Though primarily a breakfast preparation it is often eaten at lunch as well, and occasionally for dinner. It is most adaptable and welcomes such additions as meats, vegetables, preserved eggs, fish and seafood, even a Chinese version of black pudding made from pork blood, which make a more elaborate soup, suitable even for the evening meal or a late snack.
There is a familiar folktale concerning congee, which relates to its Chinese name, jook. It is said that a miserly man invited guests to his house for dinner and instructed his cook, whose name was Ah Fook, to stretch his cooked rice by ladling water into it. The signal to so dilute would be when the man called the cook’s name. During the day, however, as the cook was preparing the rice and other dishes, the man would call him on other matters, yet each time the cook heard his name, Ah Fook, he would add a ladle of water to the rice, so that by dinnertime what remained was not cooked rice but the thinnest of congees.
The cook was so upset, he berated his master with “Ah Fook, Ah Fook, Ah Fook. Fook mut yeh, bin jor wok jook,” the loose translation of which is “You have called my name so often that my wok of rice has become a wok of congee.”
I loved to hear Ah Paw tell me this story, even though I had heard it many times, because it made me laugh so hard, even as she was teaching me to be generous, particularly with sharing food.
Congee
(JOOK)
½ cup short-grain rice
⅓ cup glutinous rice
8½ cups cold water
Salt, to taste
Place rices in a large pot. Wash three times under water by rubbing the kernels between your hands. Drain.
Return rice to pot, add 8½ cups cold water, cover and bring to a boil over high heat. Leave the pot lid slightly open, reduce heat to medium-low and cook for 1 hour, stirring often to prevent the rice from sticking to the bottom of the pot. Cook until the rice thickens almost to the consistency of porridge. Add salt to taste, stir. Remove from heat and serve.
MAKES 4 TO 6 SERVINGS
Congee with Fish
(YUE JOOK)
1 recipe Congee (page 22)
1 whole 3-pound fresh fish (Grass carp was usually Ah Paw’s fish of
choice; however, striped bass or sea bass may be used. A 3-pound fresh
fish will yield 1½ pounds, skinned and boned.)
MARINADE
2 teaspoons Chinese white rice vinegar or distilled white vinegar
2 tablespoons Chinese white rice wine, or gin
3 teaspoons light soy sauce
2 teaspoons sesame oil
2 tablespoons peanut oil
1 teaspoon salt
Pinch white pepper
4 slices fresh ginger, sliced paper thin, julienned
2 scallions, trimmed, cut into 1½-inch pieces
1 tablespoon Scallion Oil (page 16)
⅛ teaspoon white pepper
1 teaspoon light soy sauce
3 scallions, trimmed, finely sliced, for garnish
1 tablespoon fresh coriander, finely sliced, for garnish
(optional)
While the congee is cooking, place the fish in a heatproof dish. Combine the marinade ingredients well and pour over fish. Place ginger and scallions from the marinade beneath the fish, in its cavity, and on top. Steam the fish for 25 minutes. (See steaming directions, page 30.)
Remove fish from steamer and allow to cool to room temperature. Discard the skin, bones, ginger and scallions and break the fish flesh into small pieces. Place fish in a bowl, add Scallion Oil, white pepper and soy sauce and mix lightly with fish. When congee is cooked add the fish to it, mix well and allow congee to come to a boil. Turn off heat, pour congee into a heated tureen, sprinkle the scallions on top, and coriander, if desired. Serve immediately.
MAKES 6 SERVINGS
NOTE Alternately, slice 1½ pounds of fish filet thinly. Place in the marinade. When the congee is cooked, add fish slices and marinade and allow congee to come to a boil. The fish will cook instantly. Turn off heat, pour congee into a heated tureen, garnish and serve. For this alternate, filleted sole or flounder may be used.
