Cooking Chinese

Let's take a break and cook up something tasty.

One of the few things I still do these days that gives me satisfaction is to cook for guests. I don’t get many chances, so when I do, I try to make the most of it. The occasion here is a small dinner last week, planned for three guests (making five of us), although we wound up with one no-show. I’ll describe the dishes and at least some of the processes and logistics that went into the meal, but first a bit of context.

My interest in cooking goes back to my mother, who was universally acclaimed as an exceptional cook in a family of many, and was much appreciated by the males who missed the calling. This contrasts with my father’s side of the family, where the cooks were quite ordinary. My father liked to pose the question of whether one eats to live or lives to eat, assuming the former as the moral high ground, although he did treasure my mother’s cooking. Both families were farmers, with no concept of cuisine, haute or otherwise, although they appreciated taste.

It seems like my parents made very little effort to teach me anything. They worked hard, and kept quiet about it. Still, I was a curious tyke, and picked up clues by observing. My mother was a full-time housewife. My father worked in an airplane factory, and expected to come home to dinner and a few hours of telly before zonking out. And with a wife who could cook, the last thing he wanted was to go out to eat. So my mother was always cooking, but she rarely wanted any help from me -- mostly just to stir the gravy. But I observed enough to get the general idea, and I picked up her work ethic, the care she showed for her craft, and the importance of sharing the fruits of her labor. In other words, what matters.

When I moved to St. Louis, she gave me enough kit to get started. The main thing was that I started to encounter “ethnic” cooking: one close friend was Greek; another Jewish; and there was a lot of good Italian to be had, and some Chinese. When I moved to New York, there was much more of everything (including a labyrinthine Chinatown). Again, I realized that the first part of learning was realizing what was possible. Once you get that, puzzling out how to make it is just a game.

Along the way, I was guided by two sage quotes. One, from a cousin who made the move east a decade ahead of me, was to point out that every time she cooked something, she felt a sense of accomplishment and purpose. She was an extraordinary cook, and introduced me to dozens of dishes that became long-time favorites. The second was from the friend who introduced me to New York. He pointed out that if you could read a cookbook, you could learn to fix anything.

My first was a thin Craig Claiborne book that started with how to boil water. But I didn’t make much progress. Another friend got me to buy a wok and try throwing one-dish stir-fries together, but I was clueless, and they weren’t very good. I didn’t make any real progress on Chinese until after we moved to New Jersey (early 1980s, landing in Bernardsville, far out in the sticks). The quality and variety of restaurant food dropped considerably. I especially missed Indian. I had lived close to two major clusters of Indian restaurants in New York (6th Street and 2nd Avenue, 28th and Lexington), but there were none in our area. I sought to remedy this, and attempted one very ambitious and ultimately disastrous chicken biryani dinner.

I didn’t get the hang of Indian until much later. But I did much better with Chinese. The key there was finding the right cookbook. For me, that was Barbara Tropp’s The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking (1982). Two bits of advice broke the ice: one was to never bother with peeling ginger (a time-saver, but it reminded me to think about what matters with ingredients; on the other hand, she insisted on using kosher salt, which I always keep within easy reach; using salt instead of soy sauce on fried rice was another guideline I learned from her); the other was to point out that you don’t need a wok. I had by then bought a couple of very good aluminum-core stainless steel skillets and sauce pans, and they worked out very well.

I wound up cooking a lot of Chinese during the New Jersey years, including a majority of the recipes in her book. I also consulted Charmaine Solomon’s The Complete Asian Cookbook (1976) — an earlier purchase, as that’s where I got the biryani recipe, as well as the chicken cashew curry that finally got me back on the right path with Indian, but I don’t think I got into the Chinese section until after I started with Tropp — and Irene Kuo’s The Key to Chinese Cooking (1977). The latter eventually became my bible, but only after Tropp’s detailed and fussy technical explanations enlightened me to the deep logic underlying the cuisine. (By the way, my bible for Indian is Julie Sahni’s Classic Indian Cooking.)

One more cookbook I should mention here is Tropp’s The China Moon Cookbook (1992). By then, Tropp was able to open her own restaurant in San Francisco. She dubbed it a “Chinese bistro,” and came up with a number of unique fusion twists on the more standard Chinese cuisine of her earlier book. I haven’t explored this book as deeply as the old one, but a few recipes did catch my eye, like “clear steamed salmon with ginger-black bean vinaigrette.”

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I mention this for background, as I took a couple days off from fretting about the world and my own precarity to make a nice little dinner for some friends. It served to remind me of the verities I opened with: I read cookbooks and made remarkable dishes; I shared them with our guests; and I felt like I had accomplished something worthy. Of course, like everything these days, it turned into more struggle than I expected, and took much longer. But unlike so many other things I’ve attempted of late, I’d call it a success. And writing about the meal is just one more way to share the work that went into it.

As with many dinners of late, I started with a short list of things I had collected and wanted to clear out:

1. A bag of dried thin wheat noodles, for light-style peanut-lime noodles.

2. A frozen bag of bay scallops, for stir-fried spicy scallops with orange peel.

3. Half a box of frozen soft-shelled crabs (10 small ones), for shallow-fried soft-shall crabs.

To make those dishes, I still needed to go to grocery store to pick up spinach and fresh water chestnuts (to go with the scallops). I figured I could also make a couple easy vegetable sides: stir-fried baby bok-choy, and dry-fried eggplant nuggets. One thing I love about the Kuo cookbook is that it has a lot of simple vegetable side dishes, running counter to the tendency to throw everything into one big stir-fry. I figured I should also make a little curried fried rice (not a proper recipe, but the link will give you a sense of what I improvised).

