Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking (6 page)

Green or romano beans with black bean and chilli

Bok choy with fresh shiitake

Vegetarian menu

Tofu “bamboo” with spring onion-flavored oil

Smacked cucumber with sesame and preserved mustard greens

Pock-marked old woman’s tofu

Fish-fragrant eggplant

Sichuanese dry-fried green beans

Spinach with chilli and fermented tofu

COLD DISHES

My honorary Sichuanese aunt, Li Shurong, is a famously good cook. Whenever I’m in the Sichuanese capital, Chengdu, she feeds me with her magnificent fish in pickled chilli sauce, her unforgettable red-braised pork, and other homemade dishes. If she notices I am tired or sad, she is even more attentive in her culinary ministrations. And every so often, she includes me in a weekend feast with her extended family.

Like many Chinese home cooks, Li Shurong has a few cold dishes at the ready when her guests arrive, to whet their appetites and occupy them while she stir-fries the vegetables and finishes off her soups and stews. She might have rustled up a quick, spicy fava bean salad, cut some preserved duck eggs into rainbow segments, or steamed and sliced up some of her homemade winter sausages and laid them on a plate with a dip of ground chillies.

Cold appetizers, rather than the deep-fried titbits typical of Chinese restaurants in the West, open the meal in many parts of China, including Beijing, Shanghai and Sichuan Province. They might be as simple as some fried peanuts and a cucumber salad with a spicy dressing, or as elaborate, in a glamorous restaurant, as a checkerboard of 16 different delicacies, made with ingredients beautifully cut and arranged in each dish like the petals of a flower. Modest or extravagant, they make a delightful start to the meal, both for the eater and for the cook, who can make them in advance and concentrate, at the last minute, on the hot dishes that must be served fresh from the wok.

Some of the vegetable dishes in this chapter make refreshing accompaniments to a simple lunch of noodles or dumplings, as well as appetizers. And don’t feel obliged to eat them only in a Chinese context, because many of them work splendidly as Western-style starters, or as part of a mixed buffet lunch. I’ve often served a Sichuanese cold-dressed chicken dish for a summer lunch party alongside, perhaps, an Arabian carrot salad, a green salad, a potato salad and bread. And my Boxing Day lunches invariably include cold meats with Sichuanese seasonings: turkey treated like chicken in a spicy sauce; beef sliced and tossed with chilli oil, roasted nuts and celery or cilantro. Similarly, there’s no reason why you can’t serve a dish of charcuterie or a salad as appetizers at the start of an otherwise Chinese meal.

Most of the dishes that follow are extremely easy to make; some, like the Smacked Cucumber in Garlicky Sauce, take about 10 minutes from start to finish; others can be cooked in advance and swiftly assembled when you want to eat. A few dishes found in other chapters can also be included in a spread of appetizers, such as Spicy Buckwheat Noodles or Mrs. Yu’s Sweet and Spicy Cold Noodles. You can also serve leftover cold meats, sliced and laid out on a plate with little piles of ground chillies and ground roasted Sichuan pepper; smoked or spiced tofu (sliced, laid out prettily on a plate and drizzled with chilli oil); or edamame soy beans, served in the pod. As in the rest of the book, allow one dish for each guest, perhaps with one extra.

SMACKED CUCUMBER IN GARLICKY SAUCE
SUAN NI PAI HUANG GUA
蒜泥拍黃瓜

This exceptionally quick and easy dish was a favorite of mine at the now demolished and much-missed Bamboo Bar, a small restaurant just outside the Sichuan University campus. The serving girls there, who lodged like sardines in the attic at the top of the old wooden building, used to mix up the seasonings behind the counter, taking spoonfuls of garnet-red chilli oil and dark soy sauce from the bowls in the glass cabinet beside them and tossing the cucumber in the piquant sauce. The combination of seasonings, known as “garlic paste flavor” (
suan ni wei
), is a Sichuanese classic, with its garlicky pungency and undercurrent of sweetness: the same sauce may be used to dress fresh fava beans, thinly sliced cooked pork (perhaps mixed with fine slivers of carrot and Asian radish), boiled pork dumplings or wontons, and many other ingredients. You may use sweet, aromatic soy sauce instead of light soy sauce if you have it in stock (tap
here
).

The cucumber is smacked before cutting to loosen its flesh and help it absorb the flavors of the sauce. Try not to smash it into smithereens!

1 cucumber (about 11 oz/300g)

½ tsp salt

1 tbsp finely chopped garlic

½ tsp sugar

2 tsp light soy sauce

½ tsp Chinkiang vinegar

2 tbsp chilli oil

A pinch or two of ground roasted Sichuan pepper, (optional)

Lay the cucumber on a chopping board and smack it hard a few times with the flat blade of a Chinese cleaver or with a rolling pin. Then cut it, lengthways, into four pieces. Hold your knife at an angle to the chopping board and cut the cucumber on the diagonal into ⅛–⅜ in (½–1cm) slices. Place in a bowl with the salt, mix well and set aside for about 10 minutes.

