Eating (11 page)

“I don’t know how many scoldings and answerings back and quarrels Rulan and I went through…. Now that we have not neglected to do the making up with each other …it is safe for me to claim that all the credit for the good points of the book is mine and all the blame for the bad points is Rulan’s. Next I must blame my husband for all the negative contributions he has made toward the making of this book. In many places he has changed Rulan’s good English into bad which he thinks Americans like better. His greatest contribution is even more negative. Whenever a dish is not quite right or when it is repeated too often he simply leaves it alone.”

Pretending to be his wife, Professor Chao writes, “Making others feel at ease is as true of Chinese manners as of American manners, but we apply the principle very differently. Sometimes we seem to be actually quarreling and fighting when we are really each trying to be more polite than everybody else. The important thing is that in that wrangling atmosphere everybody feels happy and at ease, because things are going as they should.”

Several of Mrs. Chao’s basic recipes have inspired the more complicated versions in later Chinese cookbooks,
and several of his/her attempts to create an equivalent vocabulary in English have become part of the culinary language, such as “stir-fry” and “pot stickers.” Mr. Chao’s attempt to introduce “ramblings” for “hun-t’un” (wonton), “which differ from ordinary, neat-edged wraplings by having fluffy or rambling edges like the tails of a goldfish,” didn’t catch on. But Professor Chao adds this footnote: “The same spoken word, written differently, means in fact the nebulous state of confusion when the world began,” an elevated thought to accompany your next bowl of hun-t’un soup.

How to Cook and Eat in Chinese
is once again out of print. My copy is brittle with age. Much of it is out of date. Today leaf lard is hard to find, but ginger is everywhere, and bok choy and hoisin can be found in most supermarkets. But the recipes are still basic and true. Perhaps in the digital future a virtual copy of the Chaos’ book will turn up. If so, cooks will still find the recipes useful. They will not daunt amateurs and will inspire experts.

The other day, I ordered an oyster omelette in a neighborhood Malaysian restaurant. The eggs were cooked quickly over high heat and therefore were tough, the oysters were too small and too few, and the seasoning was off, a hasty job by a careless cook. Years ago, the Chinese omelette called “egg foo yung” could be found on Chinese restaurant menus practically everywhere. In the 1960s, Jane Jacobs, my ten-year-old son, Jacob, and I were exploring northern Canada at the
northern terminus of the rail line at Moose Factory, a remote settlement at the foot of James Bay, a southern extension of Hudson Bay. Moose Factory consisted of some bleak Inuit dwellings, a run-down motel, and two Chinese restaurants bearing identical signs—“Mets Chinois et Canadien”—and probably owned by descendants of the Chinese crews that built the railroads and prepared their native cuisine themselves. The egg foo yung that we were served was an adequate relic of New York’s Chinatown in a sub-Arctic wilderness. Now the dish seldom appears on New York’s Chinatown menus. But I still serve my version of Mrs. Chao’s authentic Cantonese oyster omelette. It’s quick, easy, and delicious. Chinese fish markets and upscale supermarkets carry jars of shucked West Coast oysters, which cost less and are easier to use than local oysters in the shell, but if you can’t find bottled oysters, the fishmonger will shuck some for you if you can’t shuck them yourself.
For two, you will need about a half-dozen medium oysters, six eggs, a handful of bean sprouts, a celery stalk chopped fine, a few green onions in one-and-a-half-inch julienne strips, two tablespoons of oyster sauce, a pinch of sugar, a smaller pinch of salt, sesame oil, and some cornstarch. Quickly stir-fry the oysters in peanut oil in a ten-inch pan or wok until they puff. Drain and save the oyster liquid, and reserve the oysters in a separate bowl. Then lightly oil the pan again, and toss in the bean sprouts, chopped celery, green onions, sugar, salt, and oyster sauce. Stir-fry over high heat for a
minute or so, and add to the reserved oysters. Clean the pan, warm it, and film it again with peanut oil, and pour in the eggs, lightly beaten. Reduce the flame. As the eggs begin to form a bottom, mix in the vegetables and oysters, and cook the mixture slowly over moderate heat, lifting the edges from time to time to let the uncooked eggs flow to the bottom of the pan. Now fold the eggs with the filling in half—back to front, and cook the underside until it just begins to brown. Turn the eggs over, and cook the other side to the same point. Don’t worry if some of the mixture falls out. Slide the omelette onto a warm plate. Thicken the reserved oyster liquid a bit over a moderate flame with a half-teaspoon of cornstarch dissolved in a little water, add a dash of soy sauce and sesame oil, pour over the omelette, sprinkle a few sprigs of cilantro, and you will have made a classic egg foo yung for two or perhaps three. You will also wonder why so few Chinese menus feature this unctuous dish.