Finally, I wanted to make some kind of dessert. As I didn’t have anything authentically Chinese in mind, I turned to the China Moon Cookbook for something merely compatible. I decided to try the walnut chocolate tart, with vanilla ice cream on the side (I also has a mint chocolate chip option). This would be the one item I’ve never made before, or anything like it (although I did have a proper tart plan I had bought decades ago but never used). It turned into my biggest problem.

To make a dinner like this, I start by drawing up a menu and a shopping list (ingredients required minus stuff on hand; I keep a lot of fairly esoteric fixings on hand). To make this particular menu, all I needed to buy: baby bok-choy, carrot, cucumber, daikon, eggplant (Japanese), garlic, ginger, lemon, lime, orange, spinach, scallions, water chestnuts (I much preferred fresh, but couldn’t find them, so I wound up using canned). I shopped the day before, going to a large Vietnamese grocer, then to a nearby Kroger.

I’ve avoided Chinese in recent years: it’s usually a lot of prep, followed by what I’ve come to call “the fire drill”: high heat on many skillets where each demands a closely timed series of adds and a lot of stirring, leaving an enormous mess in its wake. But the food can be really spectacular. And I figured this menu would impress, while being simple enough to keep under control.

I like to shop a day or two in advance, and do a fair amount of prep the night before. I hoped to get the noodles and the tart (or at least the shell) done, the rice cooked, and the scallops in their velvet marinade. I did get the noodles done, but wasn’t very happy with the result. And I ran into trouble with the tart: the crust was too dry, and completely unworkable when chilled. I called it a night.

Next day I faced up to fixing the tart. I crumbled it down, and added things to make it more pliable: more butter, another egg yolk, some half & half. Finally, I could roll it out and shape it into the pan. I baked the shell, and fissures opened up around the edges I couldn’t patch. I melted chocolate, toasted walnuts, and mixed the custard, then baked it another 40 minutes. The pan leaked a lot, but the mess was contained, and it looked good enough. I didn’t bother with decorating it. In the meantime, I decided that the noodles could benefit from more peanut sauce, so I mixed up a thick batch with just peanut butter, dark soy, wine, sugar, garlic powder, and hot oil, added it to the bowl. I topped it with chopped peanuts, and declared it good enough.

By this time I had done most of the major prep: soaked the dried shrimp and mushrooms, chopped the onion, parboiled the bok-choy, cut up the eggplants and water chestnuts, velveted the scallops, sauteed the bell pepper and zucchini, fried the egg, chopped a big bowl of scallions, assembled various plates of aromatics, sliced the sausage, deep-fried the spinach, and pan-fried the crabs. I had the sauce for the eggplant ready, but still had the crab and scallop sauces to go. I had fallen behind, so started cooking the eggplant and rice.

I didn’t get to the sauces until the guests arrived. After that all was fast and furious, with five skillets: the eggplant was done and warming, and the rice was at a stage where it’s just a matter of adds and mixing. That left three stir-fries: the bok-choy was just fire, stir-fry, sesame oil (I forgot about the sugar and salt, but only noticed when I wrote up the recipe); the crabs: fire, aromatics, sauce, thickener, drop the crabs in and coat them, scallions; the scallops: fire, aromatics, sauce, scallops and water chestnuts, thickener, scallions, garnish with fried spinach. More last-minute adds to the rice, then scoop it all onto serving plates.

My plate is pictured below: rice in the middle, eggplant and crabs up top (hard to distinguish, but the eggplant is to the left, the crabs to the right), and clockwise: bok-choy, noodles, scallops. By the way, the plate pictured in the introduction was from a 2020 dinner, with the same eggplant and scallops recipes, fried rice with velveted shrimp, dry-fried string beans, Szechuan fried chicken, and dry-fried beef. This was a reprisal of what I cooked in 2000 for my mother’s 87th birthday, a few months before she died.

Not from this dinner, but here’s a picture of the prep from an earlier dinner, when I was better organized and could catch a breath before the fire drill. Looks like twice-cooked pork, grilled eggplant with peanut sauce, bok-choy, fried rice, and a chocolate pecan pie.

I was about 11 the first time I ever ate Chinese food. I was in Boy Scouts with the son of an owner of a Chinese restaurant, and he decided to treat the troop to a banquet. The food was all strange, and much of it (especially the glazed chicken wings) was flat out amazing. I had no idea that such food was possible, let alone how to make it. I didn’t return with a compulsion to figure it all out, but filed it away, like so many formative memories, until much later I remembered that such things were possible, which put me on this path.

Alas, that path appears lately to be bending back toward zero. I’ve made hundreds of complex and often amazing Chinese dishes over the years: 22 for one of my first annual birthday dinners (1996?); ones with esoteric ingredients (like shark’s fin soup), daunting techniques (like deep-frying whole fish, or stuffing steamed buns and potstickers), and many steps over several days (like Peking duck). Yet lately, as these pictures attest, I seem to be repeating myself, minimizing the work and focusing more on reminding myself of old tastes, rather than searching out new ones.

But even these more modest meals remind us that the world is full of wondrous sensations and experiences if only we can look beyond our prejudices and open up to them. Which would be easier if we could restrain ourselves from all the lying and cheating, killing and plundering that people who crave power feel justified in doing, and volunteer a little work to create and share.