of sweet steamed bread. This, coupled with a cup of hot soy milk is a lot more filling than you’d realise. This offering is my breakfast-on-the-run option here.

One of my local breakfast stalls. The reason for the haze is the intense heat and humidity during the summer in Suzhou.

                                Coming to China I was quite excited by the availability of street food, this is largely represented by shaokao 烧烤, the common late night Chinese barbecue. However, what’s been a pleasant surprise is the perpetual morning presence of the bingzi 饼子 stand. Bingzi are basically pancakes, the Taiwanese variety are very popular, being quite thick and usually served with at least an egg wrapped inside. Other popular accompaniments include lettuce (don’t worry, they fry it slightly first to make sure no pesky health benefits abide), Taiwanese sausage, bacon and, on certain fortuitous occasions, cheese. There are also thinner crepe like alternatives available, usually served with a fried dough stick, some lettuce (again, making sure all vitamins are killed in the medieval fashion of boiling in oil) and various other choices such as meat and chilli or even a sweet bean paste. I most often eat pancakes either on days when I have more digestion time or when I’m setting off on a long journey, since they are pretty effective at keeping hunger at bay.

All the blondies enjoying bingzi.

                                

                           Now I wish to tell you about a couple of breakfasts I've had in this wonderfully gastronomic country. One of my happiest memories of breakfast in China was when my mother, father and nephew visited at the beginning of summer. We were staying on an island known as PutuoShan, just off the coast of Zhejiang province in the East China Sea. It’s famous for its shrines to Guanyin, a person of historical note within east Asian Buddhism; it’s an island imbued with much religious significance, a particularly touching cultural experience in the context of a regime that actively crushed organised religion not so long ago. Touching as it was, nothing could distract us from the urgent need for the first meal. We found a restaurant that served breakfast a short walk from our accommodation, and I was rather excited by the provision of apparently almost every normal Chinese breakfast choice with some extras. There were the usual baozis and mantous, but there was also the purple sloppy red bean porridge, a rather unpleasantly bland concoction. There was also something called dou hua, which seemed to be a curd made of soy and came topped with dried shrimps. This probably sounds horrible, and no doubt to some people it is, but I rather liked the cold curd and salty tickle of the dried shrimp, a pleasant sensation in the blazingly hot Chinese summer. They also had fried dumplings, which are a favourite breakfast of the Chinese, something perhaps surprising to westerners. One thing remained certain, we would not be hungry for some time after this feast.

Breakfast with my family on Putuoshan.

                                Another experience consigned to the romanticised history section of my psyche is that of breakfast in Shanghai. When Celia (my partner) and I go to Shanghai we always stay in a hostel called Shanghai City Central Youth Hostel, partly because it’s very cheap but basically as good as a value hotel in England, partly because of their delicious and cheap cocktails, and partly because they used to have wonderful breakfasts. The fact that they are now defunct probably adds to the romanticising, but they were definitely delicious. Piles of steaming baozis, hot soy milk and even some horrible red bean porridge if you were feeling masochistic. My favourite thing to do was take a fried dough stick and soak it in hot soy milk. These dough sticks are call youtiao 油条 and are a little oily and salty, in my opinion they taste best when used as a sort of giant crouton in soy milk or soups. They can be eaten at any time of day and are also one of my favourite additions to a hot bowl of malatang. As I mentioned earlier the breakfast is now defunct, something I discovered to my sadness last time I stayed there, probably because it wasn’t profitable given that it was included in the price of a stay. Luckily, it’s in the middle of Shanghai, so there’s enough food to feed a small army on every corner.

                                So, in conclusion Chinese breakfast certainly holds its own. It will never compare to British breakfast, but I’m not sure that anything ever will for me. There are certainly a plethora of wonderful breakfast options for the hungry early riser in the Middle Kingdom.

 More pictures of Mr. Bingzi.

 The competition.

A slice of China: bicycles and bingzi.

                                 I meant this to be a short post, but I seem to have gotten somewhat carried away again, yet another testament to one of China’s greatest cultural assets: its cuisine. Thanks for reading.    

