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 A few years ago I was treated to what is probably the best meal of my life at the Fat Duck. Yet, the funny thing is what I remember most was a little card placed on the table which asked diners to remember what food they grew up with that they have an emotional connection with. Heston Blumenthal was trying to experiment with new dishes by doing something the exact opposite of what you would expect a molecular gastronomy chef would do – use our childhood food as the basis of new dishes he would invent. He believes that eating and enjoying food and a meal is strongly linked to our emotions and our memories of growing up. That is why we crave for mum’s home cooking more than haute cuisine.
There is nothing like a bowl of mum’s hot chicken soup when we’re down with the flu or a Sunday roast beef at home or at a local pub after a couple of weeks away on business. In all cultures, there is the saviour in comfort food. It is food we can eat again and again and not likely to be sick of it compared to extravagant restaurant food. It is food that connects us to our childhood, family and especially to our mother and grandmother.
In the UK, pubs fulfil the role of our mothers by serving such foods. In the U.S., diners do the same job. In China, cafes and street stalls fulfil this role. However, when it comes to Chinese comfort food in the UK (or Chinese comfort food anywhere outside of Asia), it is a rare find. Hence, unless you grew up in a Chinese family, it is not likely you have had much exposure to Chinese comfort food.
Yet, the variety of such food in Chinese culture is enormous. For those of us who grew up in Chinese families, we are lucky to eat this and now many of us can cook it. Restaurants attempt to replicate comfort food but they inevitably fail as they put too much grease, salt and poor ingredients. In the nice Chinese restaurants, they try to spruce it up with a twist, which takes the comfort out of comfort food. Ultimately, the key ingredient missing is something that you just can’t get in a restaurant – heart and soul of comfort food from mum that seeps into every morsel in every dish.
So what is typical Chinese comfort food? The good news is that it is different for every family. So I will share what my family heals and comforts with and I hope readers will share theirs.
The ultimate Chinese comfort dish for my family is congee or rice porridge. If you are not familiar, it is simply rice cooked in 4 times the amount of water you would normally cook rice with. If boiled slowly long enough, it becomes gooey and that’s when it reaches comfort food status. Congee is normally what we eat when we’re ill. It is high in water content, healthy, warming and heals the soul. There are many versions of congee, including cooking it with chicken, fish, and the one of my favourite – lean pork with thousand-year-old egg (preserved duck egg). However, the ultimate comfort version is simply plain congee. We eat it with various dressings, including salted egg, dried meat jerky, pickled cucumber, preserved bamboo shoots in chilli oil, and fermented tofu. If you have never tried fermented tofu, let me warn you that it is often an acquired taste. But once you acquire it, you will have a lifelong love affair with it.
Like in many cultures, another comfort food for us is mum’s homemade soups. The best ones (for us) are watercress soup with carrots and pork neck bones, bok choy with pork soup and chicken with Chinese mushroom soup. We start every meal with soup. It is not a home-cooked meal without soup. Many times, I would pour soup over a bowl of plain rice and that would be my meal. The key is making the broth from scratch using chicken or pork bones and boiling it long enough to extract the flavour from the bones.
This comfort dish comes from the Vietnamese influence on our family since we are a Chinese family where all the children were born and raised in Vietnam. My favourite breakfast is a fluffy omelette with chopped spring onion flavoured with soy sauce wrapped up in a Vietnamese baguette. This Vietnamese sandwich has its influence from a century of French occupation of Vietnam. So yes, the French has a place in my Chinese family’s comfort food.
I think this next dish is my mum’s invention but who knows, maybe she learned it from someone else. Or maybe it’s a popular home cooked dish that I never knew about. It doesn’t actually make sense as it includes lots of potatoes but it is eaten with plain rice. However, it is deliciously home-y and all my friends love it when they come by our home for dinner. Minced pork and tomatoes stir-fried with chips. The chips are fried separately and then thrown in the stir-fry with the other ingredients which also include garlic. Cornstarch is added to it to thicken up the sauce. Pour this over plain rice and voila!
Finally, this dish could turn me from a proud carnivore to a vegetarian. It’s a dish served in Buddhist temples and that’s my emotional link with it as it reminds me of all the weekends that my mum dragged us to our Buddhist temple to say our prayers. However, going to the temple does have its rewards and this dish was my ultimate reward. Buddha’s Eight Treasures is a stew consisting of eight different vegetarian ingredients. In reality, it often falls short of eight. However, the confluence of all these vegetables stewed together is a masterpiece in comfort food. We often include tofu, Chinese leaves, wood ears, carrots, black moss, and Chinese mushrooms.
Comfort food is about more than just food. It is about nostalgia of our childhood and about emotional connection to our family. This emotional and nostalgic connection makes eating all the more pleasurable and ultimately comforting. Psychologists proclaim that eating is a primal activity and emotional connection with our childhood and our mothers is also primal. Comfort food draws together these two primal elements to produce a powerful effect upon us.
So here’s a sensible but risky business idea – a Chinese comfort food restaurant. It would be a firm hit with all the locals and hit the right spot every time. But then again maybe I’m missing the point. Maybe Mum’s home cooking is so good because it is precisely that – infused with the love and care that only a mum could give and I’m not sure if any restaurant, no matter how many Michelin starred, could ever replicate that. Can someone do this right? Let me know what you think. Or better yet, step up to the challenge.
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