There is what looks like helpful advice on pickling herring by souring (rather than with vinegar), and also on fileting them, at http://awesomepickle.com/archives/344 .
Category Archives: food and drink
The ceremonial gateways of Montréal’s Chinatown
Montréal has four páilou 牌樓 ‘ceremonial gateways’ — two small ones on Rue de la Gauchetière and two big ones on Boulévard Saint-Laurent. The small ones are older; their writing (Mǎndìkě Huábù 滿地可華埠 ‘Montréal Chinatown’) runs right to left and they were already erected when we last visited this city, in 1998. The new ones date from 1999 and bear heavy metal plaques listing many dignitaries involved in their erection, including the Mayor of Shanghai at the time, Xú Kuāngdí 徐匡迪. Now 75 years old, Xú has had a long career as a professor of engineering but remains active in Chinese political life.
Both of the large gateways read Tángrénjiē 唐人街 ‘Chinatown’ on the outside. Inside the northwestern one it says zhǒngshì zēnghuá 踵事增華 ‘to inherit a [great] task and increase the level of talent [applied to it]‘ and inside the southeastern one it says zhōnglíng yùxiù 鍾靈毓秀 ‘for concentrated spiritual power to cultivate excellence’.
Resounding phrases are cheap; I would have preferred to find better cooking in this Chinatown. Only Mai Xiang Yuan was actually good enough to recommend (as I have done in a separate post). Mai Xiang Yuan’s sister establishment Délicieux Xiang (满城飘湘) was memorably dreadful and we wondered if the normal cook was off duty, or perhaps the menu was directed at tourists who don’t actually like Chinese cooking.
May the values of sound engineering be applied to all branches of human endeavor!
Restaurant Mai Xiang Yuan [Màixiāngyuán cānguǎn 麥香園餐館] in Montréal
In preparing for a trip to Montréal, my accomplice and I had trouble finding the names of Chinese restaurants with unalloyedly good reviews on Chinese discussion sites. There were many references to all-you-can-eat dives, where one pays bottom dollar for strong-tasting recipes cooked using ingredients of the lowest possible quality. Obviously, anyone who would recommend such a place is not serious about getting good food. One commentator even said “没有一间好吃” [there isn't a single good place] in Montréal. However, with some persistence we found Màixiāngyuán cānguǎn 麥香園餐館, an excellent dumpling parlor in Chinatown. The name Mai Xiang Yuan means “the garden of wheaten aroma”.
Owned by people from Dàlián 大連 in the former Manchuria, Mai Xiang Yuan offers some 30 varieties of boulettes (shuǐjiǎo 水餃 ‘dumplings’, rendered ravioles by the francophone press). These dumplings may be ordered boiled or pan-fried, as well as cooked in soup, and you get fifteen to an order. There is a smaller range available at lunch.
We ordered the lamb and onion and the beef and celery dumplings, both of which were delicious, with a good balance of animal and vegetable flavors, dumpling-skins cooked to perfect al dente texture, and apparently meat of decent quality. These are philosophically sound boulettes Chinoises, in my judgment.
The lunch menu also has a vegetarian offering, and beyond that there are some salads. Of these, we had the jièwèi sānsī 芥味三絲 [three mustard-flavored shredded things] combining slivers of bokchoy (dàbáicài 大白菜), fried egg, carrots, and rice vermicelli (mǐfěn 米粉), in a mild white vinegar-and-wasabi dressing with a hint of sesame oil apparent, and barely sweetened. This little salad was so good at the start of the meal that we ordered it again at the end, and it left us wishing only to be hungry once more so we could go back to try more kinds of boulettes.
Mai Xiang Yuan’s address is 1084 Boulévard Saint-Laurent and its phone number is the distinctively Chinese (514)-875-1888. At the moment, Google Street View shows a previous tenant of the space, Épicerie Thiên Phat 天發雜貨, but the address is not hard to find. The proprietress suggests visiting outside of the hours 5:30-7:00 pm, when the place is mobbed. We counted 34 seats at 17 small tables; on our arrival at 2 pm on a weekday there were perhaps ten guests already engaged in boulette-demolition. We put away thirty dumplings and two small plates of the salad, paying about CA$25 for everything, including a generous contribution of 15% sales tax to the Canadian economy.
We will be back before long, I feel sure.