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[1] For a wider discussion of breakfasts around the world see The Breakfast Bible by Seb Emina and Malcolm Eggs.

[2] I like the second character, meaning meat, it looks rather like a rack of ribs, don’t you think?

Dongshan – Dragon Prawns and Tea

东山 – 龙虾和茶

                                Summer has been pretty tough here – Suzhou: hot, humid and a lot of work. Recently I returned to having two days off and the temperature dipped to something slightly more reasonable, although the air remains stubbornly close. Given this somewhat more clement state of affairs Celia and I decided to head to Dongshan 东山on our days off. For me, this was mainly a way to scratch a culinary itch I had; my friend Jason, a Suzhou native, had to my great interest informed me that Tai Hu 太湖, a huge lake local to Suzhou, was the farming place of many fisherman who cultivated and caught crayfish as part of their fishing staple. This particularly interested me because I’m half Swedish, which may initially appear to be apropos of nothing very much. To any Swedish readers it will in fact be apropos of quite a lot, allow me to explain further. The Kräft Skiva (crayfish festival) is a big deal in Sweden, a party at some point in July or August that celebrates the former crayfish season, sadly a now largely non-existent species there since a water borne disease decimated the population to near extinction some time ago. In today’s globalised world this has provided only a small barrier to crayfish based celebrations and Swedes continue to enjoy this annual feast with catches imported from various places, one not inconsiderable supplier being China herself. I fondly remember cycling home with boxes of frozen Chinese delights, ready to be unwrapped from their hard scarlet packets, precariously balanced on the back of my bike and quickly beginning to sweat in the bright Nordic sunshine. Happily, Sweden is seeing a resurgence in the crayfish population and trends are beginning to reverse in a somewhat unexpected fashion as Sweden starts to export chickens’ feet (that favourite Chinese snack, for more on this see my earlier post) towards the orient.

                                It was then with some excitement that I found myself at what was most probably the source of some of the scarlet delicacies so gladly recalled from my youth. But before lunch we had some sightseeing to do. After one very long journey and one much shorter one  on the interminable earthquakes that are China’s buses it was with great pleasure and no small relief that we were enveloped by the silent serenity of Zijin Nunnery. This nunnery was built in the early years of the Tang dynasty (618-907AD) and houses some beautiful Arhat statues and various other pretty pieces of ancient art. Arhat is a term largely attributed to Buddhism, although it was apparently present before Gautama, the founder of Buddhism. It was at any rate pretty humbling to be in the quiet presence of these ancient artworks. The nunnery was also clean, emerald green and almost entirely devoid of people – something of a nirvana following the hellish stint of almost continuous work in the noisy SND 高新区area of Suzhou. We had a little walk around and then rumbled off on a bus towards the banks of Tai Hu, enjoying the view across the countryside and the sleepy little villages punctuating the winding roads. 

Celia at Tai Hu

龙虾

                                We quickly found a lady hawking for trade near her restaurant. She hastily informed us that whilst she currently had no crayfish she could easily go and procure an ample portion for two people from the nearby fishermen. A short while and a broken conversation with some locals later, one of whom was a man of a certain age so typical the world over, a self-proclaimed authority on everything, a steaming bowl of these red treasures arrived. The Chinese experience is somewhat different from the Swedish on, as one would expect, given the vast cultural and physical distance separating the two. Swedish crayfish are normally served cold, having been preserved in a mixture of brine and dill. The Chinese variant were presented in a large bowl and cooked with lumps of ginger, a steaming hillock of scarlet, still having been preserved in brine.