Preserved Egg and Pork Congee
(PEI DAN HAM SAU YOOK JOOK)
1 recipe Congee (without salt) (page 22)
1½ cups Salted Pork (page 18), cut into strips 2 inches long, ½ inch wide
and ¼ inch thick
3 preserved eggs (see Note, below), shelled, cut coarsely into ½-inch
pieces
4 tablespoons Scallion Oil (page 16)
½ cup scallions, trimmed, finely sliced
Salt, to taste
As the congee is cooking, prepare the salted pork and the preserved eggs.
About 20 minutes before the congee is finished cooking, add scallion oil. Stir and mix well. Add pork and preserved eggs, mix thoroughly and allow to simmer for 20 minutes until well blended. Add scallions, stir in well. Turn off heat, taste and add salt if necessary. Transfer to a heated tureen and serve immediately.
MAKES 6 SERVINGS
NOTE Preserved eggs are often called thousand-year-old eggs. Once they had been coated with clay and husks of grain, and came packed in huge ceramic clay barrels, from which they were sold. Today they are clean, their shells are gray, they are individually wrapped in plastic and packed six to a box.
EQUIPMENT AND TECHNIQUE, THEN AND NOW
These recipes, traditional bedrock basics, were taught first by my grandmother to demonstrate that cooking must be done properly and that shortcuts were forbidden. Even though I occasionally modify recipes for the modern kitchen, the philosophy behind them is constant. In these early days of learning, my Ah Paw would say repeatedly, “Soi guah op bui. Soi guah op bui,” or “Water passes easily over a duck’s back feathers,” which indicated that if a person failed to listen to explicit instructions, her work would be poor. This pertained particularly to kitchen disciplines, she said, and I would be wise to listen closely.
That brick kitchen where I began to cook in China differs only in degrees of modernity from my kitchen today, and not at all in its basics. That wood-burning stove in front of which I stood on a stool and stir-fried with an iron spatula in a cast-iron wok held by one of my grandmother’s servants, has been replaced by a stainless steel six-burner gas stove—similar to those used in commercial restaurants. Those thin cast-iron woks that often burned through have evolved into carbon steel woks that last for decades. Instead of bamboo sticks stretched across a wok supporting foods to be steamed over boiling water, there are now bamboo, aluminum and steel steamers. But all of the processes are the same.
The woks used in Ah Paw’s kitchen were of thin cast iron that with constant use, often burned through and had to be patched and repaired by traveling foh wok—itinerant metal workers, who went from town to town. Today there are carbon steel woks which, after seasoning with cooking oil, require little interior washing and cook beautifully with the merest amounts of oil, and last indefinitely. There are woks of stainless steel and aluminum as well, good for steaming, less so for stir-frying. Woks are one- and two-handled, flat-bottomed and round. In my collection of more than two dozen woks, which range in size from twelve to twenty-four inches in diameter, I even have one old cast-iron wok, simply to remind myself of my grandmother’s kitchen.
Carbon steel ladles and spatulas have remained unchanged in fifty years, but those of iron have been replaced with stainless steel, and they’re lighter and more efficient. I still use wire mesh strainers from as small as four inches across to as large as fourteen inches, but I now also have wide, round strainers of steel punched through with holes, almost like colanders with handles. The heavy iron and steel alloy cleavers used in Ah Paw’s kitchen have been replaced by a wide variety of cleavers, carbon steel and stainless, with wood handles; others are made of one-piece honed steel, light for slicing and dicing, heavy for chopping through bone. The best one, the one used in the kitchens of the best Chinese chefs, is an American-made well-balanced cleaver by Dexter.
As you wil
l note even the changes in Chinese cooking implements has been a slow evolution, more modernization than change. Yet basically, all has remained the same throughout history. I still mince meats for dumpling fillings with my cleaver as I learned to in Ah Paw’s kitchen. I remember her dictum about washing a cutting board thoroughly so that subsequent foods cut on it would remain pure in their inherent flavors and blend seamlessly. Foods would not be cohesive she told me, if perfect cleanliness was not adhered to. I remember when she instructed me on how to concoct the stuffing for bitter melon, one of our family’s favorite foods. I knew the seasonings involved: salt, pepper, sugar, soy sauce, oyster sauce, sliced scallions, ginger juice, white rice wine, a touch of cornstarch. These were to be combined with perfectly minced fresh shrimp.
