Our daughter’s classmate, Wenrui (“When-ray”), has now been living with us for a few weeks, long enough to have taught me a few lessons about living bravely in a foreign country.
Most of these have had to do with food.
Wenrui is an exceedingly polite young lady, and highly adaptable, as one would have to be, living more than 11,000 miles from home. As the chief cook in our house, I got it into my head that her homestay with us could be an opportunity to learn about America by way of its extremely varied food culture. After all, one of the glories of life in America is that we’re free to experiment with everything the world has to offer.
If American cuisine delights in promiscuity, Chinese cooking is like an ancient, rock-solid marriage — a marriage that has thrived for five thousand years on endless improvisation, constant refinement, and the deepest respect for tradition.
Wenrui hails from Qingdao (“Ching-dow”), a major seaport on the Yellow Sea, and one of the centers of the regional cooking known as “Shandong cuisine.”
Shandong cuisine is a big deal in China. Not only is it one of the national treasures known as the Eight Culinary Traditions, but it’s in even more elite company as one of the Four Great Traditions. In fact, Shandong cuisine is thought to be the root of the majority of cooking traditions in China.
Surely this is a function of its happy location on the edge of a superabundant sea, and its mild, humid climate, which allows the cultivation of an enormous range of fruits, vegetables, and grains.
One would expect a great cuisine to grow out of such a full market basket of ingredients; Shandong cooking is nothing if not encyclopedic. Its Wikipedia entry showcases four famous dishes: stir fried pig’s kidney; nine-coiled large intestine; pull-out silk sweet potato; and deep-fried golden cicada.
In her first week with us, I thought I’d wow Wenrui with variety. I roasted a turkey, then converted the leftovers into an authentic Cajun gumbo, complete with a traditional — and labor-intensive — dark roux. I cooked Julia Child’s famous boeuf bourguignon. I improvised a tortellini salad with grilled andouille sausage and onions. Challah french toast with pure maple syrup. Pasta with my patented red sauce.
Of course, this was before I knew I was competing with pig kidneys and cicadas.
All of these special meals were well received. Wenrui seemed to genuinely enjoy the food, and she was very appreciative. But I could tell that something wasn’t quite hitting the spot.
Cooking lives at the intersection of the needs of the body and the desires of the heart. It hadn’t occurred to me that, at the end of a long day at school, her head packed with new knowledge, her ears numb from the onslaught of English, that what Wenrui needed wasn’t another lesson — no matter how tasty — but rather a little taste of home.
So I’ve embarked on a new adventure: learning a few basics of Chinese cooking.
Our first experiment didn’t turn out so well. One of the main challenges in cooking authentic Chinese food is sourcing the ingredients. We decided to start simple, with a classic vegetable stir-fry. Unfortunately, we didn’t know that broccoli rabe, which looks so promisingly Asian, doesn’t really lend itself to a stir-fry. It’s actually very bitter. Perhaps if we’d blanched it first…
Wenrui was a good sport about the stir-fried rabe. She ate a big portion and pronounced the sauce “very good,” but the look on her face said it all.
Building on the strength of that sauce, with its characteristically Chinese balance of salty and sweet, I tried another stir-fry with bok choy, but not before watching a bunch of Youtube videos so I’d know how to handle the preparation and cooking of that strangely tubular cabbage.
It was a hit! Since the bok choy, I’ve branched out. Last night was a very grand experiment in spicy seafood soup. Who knew that mussels, clams, and red snapper were compatible with kelp broth and chili paste?
Next up, a staple of Szechuan cooking: Kung Pao chicken. The special Szechuan peppercorns were tricky to find; I wound up ordering them on Amazon. We’re all looking forward — I think — to finding the characteristic level of heat for the dish, which is apparently a kind of pleasant numbness of the lips.
I hope it goes well. The hardest part of cooking any new dish is knowing what it ought to taste like, and in Wenrui, we have a built-in taste-tester. Even if it’s a smash hit, I doubt any praise will make me feel better than the surprise on her face when she took the first tentative bite of that humble stir-fried bok choy.
She glanced up and said, “This tastes like Chinese cooking!”
The chef heaved a great sigh of relief.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 31 January 2013
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