                                Crayfish are funny looking things, painted a deep red by the boiling pot, gangly eyes on stalks and disproportionately large claws hanging clumsily in front of them. They could easily star in a 1950s Ed Wood B-movie as cheap stand-ins for Styrofoam alien invaders. The Chinese call them Longxia 龙虾 (this Pinyin is pronounced long-shee-ah), the characters translating literally as dragon prawns. There is a certain poetic simplicity about the Chinese language I’ve mentioned before, elevators are called electronic ladders for example, and that linguistic feature is preserved by this particular piece of elegant nomenclature. The term can mean either crayfish or lobsters, but it was the smaller cousins that we were to enjoy on this particular day. They are somewhat troublesome to eat, the most succulent flesh being encased in a hard shell around their rear ends. One can also eat the claw meat and even parts from their heads, known somewhat optimistically as crayfish butter by the Swedes. It all requires a total lack of table manners and the will to crack open various parts of these perished creatures to get to the soft treasure within. In Sweden they have a selection of tools for this, but the Chinese are made of stronger stuff and it is left to the eater to puzzle out the best way to crack into their meal. All this means that eating them is not really worth the effort, but like all the best traditions we continue to practice it out of habit and in order to get that implacable sense of satisfaction from doing something unusual, occasional and largely pointless. I certainly enjoyed these salty scarlet treats to about the same degree as their Swedish counterparts, but I won’t be enjoying them for some time as frequency would be the death knell for the enjoyment of this particular tradition.

A bowl of crayfish, notice the pieces of ginger.

...and after the feast there was desolation upon the table.

茶

                        After our crayfish feast we headed back to the non-descript one horse (or, less poetically, one motorised tricycle) town that is Dongshan proper. Non-descript and somewhat grimy it was but explore it we did anyway. After a deliciously thirst quenching fresh lemon iced tea we came upon a small covered market. There were several small stall owners hawking local fruit, strange miscellaneous items and two parallel lines of hawkers perched behind small hillocks of various kinds of tea. I managed to identify some as local Dongshan tea with my rudimentary Chinese reading skills. I started to negotiate the sale of some of this to me, during which time some confusion ensued due to the impossibly cheap price of the tea. The exchange led quickly to a somewhat bemused reaction from the stall owner. I’m often faced with this bemused reaction when I try doing all the silly things I like doing that westerners probably have no real place doing in the middle kingdom. Buying tea from stalls in the middle of nowhere, going to hidden local vegetable markets, taking buses to random outposts of cities, getting lost in industrial zones, etc. The reaction is not so much unpleasant as almost endearing in the confusion it barely hides behind the ubiquitous Chinese saving of face. Clearly westerners did not often chat to this chap in Chinese, and his stock of reactions did not cover this particular situation. The expression is something of guardedness mixed with eventual admiration for your dogged attempts to communicate. Also, somewhat pleasingly for me, people off the tourist trail are generally too busy being bemused to try to rip you off, indeed it generally seems not to be the done thing for stall holders selling comestibles. The confusion was furthered by the misunderstanding of his pricing. He gave me the price of forty kuai (the unofficial name for Yuan, a bit like quid for pounds) a jin 斤 (a jin is 500g, a standard weight in China), but tea is often sold in liangs 市两 (50g[1]), since teas like Longjing 龙井 and Biluochun 碧螺春 are rather expensive. I therefore asked for a liang and tried to hand over forty kuai. He gave me the common reaction saved for this kind of situation, a look that seems to be searching for obvious signs of mental deficiency or even lunacy, but then quickly gives way to the understanding that you’re not stupid or pathologically wasteful, just foreign. It’s not really your fault that you’re wasting his precious lounging time – you were born this way and deserve more pity than anything else for your national shortcomings. The transaction ended cordially however, and I decided to take some photos, which he though was absolutely hilarious and told me I should take some pictures of the “beautiful lady (mei nu 美女)” – the owner of the neighbouring stall. These sort of endlessly entertaining interactions almost always end up in good humour and someone complementing my inevitably somewhat broken Chinese. This is a common experience for me in China, an apparent abruptness that belies a friendly national psyche brimming with good humour that rests just beneath that tough surface. It was a fun end to what had been a pleasant day in Dongshan. I’m happy to report that I’ve been drinking the Dongshan infusion, and that, whilst not the highest quality brew, it is a good everyday green that unfurls in an ever aesthetically pleasing fashion when steeped. A fine souvenir from another satisfying Chinese experience.    


[1] Note this is the standardised post 1959 measure, before which it was about 31g.

Cuppa, anyone?

And finally a picture of some lily pads on Tai Hu to leave you with a pacifying view of Chinese summer.

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