A mutton chop at Keen’s Steakhouse
The best restaurant meal I have had in some time was served to me two nights ago at Keen’s Steakhouse (36th St. east of 6th Avenue). It was a large mutton chop, cooked medium as the chef suggests and served with stir-fried greens.
The other dishes eaten by my party that night are of no consequence, and the lore of the restaurant and its historical décor, and its staggering prices, you can read about somewhere else. But this was some mutton chop. I can’t recall having eaten a cut of meat with such relish. Not that I have any particular interest in mutton, either, but this was a meal to remember.
Some Western recipe-names as transformed by the Taiwanese linguistic experience
- babaganoush => bàba gē nǚxù 爸爸割女婿 ‘Papa uses the knife on his son-in-law’ (Mandarin)
- guacamole => guá khah bô-lé 我較無禮 ‘I am basically without manners’ (Taiwanese)
- cockaleekie => thák-kà lí khì 讀到你去 ‘Study until you depart (die)’ (Taiwanese)
- cheese => qìsǐ 氣死 ‘So angry it will kill me.’ (Mandarin)
A local custom without the corresponding exotic saying in rural Taiwan
When I first visited rural Ilan 宜蘭, Taiwan, in the mid 1980s, it was the East Asian lunar New Year. Ilan people ate soy sauce-stewed hard-boiled eggs (lớ-nuī 滷蛋), “gall-treated pork liver” (tám-koaⁿ 膽肝), a lot of meat dishes, mustard greens in the guise of “longevity vegetables” (tnĝ-nî-chhài 長年菜), and the inevitable fish. Inevitable why? Because there is a Chinese saying, niánnián yǒu yú 年年有餘 ‘[may there be] abundance every year’, and “fish” (yú 魚) is identical in sound to “abundance”. The foreign visitor to a Chinese-speaking household at New Year’s may get to hear this, and its explanation, with every fish served.
But not in rural Ilan in those days. The local Taiwanese colloquial word for “fish” is hî-á, while the character readings are gû and gî; all are etymologically the same word as Mandarin yú. “Abundance” is î both colloquially and in reading. So “fish” and “abundance” are definitely not homophones in the local language of Ilan. But the people there of all ages still ate fish in abundance at New Year’s, even though the saying that explains it was only in use among the younger family members, educated in Mandarin. The saying is not really local to traditional Ilan. But eating fish at New Year’s certainly is.
A happy New Year to all. (Come to think of it, it wasn’t usual to say kiong-hí, Mandarin gōngxǐ fācái 恭喜發財 ‘I wish you happiness and may wealth descend upon you’, then either.)
Simple meal at Shui Mei Café (嘎嘎叫, 67A East Broadway, NYC), formerly So Go Café)
This morning my accomplice and I ordered three dishes and were quite satisfied.
1. 拌面 Yellow Noodle with Peanut Sauce. An old standby of Fúzhōu comfort food, closely related to the “cold noodles in sesame sauce” that became popular because of Empire Szechwan in the 1970s. Made with flat noodles, which the sauce keeps from sticking together. The sauce was not excessively sweet. Quite satisfactory, though this is not the sort of food to earn high ratings in any case.
2. 豬肚罐 Pig Stomach in Can. There is no can. This is a delicious soup slow-cooked in a cylindrical porcelain vessel, the same kind used for decocting medicine. (To keep up with the crush of business they prepare the soup somewhere else and freeze it, heating up each portion to order in the store.) The consistency of the tripe (which was clean) was perfect, and the soup — made with plenty of celery and small black mushrooms (香菇) — was delectable. Well worth another visit.
3. 芋鴨粉乾 Duck & Taro Vermicelli. Noodle soup, made with a stock less tasty than the “pig stomach in can”, above. The noodles are not the usual ultra-fine “vermicelli” but a white, rice-flour noodle the thickness and consistency of overcooked spaghetti. Basically inoffensive, but not “vermicelli”. The pieces of duck and taro and black mushroom were well-cooked and perfectly satisfactory.
This restaurant, formerly So Go Café, has expanded north into the storefront formerly occupied by Waloy Bakery 華來美食 in 67B East Broadway. Business is still booming, and they now have a more serious English menu than when they first opened. The number and arrangement of seats finally seems adequate to a small restaurant. Clientele remains overwhelmingly Fúzhōu.
Soft plastic Western-style spoons rather than the Chinese “boat spoon”. Pay at the cashier when you order and then take a seat; a waitress will serve you.
They now open at 7:30 AM.
(This review was posted to Chowhound.com earlier today.)
