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Life in China A Hundred Ways with Dofu
Life in China A Hundred Ways with Dofu | A Hundred Ways with Dofu |
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| China | |
| Monday, 03 December 2007 | |
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A Hundred Ways with Dofu: Company fare in north east China. Forty years ago someone gave me a cookery book: ‘A Hundred Ways with Mince', and since my husband was a student at the time it was very useful. I've travelled quite a bit since those days, and developed more sophisticated tastes, so I endorse the Chinese claim that their cuisine is ‘Shi jie di yi', the best in the world. When I worked in Tonghua, though, company chef Mr Liu was really stretched to maintain the tradition. The company canteen sported two huge TV screens at either end, but otherwise it was a bit like dining At Her Majesty's Pleasure. Food was heaped in metal basins and trays on a table down one side of the room, along with battered spoons, aged-wood chopsticks, pottery rice bowls, and prison-style food-trays with partitions. The company ran on traditional ‘danwei' lines and the Chinese employees were brought on coaches from their dormitories in town. At 7am, 12.00pm and 5pm they queued and filed past, helping themselves from the steaming basins. The slenderness of the employees was accounted for by the high ratio of vegetables to meat. Cabbage, green beans, aubergines and pumpkin boasted only scraps of pork or chicken. It's a good thing I liked aubergines because, like cabbage, they appeared every day. A favourite dish was ‘Di San Qian': green peppers, potatoes and aubergines, stewed together in a sweetened sauce whose main ingredient was soya. It was so tasty I requested it when dining out at local Korean restaurants. The main source of protein was bean curd, or ‘dofu'. Fried, boiled or stewed, on its own in a savoury gravy, its silky texture was particularly welcome when mixed with the dry-fleshed, spiny river fish. These resembled eels flattened by steam rollers, but they were tasty enough, cut into sections and fried to a crisp. The only dofu I really disliked was the sort that was compressed and rolled out to form a thin straw-coloured mat. This was ‘gan dofu', dried dofu, despite its name unpleasantly moist, with the texture of a face flannel. Refreshing when shredded and mixed with shredded carrot and a sweet sour dressing as a salad, it more often came as square pancakes, to wrap around a filling of radishes and soy paste. Yet another guise was the fake scrambled eggs at breakfast. It didn't taste like egg, which I had put down to overcooking and the spring onions or shredded green peppers which were mixed in. However, I helped myself to this and chipped potatoes, not fried but cooked until soft in oil and soy sauce gravy. The accompaniments to the main dishes were trays of dark and salty pickled vegetables. I never acquired a taste for these, although I tried from time to time, as they seemed to be popular. One thing I didn't like was my colleagues' habit of eating raw garlic. This was placed on a ledge near the long tables, together with a bowl of chilli-seed paste. Whilst chewing garlic cloves was no doubt good for the health in the Dongbei climate, it made for uncomfortable episodes at my desk in the afternoons, as one or another of the Chinese editors came to consult me about English grammar, leaning close over a text to explain the difficulty. To my mind, by far most unappetising item of canteen fare was boiled silkworms. ‘Very good to eat!' Mr Liu assured me, waving his ladle at the heaped basin, ‘Very high in protein!' I had already seen them on sale in the ‘wet' market, in the town centre, together with all kinds of shell-fish and small black frogs, which clung to nets and alarmed me by jumping when I passed. The silkworms, like fat large-calibre bullets coated in brown varnish, with pointed, wriggly sections at either end, were laid out on the vegetable stalls, although their movements clearly showed they must be a form of animal life. I found them both fascinating and horrible to watch. Boiled, and heaped in metal basins, they didn't appeal. Their canteen presence was announced by the distinctive musty smell they gave off when boiled. I couldn't eat them without gagging. A bite through the shell released a pasty, tasteless core of squishy flesh onto the tongue, like a cream bun filled with wallpaper-paste I looked forward to the tea trolley, which trundled round the corridors twice a day, heralded by a cry of: ‘Shangwu Cha!' (morning tea) or ‘Xiawu cha!' (afternoon tea). In fact, here was no tea, just a big urn of hot cow's milk in the morning, and soy milk in the afternoon, flanked by a tin kettle of milky, sweetened coffee. The youthful Chinese editors helped themselves to sliced bread, on which they spread strawberry jam from a huge jar, with a bamboo spatula. Sometimes there was ‘gaodan', a soft plain sponge cake cut into slices, or crisp long biscuits called ‘Zhizi', fingers, delicious when dunked in hot milk. In the intervals between meals and tea-trolley, my Chinese colleagues snacked on sunflower seeds. They were adept at cracking them loudly between their teeth, extracting the kernels and spitting the shells onto the desktops. I never mastered the knack, always having to use a hand to hold the seed between my teeth to effect the splitting and avoid a mouthful of shell. I wondered at my ineptness, until a laughing Xiao Guor, whose desk was opposite mine, showed me the notch in her tooth. Most Chinese, she explained, developed such a notch at an early age and this was the secret of success. From Shanghai Crab to Beijing Roast Duck, Chinese cuisine is justly celebrated. Who could resist dishes called, ‘Eight Precious Rice', ‘Lion Head Meatballs' or ‘Monk Jumps over the Wall'? In northeast China, however, Mr Liu, with his boiled silkworms and his hundred ways with dofu, taught me a lot about the sheer ingenuity required of Chinese cooks. Sheila Cornelius worked for a Chinese publishing company in Tonghua, Jilin Province, 2003-2004 |
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