Combine all the other ingredients in a small bowl.

Drain the cucumber, pour over the sauce, stir well and serve immediately.

VARIATIONS

A sweet-and-sour sauce for smacked cucumber

A lovely variation. Smack, cut and salt the cucumber as in the main recipe, but dress it with the following seasonings: ½ tsp salt, 1 tbsp finely chopped garlic, 2 tsp sugar, 2 tsp Chinkiang vinegar, 1 tsp light soy sauce and, if you fancy a bit of heat, 2 tbsp chilli oil.

Smacked cucumber with sesame and preserved mustard greens

For a nutty, savory flavor, smack, cut and salt the cucumber as in the main recipe, but dress it with the following seasonings: 2 tbsp Sichuan preserved mustard greens (
ya cai
), 1 tsp finely chopped garlic, 1 tbsp runny sesame paste, 1½ tsp clear rice vinegar, 1 tsp sesame oil and salt to taste.

SICHUANESE SPICED CUCUMBER SALAD
QIANG HUANG GUA
熗黃瓜

This swiftly stir-fried cucumber, infused with the smoky aromas of chillies and Sichuan pepper and the subtle fragrance of sesame oil, is normally served at room temperature and can be made a few hours in advance of your meal. It uses the Sichuanese
qiang
cooking method, in which a brief blast of heat in the wok drives the flavors of the spices into the main ingredient. It is usually served as an appetizer, or as a side dish with a selection of Sichuanese “small eats,” such as the slippery dragon wontons, “glassy” steamed dumplings and Lai glutinous rice balls for which the regional capital Chengdu is famed.

1 cucumber (about 11 oz/300g)

½ tsp salt

2 tbsp cooking oil

4–5 dried chillies, snipped in half, seeds discarded as far as possible

½–1 tsp whole Sichuan pepper

1 tsp sesame oil

Cut the cucumber in half lengthways and scoop out the pulp and seeds with a teaspoon (I usually eat them as I go along). Then cut each half into about three sections and slice each section into thin strips. Place the pieces in a bowl, sprinkle with the salt, mix well and set aside for at least 30 minutes.

Drain the cucumber and shake dry.

Heat a wok over a high flame. Pour in the cooking oil, swirl it quickly around, then add the chillies and Sichuan pepper. Stir-fry the spices until the chillies are darkening but not burned, then add the cucumber. Stir-fry very briefly to heat the surface of the cucumber and drive in the flavors of the oil. Off the heat, stir in the sesame oil and turn on to a serving dish.

VARIATION

Spiced potato sliver salad

If you’ve never tasted a dish like this, prepare to be surprised. It’s a simple concoction of potato slivers enlivened by scorched chillies and Sichuan pepper, but the potatoes are deliberately cooked so fleetingly that they retain some of their raw crunchiness. Peel 11 oz (300g) potatoes (larger ones will be easier to cut). Cut them evenly into the thinnest possible slices, then into slivers; you may use a mandolin for this, if you have one. Place the slivers in a bowl of lightly salted cold water as you work, so they don’t discolor.

Bring a panful of water to a boil and blanch the potato slivers for about two minutes; they should remain crisp. Turn them into a sieve, refresh under the cold tap and shake dry. Place in a bowl and add 1½ tbsp clear rice vinegar and salt to taste. Now make the spicy oil: snip eight dried chillies in half and discard their seeds as far as possible. Heat 3 tbsp cooking oil in a wok over a medium flame. Add the chillies and 1 tsp whole Sichuan pepper and sizzle gently until the chillies are darkening but not burned. Add the oil and spices to the potato with 2 tsp sesame oil, mix well, then serve.

SICHUANESE GREEN SOY BEAN SALAD
XIANG YOU QING DOU
香油青豆

Young soy beans, which can be bought fresh in places where they are cultivated and are otherwise available cooked and frozen, are a strikingly beautiful green and delicately savory in flavor. In the West, they are most often encountered in their pods, with the Japanese name edamame. Although the Chinese eat them this way too (tap
here
), they also like to serve the shelled beans as an appetizer, sometimes just with a little red pickled chilli for color, sometimes mixed with preserved mustard greens and other ingredients as in this recipe. Leave out the preserved vegetable if you don’t have it to hand.

Salt

7 oz (200g) fresh or defrosted frozen green soy beans (shelled weight)

2 oz (50g) Sichuan preserved vegetable (
zha cai
)

½ oz (25g) carrot

A small piece of red bell pepper or fresh red chilli

1–2 tsp sesame oil

Bring a panful of water to a boil, add salt, then the soy beans. Return to a boil. If you are using fresh soy beans, cook for about five minutes, until tender, then drain and refresh immediately under the cold tap; if you are using defrosted frozen beans, simply blanch them for a few seconds, drain and refresh.

Cut the preserved vegetable, carrot and red pepper into small squares of a similar size to the beans. Bring a little water to a boil, then blanch the carrot and pepper, separately, for a minute or two, until tender but still crunchy. Drain and refresh these, too.

Mix the beans and other vegetables together with salt and sesame oil to taste.