Are cell phones and bananas radioactive?
I’ve often heard that both bananas and cell phones emit nuclear radiation.
Below are measurements taken with the Mazur Instruments PRM-8000 nuclear geiger counter. Each reading lasted 10 minutes and was taken in the same place as the others. The result is reported standardized as mR/hour. All items were at a uniform distance of 1 mm from the tube opening. The phones were placed with a non-screen edge at the tube opening.
| item | measurement |
|---|---|
| background radiation where tests were done | 0.015 mR/hr |
| Casio G’zOne cell phone, off | 0.017 mR/hr |
| Casio G’zOne cell phone, in standby | 0.015 mR/hr |
| Casio G’zOne cell phone, in live call | 0.016 mR/hr |
| HTC Incredible Android smartphone, off | 0.016 mR/hr |
| HTC Incredible Android smartphone, in standby | 0.014 mR/hr |
| HTC Incredible Android smartphone, recording video | 0.016 mR/hr |
| Delmonte organic banana, product of Ecuador (slice) | 0.017 mR/hr |
| Favorita non-organic banana, product of Ecuador (slice) | 0.016 mR/hr |
Doesn’t look too worrisome, does it?
The brown German flour of Przasnysz
My grandfather Maurice Prager (1902–1992) recalled that flour was hard to come by during and after World War I in his home, the city of Przasnysz, Poland.
After the German troops withdrew, people found elongated bags of brown flour left behind, and these were hurried off to the local bakers so that bread could be made.
But there was something wrong with the flour. The dough was sticky and didn’t rise, and the flour itself was bitter. The bakers didn’t know what to think.
Eventually someone turned up who had been to Vienna. “That is not flour — it is something called Schokolade. You should try dissolving it with a little sugar in hot milk.”
Przasnysz is pronounced roughly “pras-nish” in English phonology ([pʂas-nɨʂ] in my great uncle’s Polish). Its pronunciation in my grandfather’s Russian-fragranced local Yiddish was “prushnyits”; the city’s Yizkor book spells the name “Proshnits”. As is common all over Europe, a given place may have quite different traditional names in different languages.
Recollection of the traditional bagel in central Poland before World War I
My grandfather Maurice Prager (1902–1992) said that in his boyhood in the city of Przasnysz, Poland, bagels were only made by private people for sale on the street, not by bakeries, which dealt in bread, nor by pastry shops. The food economy in that place and time was different from our own — far more of it was in the hands of non-professionals (though my grandfather knew something of the professional food industry because he was close to his uncle, a miller).
As he described them to me, the bagels consisted of thin double strands of dough braided in a circular spiral, and unlike the almost-holeless variety we see in New York today they had much more hole than bread. So far from being chewy or gummy, which define the range of consistency in New York today, these were extremely tough. They were made of white flour and did not have any other flavorings, neither seeds nor bulbs, and forget blueberries or chocolate.
My thought is that they must have had more in common with a traditional German soft pretzel (though boiled before baking rather than treated with lye) than with either the Montréal or New York bagel.
I was moved to write this by the visit of a friend bearing Montréal beygelach.
Suitable pots for making turmeric tea
When fresh turmeric tea (haldi chai) is made by infusion in a ceramic pot, it is a deep yellow color. But when turmeric is cooked at low heat in a stainless steel pot, it is noticeably more reddish and darker.
I know that the reddening of turmeric is the result of interaction with alkaline substances — in fact, it used to be used in making a kind of paper used for testing high pH values, and you can observe that a little baking soda reddens fresh turmeric before your eyes. It seems that the steel is producing a similar change. I’ve switched to a pot with a non-stick coating, and the tea is now the same color as that produced by infusion in ceramic.
When cooled rather than infused, fresh turmeric tea clouds as it cools, but heating it restores its clarity. The second and third pots from the same root has more of the “musty” taste of turmeric powder, in contrast to the sweet, carrot-like taste of the first pot. Both pots have a visibly oily surface.
More on fresh turmeric tea here.