Mrs. Chao’s Chinese-style sashimi makes a good starter for an egg-foo-yung lunch. If you have the basic ingredients on hand and a good fish market nearby, you can whip it up in minutes, but you will have to let the dish stand for ten minutes or so while the fish marinates.

You will need a very sharp thin-bladed knife with which to cut a pound of very fresh wild salmon, tuna, or wild striped-bass fillet, or a mixture of all three, into very thin, very neat oblong slices, as in Japanese sashimi. Then mix a tablespoon or so of dry sherry with
another of soy sauce, a few grains (no more) of sea salt, a little fresh-ground pepper, a green onion trimmed and chopped very fine, and a teaspoon of sesame oil. Let the fish steep in this marinade in the refrigerator for ten minutes or so, and serve with a few sprigs of fresh cilantro.

Recently, my old friend Eddie Schoenfeld cooked for me and a few friends at his home in Brooklyn. I have known Eddie since the seventies, when I was startled one day at lunch with a Random House colleague at Uncle Tai’s, then the hottest upscale Chinese restaurant in New York, to find what appeared to be a bearded Chasid in a black suit, but without the usual hat, and with a nonregulation black bow tie, handing out menus. Eddie was not a Chasid. He had begun his odd career by arranging banquets for his friends at authentic Chinatown restaurants, and soon this became a business. One of these restaurants had made a great success by introducing spicy Szechuan cuisine to the United States, and its owner, David Keh, decided to try his luck uptown with Uncle Tai in the kitchen. He took Eddie with him. Eddie brought his clients along. The place was a huge success. And so we met.

Our friendship took root and blossomed. I suggested to Eddie that he and Uncle Tai write a cookbook. Uncle Tai’s so-called Hunanese recipes had caught on with uptown diners, and some would become classics, ubiquitous today on Chinese menus. To illustrate this success, Eddie multiplied for me the number of Chinese restaurants in the United States by the presumed proportion
that include General Tso on their menus and calculates that Americans now spend over a billion dollars a year on these sweet, gooey, high-margin chicken thighs. Later, Eddie explained that these were not necessarily Uncle Tai’s recipes, nor were they Hunanese. Hunan is an impoverished province, and its cooking is undistinguished. But the name was easier to pronounce than “Szechuan,” and so Uncle Tai’s enterprising backer, David Keh, launched Hunan haute cuisine for the uptown trade. Moreover, some of the recipes were actually created by Mr. Peng, a reclusive genius from Taipei. Uncle Tai, a master chef with an unpredictable temper, adapted many of his dishes for Americans. When we signed the contract for the Uncle Tai cookbook, neither Eddie nor I knew this complex provenance. Nor did we know that Uncle Tai’s third son would be furious with Eddie for revealing his father’s recipes, which the son considered family property. On a busy evening at Uncle Tai’s, as Eddie was serving a banquet to a table of twelve, the number-three son, a waiter and a judo expert, flew at Eddie, who landed unconscious for a few minutes on the carpet. Eddie, a cool professional, eventually got up, arranged his tie, walked out of the restaurant, and never returned. Uncle Tai’s cookbook, which would probably have become a perennial best-seller, was never published, but became the basis for Eddie’s collection of thousands of Chinese recipes. Uncle Tai eventually left New York and reopened in Dallas.

At dinner in Brooklyn, Eddie recalled these events
in his cheerful, dispassionate way but concluded with a sigh: that night, he said, “we had a line out the door.” Eddie has since created several fine Chinese restaurants in New York, most recently the Chinatown Brasserie on Lafayette Street, one of the two or three top Chinese places in town at the moment. The dinner he served that night was effortless and sublime. The main dish was a simple steamed salmon fillet about a half-inch thick, served in bite-size pieces beneath a sauce that requires careful measurements until you’ve made it a few times. Once you understand how the complex flavors blend—the fermented black beans are dominant, but faintly, like an echo; the oyster sauce provides body and salty sweetness; the sherry adds a delicate nip—you will have no trouble reproducing Eddie’s dish, which, including prep, shouldn’t take more than ten minutes, assuming you have the ingredients and equipment at hand. Salmon and fermented black beans are of course a well-known combination, but this subtle treatment gives the traditional preparation a nice bounce. Serve it with mildly flavored fried rice, or precooked Hong Kong noodles, mixed with enough sesame oil and soy sauce to add a mild flavor.

