Earlier in the year, Eileen
Wen Mooney's book Beijing Eats – A Food-Lover's Companion
to China's Culinary Capital was published. It is
a guidebook to eating in Beijing covering 140 restaurants
and including a bilingual glossary, phrase list and maps
of restaurant locations. This week I had an email chat
with Eileen.
What makes Beijing the Culinary
Capital of your book title? Beijing as the seat of the
government has always been attracting people from all
over China. Pretty much every regional cuisine is represented
in the capital, therefore one can eat foods from every
corner of China without leaving the city. Over the past
20 years there has been a culinary revolution here, with
entrepreneurs from around the country opening new restaurants
in the city. This has also been helped by rising incomes,
which has resulted in more people dining out and keen
to try different cuisines.
Why did you see a need
for a book like this? Because I want people–both
foreigners and Chinese–to know that Chinese food
is more than just Cantonese, Sichuan and Hunan,
or just Peking duck. I want to tell people that there
are so many wonderful dishes that are not well
known and should be experienced. Many writers attempt
to simplify Chinese cooking by squeezing the whole
gamut into a handful of 4 or 8 regional cuisines.
This is impossible. There are stark contrasts from
one place to another, even in those provinces that
border on each other. For example, lumping Hebei,
Henan, Shanxi, and Shandong together is like saying
French, Italian, Spanish, and German food are in
the same family. I'm also concerned that the new
trend of restaurants turning out two or three cuisines
from the same kitchen, and the obsession with presentation
and contemporary Chinese cuisines is starting to
blur culinary lines and threatening the survival
of some cooking styles. Today it's difficult to
find more than one or two restaurants in the city
preparing decent food from Anhui, Jiangxi or even
Shandong. I hope my book can play some small role
in getting diners out to try some of these lesser
known cuisines. I also hope that it will also encourage
the owners of restaurants focusing on the basics
and doing things the old-fashioned way.
Does the book only cover
Chinese food or all types? My book focuses on Chinese
food only.
What sort of food experiences
in Beijing excite foreigners? What disappoints (or
otherwise negatively effects them)? Many foreigners in Beijing
love spicy foods, Peking duck and dim sum. A growing
number is beginning to experience ethnic cooking from
exotic places like Yunnan and Guizhou. One negative aspect
is the growing interest in nouveau cuisine, or contemporary
Chinese cuisine, and presentation. Both foreigners and
Chinese are starting to frequent such places, many of
which I believe are too focused on gimmicks–and not basic
taste. This is another threat to the survival of traditional
cuisines. Foreigners are negatively affected by dirty
or sloppy dining venues, restaurants that offer things
such as intestines, tripe, insects or other foods not
popular in the West. That's a shame because some of these
things are among the favorites of the Chinese. I'm a
big fan of tripe and one restaurant I like offers 13
varieties.
Your book covers 140 restaurants.
That's quite a lot. Did you eat in all of them? Yes, I've been trying places
since I arrived in 1994, and many of the restaurants
I introduce in my book I visited dozens of times. At
the very least, each restaurant was visited a minimum
of two times–but I estimate I've made three or more visits
to each one. And this is important because it's difficult
to really judge a restaurant with just one visit. I estimate
I chalked up more than 1,000 restaurant visits in putting
this book together.
You are an ethnic Chinese
from Bali who has been living in Beijing for quite
a long time; what initially brought you to Beijing? I came to Beijing following
my husband, who is a journalist. I sort of fell into
food writing. I had never written before coming here,
but started to do a bit of travel writing beginning a
decade ago. In 2005 I wrote my first restaurant review
for what was then known as That's Beijing, which is today
known as The Beijinger. I'd always liked cooking–I even
took some cooking classes in Taipei in the mid-1970s.
I have lived in Indonesia, the United States, Taiwan
and Hong Kong, and have traveled around Europe trying
different foods, so I have long been interested in food.
Moving into food writing was a natural progression for
me.
What is the biggest change
in that time to Beijing's restaurant scene? The biggest improvement has
been in terms of the quality of food and service and
the growing number of new restaurants opening up around
the city, from hole-in-the-wall places to upscale dining
venues. Unfortunately, I worry that the growing competition
is forcing people to turn to gimmicks to survive and
prosper rather than focusing on the basics. I now see
a reversal of some of the gains that were made over the
past two decades as restauranteurs look for novel ways
to pull in customers, forgetting that eating is more
important than decorations or presentation and novel
ways of preparing food.
Do you have a favourite
Beijing food? Yes, I do. I love sauteed
mung bean pulp, Beijing fries made from mung bean flour, zhajiang noodles,
traditional Beijing hotpot and boiled tripe. Of the 13
kinds of tripe, duren is as tender as scallops,
while at the same time crisp, while duxin is incredibly
tough, and almost has to be swallowed without chewing.
Unfortunately, it's becoming more and more difficult
to find good Beijing food in the city–this cuisine is
as threatened as the hutongs and courtyard houses.
Outside of China, where
can people get hold of your book? Right now, my book can be
ordered on line in the United States at Amazon and China
Books. I hope in the future it will be more easily available
in other places.