Pípá yā 琵琶鴨 (frisbee duck)
One of the more striking Cantonese roast meats in Chinatown is the pípá yā 琵琶鴨 ‘lute-shaped duck’. The duck is cut open and roasted while splayed flat with a horseshoe-shaped metal frame. The splaying allows more moisture to evaporate and fat to drip out during roasting, so the meat is drier and the flavor more concentrated. Ordinary shāoyā 燒鴨 ‘roast duck’ has a quantity of dark liquid inside that is discarded when the duck is cut into pieces (zhǎn 斬), but the pípá yā does not, and that accounts for part of the difference. The roasting process itself is the same as for ordinary shāoyā; there are no other seasonings used, for instance. The metal frame remains in place until the duck is cut up. All the Cantonese roast fowl have skin that is basically soft, unlike the more familiar Peking duck, which is specially treated to burn off the fat and leave the skin crisp (or leathery, depending on your chef’s skill).
The name pípá yā has to do with the fact that the splayed-open duck is imagined to look like a Chinese lute — pípá 琵琶 (Japanese biwa, Korean bipa) — which has a round body. The duck’s neck is usually curved to one side, unlike the straight neck of an ordinary roast duck. As with many Chinese culinary metaphors, ‘lute’ is not so apt as it is appetizing — I mean, in its suggestion of palace life or scholarly seclusion. When I was a boy, my friends and I called these things “frisbee ducks”, which has no charm at all.
I bought one this morning from Sun Sai Gai 新世界 at 220 Canal, corner Baxter, one of Chinatown’s long-term institutions (though the management has changed a number of times in the 35 years I’ve been going there).
Shark fin and the economics of Chinese “face”
A student wrote to me for background information about the use of shark fin in Chinese cuisine, in connection with the ban in California. I replied:
The main reason for the cultural value of shark fin soup has to do with the Chinese tradition of “face”, i.e., showing respect for the public prestige of one’s guests. The fins themselves (called yúchì 魚翅 ‘fish wings’) contribute a distinctive texture to soups made from them. This texture is hard to replicate from other ingredients, and it is true that Chinese cuisine places great emphasis on texture.
But texture itself is only indirectly the cause of the shark fin’s value. The actual reason is that since the thing is so hard to replicate and so expensive, providing it for my guests is a way of showing them “face” — showing them that I am willing to go to trouble and expense for them. The intrinsic qualities of the food are much less important than the fact that the expense and distinctiveness of those qualities make it a good token for showing respect.
Making shark fin illegal would certainly increase the “face” value of the food still further. I have been served several endangered species at official or semi-official banquets in China. They were not particularly tasty — pangolin, in particular, I found quite vile — but by serving them to me and my sponsors, the host was showing respect.
This is a central element of Chinese culture, and if you think about it, not totally unrelated to ideas you can observe in American society. The next time you are in a fancy Western restaurant, look for items that are more expensive than their intrinsic character would warrant. Ever see chocolate cake with gold leaf on it? Exactly how much flavor do you think gold leaf has?
If you want a better analogy with regard to environmental impact, consider this.
If you talk to businesspeople in the US, you’ll hear some of them say that regulation of industry and substances is futile because it increases the motivation to break the law, increasing the cost of regulation in a spiral because of the continual need for further enforcement. Making a substance illegal raises its price and gives dealers both the reason and the resources to break the law, bribe law enforcement, and defend their businesses with violence. Placing tariffs on an import increases the motivation to smuggle it, to misreport sales and import figures, and to bribe customs agents. Etc. You will find many people in this country who say they believe in this principle.
Similarly, the more severe the consequences of supporting trade in endangered animals, the higher the value of serving it to an honored guest in China.
If you believe, as many Chinese people do, that institutions are intrinsically corrupt and personal relationships are the most important thing, then you can see why these foods continue to be served.
Unagi hitsumabushi 鰻櫃まぶし
Unagi hitsumabushi 鰻櫃まぶし (or… hitumabusi) is a specialty of Nagoya 名古屋, Japan. River eel is grilled and served over rice, with which it is mixed. The custom is to divide the food into three servings, each eaten a different way:
- plain, as though it were unadon
- with wasabi, nori shreds, and scallion rounds
- with the same seasonings in #2 but with broth poured over it, like ochazuke
The Sun-chan restaurant in New York (103rd St. and Bway) serves this as a dish for two year-round, though summer is the usual season for it.
juémíngzǐ 決明子 tisane
Senna obtusifolia, Chinese juémíngzǐ 決明子, Korean gyeol-myeong-ja 결명자, is a legume. Its seeds are roasted and infused into a tisane that has a highly distinctive aroma — which reminds me of the smell of some sort of bakery product. The plant also goes by the names “sicklepod” and “coffeeweed”, and the prepared seeds are available in many Korean markets with the old botanical name Cassia tora Linné prominently featured.