You will need a twelve-inch bamboo steamer with a tight-fitting lid, a fourteen-inch wok, and a ten-inch heat-proof platter, lightly oiled so that the fish won’t stick. For the sauce, you will need a small bowl in which to mix a half-teaspoon each of minced garlic, minced fresh ginger, and sugar; a teaspoon
each of regular (Kikkoman, e.g.) soy sauce and dark soy sauce, blended with mushrooms, which you will find in Chinese food shops;two teaspoons of oyster sauce, available in many supermarkets;a tablespoon each of finely chopped fermented black beans (sold in Chinese food stores) and dry sherry;and a dash of fresh-ground white pepper. A quarter-teaspoon of MSG is optional and unnecessary. To the mixture add a teaspoon of potato starch if you can find it in a local health-food store—or arrowroot, or as a last resort cornstarch—dissolved in two tablespoons of water. Then put three inches of water in the wok, fit the steamer to it—make sure that the bottom edge of the steamer sits in the water, or it will scorch—and bring the water to a boil. Center two half-inch fillets on the oiled plate, pour the sauce over them, and sprinkle a half-cup or so of green onions over that. Put the plate in the steamer, and cover it tightly with the bamboo top. Do not use a metal top or the condensed steam will fall back onto the fish and ruin it. After three or four minutes, the fish should be barely cooked through at its thickest part. Break the fish up with a chop-stick, mix the fish bits with the sauce, and serve at once. This is a wonderful dish for four; quick, easy, inexpensive, and delightful.

For fried rice, boil two cups of rice with two and a half cups of water: I use basmati, but any unflavored standard long-grain rice will do. Boil until the water disappears, then cover and set over a very low flame to steam for ten minutes or so, until all the water is absorbed and the rice is just beyond al dente. If
you overcook it, don’t despair. Turn it into gruel by adding a little water and cooking it further, adding soy sauce, chopped meat or fish, etc., and serve it as congee. Otherwise, let the rice cool and dry for an hour or two or overnight. Then, in a wok, heat a quarter-cup of vegetable oil, and when the oil is very hot but not smoking, add the rice and shove it around with a Chinese shovel-like scoop if you have one, or whatever else serves the purpose. After a minute or two, when the rice is well coated with oil, add soy sauce sparingly to taste. Then break an egg into the rice and mix it about until the rice is well warmed. Now you can add whatever suits you—bits of meat, chicken, fish, shrimp, vegetables, bean sprouts, leftovers—but not too much.

I
n the 1950s, when I lived on the top floor of an old town house in Greenwich Village, I could still encounter on walks through my neighborhood relics of the old bohemia: the wood-frame house on Bedford Street where Edna Millay once lived; Patchen Place, the rickety mews where e. e. cummings rented a house and where Djuna Barnes still lived; the run-down tenement across town, on St. Mark’s Place, where Lev Bronstein, who changed his name to Leon Trotsky, once kept a printing press, and where Wystan Auden and Chester Kallman now lived, amid piles of books and manuscripts, and where you had to check before you sat down that Chester, a good if messy cook, hadn’t parked a pot of oxtail stew on your chair. On Hudson Street, Dylan Thomas was drinking himself to death at the White Horse, two blocks north of the modest house where Jane Jacobs wrote
The Death and Life of Great American
Cities.
Once or twice in the Fourth Street subway station, when I still worked at Doubleday and Co., I saw William Faulkner—slight, with grayish hair, dressed in chinos—clutching a manuscript folder on his way uptown to see his editor, Albert Erskine, at Random House. It did not occur to me—as I walked along these century-old streets under leafy sycamores with Barbara and her Harvard friends John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and Kenneth Koch, who would become the so-called New York School of Poets—that we were at the end of an expiring bohemia, which was even then becoming gentrified. That trickle would soon become a flood of restored town houses, smart restaurants, and expensive shops, all but obliterating the picturesque remnants of the 1920s culture.