I minced, mixed, stirred the mass in one direction only, as my grandmother had instructed. I stuffed the melon slices, cooked them. At dinner that night, after everyone had eaten and said they enjoyed the bitter melon, Ah Paw asked for quiet and announced that Ah Fei, at the age of eight, had made the dish jiu tak ho perfectly, and that the family should congratulate her. I was so proud. That is how it was in my grandmother’s kitchen, how it has been for my children when they have cooked properly and well, and not bun san suk, defined by my grandmother as “half cooked, half not cooked.” It is how it will be for my granddaughter, and yours as well.
TWO
TO THE MARKET
ONE OF MY MANY DISCOVERIES AS a young girl was the market in Ah Paw’s town of Sah Gau. Because it was a large town, much larger than my small village of Siu Lo Chin, it was the market town for many surrounding villages as well; it contained many shops, and was filled with smells, sweet and savory. My grandmother insisted that shopping for her household meals was a twice-daily affair. I would sit with her as we finished breakfast, then would consult with Dai Kum Moh, my number-one aunt, who lived in one of Ah Paw’s four houses but ate with us. Then she called in Ah Guk, my aunt’s more experienced servant and shopper. My aunt supervised all of Ah Paw’s food shopping because she knew virtually all the shopkeepers quite well, and preferred to shop with Ah Guk, whom she respected. Often I would go with them.
The Sah Gau market was a collection of streets and alleys filled with dozens of shops, and each had to be visited because virtually every food that we needed to buy was sold loose, by weight. There were no bottles of oil, or vinegar, or wines, or any other of our liquid staples such as soy sauce, oyster sauce, sesame oil and hoisin sauce. There were no packages of water chestnuts or sugar, salt, flours, dried shrimp and cuttlefish or salted fish. Everything, liquid or solid, was sold by the tael and catty. Ah Guk, whose name translated to Chrysanthemum, would carry a collection of bottles and jars, which needed to be filled on each trip.
One tael equaled 1.3 ounces, with twelve taels equivalent to a pound; one catty of sixteen taels equaled twenty-two ounces. Shops had measuring cups for the dried foods, and ladles of varying sizes for the liquids. One shop I recall had a huge clay pot containing a mound of fresh salt, harvested from the sea, still a bit moist. Next to it were barrels of loose brown sugar, slices of sugarcane sugar, and white sugar. Rice barrels contained extra-long-grain rice, short-grain, special rice from Thailand and glutinous rice. Barrels of soy sauce, oyster sauce, bean sauce, peanut oil and sesame paste stood alongside.
Another shop would have mounds of dried foods, both grown and baby shrimp, cloud ear fungus, tiger lily buds, mushrooms, dried scallops and mussels and bean thread noodles fashioned from mung beans. Various flours milled from water chestnuts and tapioca, from wheat and rice, and from the mung beans that provided much of our starch were displayed as well as a bewildering array of spices and herbs, all loose and unpacked.
Butchers sold mostly pork, in pieces, with every part of every pig seemingly finding a taker. There was some beef for the adventurous but most people ate pork exclusively. They sold lop cheung, the special pork and pork liver sausages, roasted duck and, at certain times of the year, cured slab bacon as well. Poultry shops sold freshly killed chickens, ducks and geese, fresh chicken and duck eggs as well as those preserved so-called thousand-year-old eggs.
Bean curd, always fresh, was made by the hour in small streetside factories and we would buy cakes, or smooth custards, or pieces of somewhat firm masses either in milky white or yellow. There was no difference—the yellow was simply dyed, for those people who might wish to serve yellow instead of white. Other shops lined up big crocks of white rice wines and the sherrylike Shao-Hsing, with them white and red distilled wine vinegars, and that special, thick balsamiclike Chinkiang vinegar. It was a true culinary cornucopia and I loved its smells as well as the small lengths of sweet sugarcane shopkeepers would give me to chew on.