炒空心菜 (chao-3 kong-1 xin-1 cai-4)
Water spinach, also known as water convolvulus (Ipomoea aquatica),
is one of the great vegetable staples of Taiwan and southern China. This
quick-growing leafy green (best grown in water) when cooked right is
a great combo of crunchy stems and tender leaves. Here is a basic recipe:
Wash vegetable. Trim off the thickest
parts of stems. Cut into 4 cm lengths.
Heat oil over a low flame, add garlic,
ginger, and chilli. Fry till fragrant.
Bring the flame to high heat, add vegetable.
Fry for about 1 minute.
Add salt and chicken stock. Fry for
a further minute. Remove to serving plate and eat at
once.
Notes: Like a lot of the more delicate
Chinese leafy greens, water spinach needs hot, quick,
vigorous stir-frying, but not a minute too long. When
I say 'eat at once,' I mean it. Have your diners seated,
chopsticks in hand, to enjoy it in peak condition; remember
that as long as it is hot, it is still cooking.
Poisonous
Snake-bitten Chicken"… an irregular way
of slaughtering poultry."
Irregular indeed – the above quote from
a disapproving local health official in China where according
to the BBC,
people are up in arms over a handful of restaurants in
the south serving "poisonous snake-bitten chicken" as
a detoxing delicacy. Snake bites chicken, chicken dies,
chicken is cooked, diner bites chicken, diner …
How putting a deadly toxin in your body
can be considered 'detoxing' defies even the most infantile
logic. This video shows
a man forcing a reluctant snake to bite a chicken and
inject its venom. Too bad they are putting an end this
practise. I would love to check it out, hopefully to
witness the snake biting the man. Then I would ask him
whether snake venom was truly detoxifying or not. Caution:
the video is not only in poor taste, it is poor quality
and excruciatingly boring. Watch it if you must.
Ironically, on the same page of the BBC's
website there is a link to older story entitled, "China
food poisoning kills 41."
In the
hills east of Taichung there is a network of hiking
trials that we often use. At one trailhead a clutch
of oldster farmers is always selling fruit and vegetables;
a sort of impromptu farmer's mini market. It always
make me laugh when someone tries to sell me a watermelon
or hand of bananas as I am about to begin my
hike in the steep hills – as if I want to carry that!
Last weekend one approached us holding out what I
thought were dried chillies. As he came closer the
only thing I was certain of was that they were
not chillies. Mulberries, he said, a kind I have
never seen before; elongated, some of them three
inches in length, and he'd grown them on his orchard
nearby.
Taiwanese do not seem to particularly
prize the more familiar black mulberry. Some people do
make preserves with them, but time and again I have seen
trees dropping fruit all over the place because no one
seems interested in picking it. And you don't see mulberries
for sale much either, perhaps because they are delicate,
ripen quickly, and go off just as fast, making the fresh
item a difficult commercial proposition. Or perhaps people
just don't like them.
This season there is a bumper crop. Slender
tree branches are arching over with the burden of fruit,
and birds are having a fine old feast. I have a tree
myself (it is potted so you can picture it more as a
bush) which has more fruit on it than ever before, but
that did not stop me buying a container – perhaps half
a kilo – of this unusual mulberry from the old man for
NT$40 (US$1.20).
It turns out they are called Himalayan
or Pakistan mulberries (Morus macroura).
Common mulberries are near-black when ripe and quite
tart, these however, as you can see in the photo, are
lighter in colour and sweet. The stem of this mulberry
extends nearly all the way down inside the fruit. To
eat, put the whole fruit in your mouth, except for
the stem, which you pull, and it should slide out easily.
Presto!
Interesting discovery though it was, I
still prefer to eat the garden variety tart, black mulberries.
A study in
Taiwan says cured meat products like smoked pork, bacon,
sausages and salt fish may increase the chance of getting
leukaemia. I hate it when these studies come out. I have
already given up a lot: dairy products, and anything containing
milk (including cows) because of melamine, vegetables because
of pesticides, and red meat because fat kills (so I won't
miss pork, bacon and sausages anyway), but now salt fish?
Give it up; like hell! I love tiny Taiwanese salt fish
fried up with peanuts. You might too. Here is the recipe.
Chinese
Restaurant Wins Three Michelin Stars: World First Hong Kong restaurant Lung
King Heen is the first Chinese restaurant in the world
to get the three big (rubber?) stars from Michelin – the
Academy Awards of cooking. Bravo.
China has had a great haute cuisine for
hundreds of years at least, and while it is good to see
Western trend-makers finally recognising this, I can't
help be a bit cynical. Will we see some high-end Chinese
restaurants changing, pandering to international (read
French and Italian) standards of cooking and presentation?
Will we see a greater reluctance to serve the kinds creatures
and their body parts that would make the average Western
diner blanche? Will we see more Chinese (con)fusion food?
Hope not. A great restaurant is great with or without
awards, but awards, particularly prestigious ones, are
seductive, and they have huge marketing value.
China is the world's
leading rice producer (followed by India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Vietnam,
and Thailand). 186.73 million metric tons was harvested in 2004. In
2003 China exported 2.597 million metric tons of rice, making it the
5th largest exporter. China trails Thailand at number one, then India,
Vietnam and the United States.