Brillat-Savarin on the pleasures of the fast
Brillat-Savarin (1755–1826), who experienced the French Revolution in mid-life, describes the practice and decline of fasting in mid-eighteenth century France (Gutenberg edition of Physiologie du goût, Méditation XXIV, “Du jeûne”).
His most general reflections are as follows:
En y regardant de près, les éléments de nos plaisirs sont la difficulté, la privation, le désir de la jouissance. Tout cela se rencontrait dans l’acte qui rompait l’abstinence; j’ai vu deux de mes grands-oncles, gens sages et braves, se pâmer d’aise au moment où, le jour de Pâques, ils voyaient entamer un jambon ou éventrer un pâté. Maintenant, race dégénérée que nous sommes! nous ne suffirions pas à de si puissantes sensations. [Section 117][ If we look into the matter closely, our pleasures are made up of the difficulty of enjoyment, deprivation of it, and desire for it. All of these are to be found in the act of fast-breaking. I saw two of my great-uncles — wise, brave men — swoon with delight at the moment when, on Easter Sunday, they saw the first cut into a ham or the evisceration of a block of paté from its mold. Now — degenerate race that we are! — we will never be able to bear such powerful feelings. ]
Fresh turmeric-root tea
Shredded fresh turmeric root makes a much tastier tisane than any sort of dried turmeric powder. It smells not unlike an infusion of the familiar powder but has a much richer and somewhat carrot-like favor, some pepperiness, and a sweetness that emerges faster and more intensely than when turmeric powder is steeped.
I steep the shreds of one medium-sized root (c. 12 g) in a large (c. 900 cc) teapotful of just-boiled water, and find it quite palatable after 20 minutes. No milk or sweeteners are needed (these feature in South Asian preparations of haldi chai as a treatment for colds).
Beware of staining your hands, clothes, and everything in your kitchen yellow. (Staining your soul with turmeric is acceptable, however.) To get rid of stains on kitchen equipment I use Soft Scrub, a harsh cleanser that contains bleach, grit, and a number of other substances. That will quickly remove the sticky yellow stains from countertops, plates, and blades. Wash everything thoroughly after you’re finished with Soft Scrub, to get rid of its own residues. (The ingredients are currently listed at http://www.softscrub.com/Soft-Scrub-With-Beach-Cleanser .) Soft Scrub reacts with the turmeric to produce a dark red/brown color, and you may at first imagine you’ve cut yourself.
I don’t know how to get the yellow stains off my fingers, so I use inexpensive rubber gloves to hold the turmeric root while I’m shredding it.
Fresh turmeric apparently has anti-fungal properties, and the fresh roots do not quickly go bad if kept in the refrigerator in a sealed plastic bag and a paper towel to absorb moisture. If an infusion made from the fresh root is left out overnight. it is totally without cloudiness the next morning. (The same is true of rooibos tea.)
The Chinese name for turmeric root is yùjīn 鬱金 lit. ‘verdant gold’.
I posted more on fresh turmeric tea here.
Food issues during the Siege of Leningrad
Ms. Reid vividly describes how people tried to get by on virtually inedible food substitutes: cotton-seed cakes that were normally used as fuel in ship furnaces; sheep guts, together with calf skins from a tannery, were turned into “meat jelly”; fermented birch sawdust was turned into “yeast extract,” which, dissolved in hot water, was considered “yeast soup.” As the civilians grew more desperate, they scraped dry glue from the underside of wallpaper, boiled leather shoes and belts hoping in vain that they could be eaten or at least chewed. “Zoologists survived the siege: they knew how to catch rats and pigeons,” the author notes. “Impractical mathematicians died.”
The most desperate turned to cannibalism. Using police records that became available in 2004, Ms. Reid provides details where Salisbury had to rely on unofficial and often unsubstantiated anecdotes. The stories are gruesome. It was common for bodies to be left in apartments among the living because of the danger of taking them to cemeteries or even down to the street. Those that were buried were dug up and eaten. Hospital workers took home amputated limbs. Organized groups lured passersby into apartments with offers to barter food for valuables, then murdered the visitors and ate them. According to police records, there were more than 2,000 arrests for cannibalism in Leningrad, a figure that would have to be considered well below the true number of actual episodes.
Joshua Rubenstein, review of Anna Reid, Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941–44 (Walker & Co.) The Wall Street Journal, 27-28 August, 2011, p. C9 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903999904576470533082161382.html
