Cookbook Survivor: Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking
Sunday's Child Is Bonny and Blithe
This is a great teaching cookbook, which means it’s only a so-so cookbook in practical terms. What I mean is that if you pick it up thinking, “I’d like to make so-and-so” or “I have a pork butt in the refrigerator, what to do with it”, the book’s structure is a bit intimidatingly set against those questions.
What I feel every time I read it is that I’d like to set aside two or three weeks of my life and cook from it every day, in order. That wouldn’t just take time, it would take stocking up the pantry very thoroughly and adding a few things to the kitchen equipment, but it might be worth it—I’m convinced by the salience of the “syllabus”, as it were, whenever I look at the book.
Chinese cuisine is very much not one thing. Carolyn Phillips’ All Under Heaven is great for breaking out different regional cuisines, though my knowledge of China overall is 100% book knowledge—I have no visceral or material experience to hang that on. My relatively few experiences with high-quality restaurants serving one or more regional Chinese cuisines have been really memorable, but where I live, those experiences are fairly few and far between—it takes a trip into Philadelphia’s Chinatown or one of a very few suburban restaurants that hold up to scrutiny (Han Dynasty). Otherwise what I get is the standard “Chinese food” that is at best kind-of-ok and that doesn’t often inspire me to want to reproduce it.
One standard dish that is also found in really great Chinese restaurants is char siu barbecue, usually pork. It’s a Cantonese preparation, though versions of it are found throughout East Asia and Southeast Asia. There’s a good online recipe for it at The Takeout (strangely credited now to an author other than Kevin Pang, who I could have sworn was the original author) that is somewhat demanding in terms of specialized ingredients, including maltose, which I think I’ve previously discussed in this column as one of my least favorite pantry items ever in terms of difficulty of use. (It’s used to make char siu look really glossy after it’s cooked.)
Anyway, Yin-Fei Lo’s book has a good recipe for barbecued pork that is the basic simple version of this preparation—honey, Shaoxing wine, soy sauce (dark and light), hoisin sauce, five-spice powder, and red fermented bean curd. She adds a bit of oyster sauce to her marinade. No red food coloring, which is sometimes used by restaurants and take-out joints to give it a more lurid, brightly colored appearance. I have it marinating in the refrigerator now. What I’m going to do is barbecue it later in the afternoon and then chop some up to put it in steamed buns, an option she recommends.
I’m also going to mull over some sort of vegetable side dish based on what I’ve got in the fridge. The most likely components as I look are some baby bok choys and some shiitake mushrooms, but we’ll see—I’ll leaf through the cookbook and see if I spot something that makes sense.
Tempted to catch the train! :)