With each visit the empty jars, bottles and crocks we brought to the market empty were returned to Ah Paw’s house, filled, along with paper-wrapped parcels of dry goods. My number-one aunt loved the market bartering ritual. She would joke with the shopkeepers, pretend they were asking too high a price, that perhaps a soy sauce suggested was not from the smooth and balanced top of the fermented crock, but closer to the bean sauce that came from the soy crock bottom. She would heft a piece of pork, tell a storekeeper that his measurement of salt or white pepper seemed to be a bit less than the specified number of taels. But it was all in good humor, accepted by buyer and seller as part of market life, and when we returned to Ah Paw’s house my grandmother and my aunt would laugh about that day’s adventure.
These days, to be sure, all of those foods, spices and flavorings, all those oils and sauces and wines are available in bottles, jars and parcels, and shopping for foods remains a pleasure, but often I yearn for those stores and their smells.
Then it was to Ah Paw’s kitchen for the preparation of that day’s lunch and dinner, and of course my continued lessons. This day Ah Guk, at Ah Paw’s instructions, was to teach me how to blanch foods and steam them, and I was to continue my practice in stir-frying.
BLANCHING AND STEAMING
Blanching is a process wherein foods are plunged into boiling water or oil, usually for mere seconds. With vegetables, blanching in boiling water, with a bit of salt added, serves to remove the water in the vegetables, heightens their color, and tenderizes them without softening their texture. The process, according to my grandmother, was called chut soi, which translates as “let the water out.” The addition of a bit of baking soda to the water will brighten the color even more.
Blanching in oil, called jau yau, is usually reserved for meats, poultry and seafood, where the process serves to seal in the food’s juices. Often vegetables that are deemed tough, such as bamboo shoots, jicama, water chestnuts and root vegetables are blanched in oil to keep their moisture in. Occasionally meats, poultry and shellfish are water-blanched as well, to remove their moisture. The methods of blanching are detailed in this book.
Steaming foods in my grandmother’s kitchen was an exercise in saving time, energy and extra effort. Often we steamed foods by setting them atop rice in woks so that they would cook along with the rice. These days steaming is a different practice, though the principle is the same. Foods are placed in steamproof dishes, set on racks over boiling water, covered and steamed for specific times. Steaming can be done in traditional bamboo steamers set into woks over boiling water or in steel and aluminum pots with steaming inserts. The process, called jing, preserves the juices of the food in the steaming dishes, gives foods a natural, glistening appearance, and is the perfect process for reheating. When steaming, boiling water should be kept on hand to replenish any that evaporates.
Every day, including shopping days, complete meals would be cooked both for lunch and for dinner in Ah Paw’s house. When I was permitted to stir-fry, the essential cooking process of the Chinese kitchen, my grandmother would caution me, virtually every time, with sin lok ngan hau lok yuen, which iterated that in the stir-fry, hard foods always went into the wok first, the soft foods later. By the time I was eight years old I was stir-frying with co
nfidence, and always remembering hard first, soft second.
There were always seven or eight people at my grandmother’s table, my number-one aunt, to be sure, the servants, my grandmother and me, and any of the relatives who occupied her other houses who happened to be in Sah Gau. Each meal, lunch or dinner, was equally as important as another.
Steamed Black Mushrooms
(JING DONG GU)
This versatile mushroom preparation is wonderful at any time, eaten as they are just out of the steamer, or as part of a large banquet, or as an ingredient in other dishes. They may be eaten hot or cold.
24 Chinese dried black mushrooms, about 1½ inches in diameter
¾ teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons sugar
1½ tablespoons dark soy sauce
1½ tablespoons oyster sauce
2 tablespoons Shao-Hsing wine, or sherry
2 teaspoons sesame oil
3 tablespoons Scallion Oil (page 16)
My Grandmother's Chinese Kitchen Page 3
