Features

HOW TO EAT IN CHINESE

Whenever inspiration has deserted me, I go over to my bookshelves to rummage through my collection of culinary works. This time I opened a precious little book given to me many years ago by a visiting friend. It is called “How to Cook and Eat in Chinese” written by a lady physician by the name of Buwei Yang Chao. It is actually illegal, as it is a pirated edition from Taiwan, but I have seen copies on the shelves of some Bangkok bookstores which seem to be legitimate.

“How to eat in Chinese” (from the TIME-LIFE book: “The Cooking of China”)
Mrs. Chao, at the time of writing, lived in the U.S., in Cambridge Mass. to be precise, and she wrote it as a guide for American cooks interested in the cuisine of China. These kind of cookbooks often lead to concessions which make them quite useless when one wants the real thing, albeit this is not so in the case of “How to Cook and Eat in Chinese”. In my opinion, Chinese cooking is a state of mind. It depends not so much on the ingredients as on the technique and the rational behind it. I believe one can create Chinese meals everywhere in the world as long as one has the utensils and the right kind of stove. The latter is a most important factor. It should be able to produce a blazing fire, for so called “Stir Frying”, as well as a fire for stewing, which means a very low fire. In fact, so low sometimes that it will keep a soup simmering for hours without ever reaching the boiling point.
Because the lady herself was born and raised in mainland China and is still delightfully Chinese in her observations and comments, it is written in a most unconventional style, heart-warming, with a delightful feminine sense of humour. It is a pleasure to read, even if you are not planning to set one foot in the kitchen. Amazingly, she actually disclaims responsibility for this book by saying that she should be practising medicine instead of writing and that it was Mrs. Hocking (Mrs William Ernest Hocking) who should get all the blame because she was the one to tell her to compile it and “Whenever Mrs Hocking tells me to do a thing, I always feel I really must. She really didn’t write this book. The way I didn’t was like this. You know I speak little English and write less. So I cooked my dishes in Chinese, my daughter Rulan put my Chinese into English, and my husband, finding the English dull, put it back into Chinese again.”
She describes how she and her daughter went to many “scoldings” and “answering back” to get the book done and if it hadn’t been for their friends to appease them, the book would never have been published and there would have been a permanent estrangement between the conservative Chinese mother and her modern American educated daughter. After the book went on the market there is peace again in the house she says.
“Next,” she writes, “I must blame my husband for all the negative contributions he has made toward the making of the book. In many places he has changed Rulan’s good English into bad, which he thinks the English speaking public likes better.” “The only recipe that is really his own is ‘Stirred Eggs’, which I let him write out himself. But he was so long winded about it that I had to stop him from trying any other dish. Apart from that, his support to my undertaking has been largely oral.”
Mrs Chao gives thanks to her friends and fellow provincials Pearl S. Buck and Hu Shih from Anhwei (for their words of praise, “which I hope the reader will find only moderately exag-gerated.” Hu Shih - I don’t know who he was - wrote a foreword for the book and the famous author Pearl Buck a preface. Pearl S. Buck was for me the initial source about China when as a child I read “The Good Earth”, a book for which she received the Noble Price. After that I began saving pictures of China and Chinese life which came with packages of tea of the “Goalpara” brand.
Mrs Choa was probably the one who coined the term “Stir Frying” for a technique in which vegetables or meats are quickly fried in little fat over a very hot fire so that the ingredients have little time to shed their juices. She adds to the English vocabulary a whole assortment of culinary expressions and names which as far as I know nobody has ever used in this context before. Besides the above mentioned “stir frying” she mentions “plunging”, “defishers”, “meeting”, “clear simmer”, “splashing”, “ramblings” and “wraplings”. To call recipes “Sweet Peppers stir Chicken”, “Meat Sauce meets Lobsters”, “Pot stuck Duck” or “Red in Snow stirs Horse Beans” is an art in itself.
Since she complains about her husband’s recipe for “Stirred Eggs”, I made it a point to look it up and indeed it is quite a litany of more than one and a half pages of narrative for a recipe which is basically something between glorified scrambled eggs and an omelette with spring onions. He goes - for instance - to great length to explain the procedure and technique of breaking and beating the six eggs he uses for the dish. It follows in full for your amusement.
“Either shell or unshell the eggs by knocking one against another in any order. Since, when two eggs collide, only one of them will break, it will be necessary to use a seventh egg with which to break the sixth. If, as may very well happen, the seventh egg breaks first, instead of the sixth, an expedient will be simply to use the seventh one and put away the sixth. An alternative procedure is to delay your numbering system and define that egg as the sixth egg which breaks after the fifth egg. Be sure to have a bowl below to catch the contents. With a pair of chopsticks, strike the same with a quick vigorous motion known as ‘beating the eggs’. This motion should, however, be made repeatedly and not just once. Automatic machines, aptly named as ‘egg-beaters’, have been invented for this purpose.”
For sure, we can not but agree with his wife that writing a Chinese cookbook in this fashion would be a disaster as it would produce a work as extensive and bulky as the Encyclopaedia Britannica