1,000 Foods To Eat Before You Die: A Food Lover's Life List (188 page)

There are two things you have to like a lot to appreciate this specialty of the Sichuan city of Chengdu: chicken, naturally, but more important, red-hot dried chile peppers. One look at the dish, with its moist and tender sauce-glazed bits of chicken blanketed by myriad curled, vermillion chiles, and you might think those two ingredients were matched pound for pound in the recipe. But for those with a fireproof palate, and the knowledge that taking intermittent mouthfuls of plain steamed white rice will dampen the flames,
Chengdu ji
is an addictive treat.

The chicken itself—both light and dark meat, and preferably bone-in to maintain juiciness and enhance flavor—is cut into large chunks, then stir-fried in peanut oil along with slivers of fresh ginger, garlic, scallions, those incendiary whole peppers, and a bit of ground Sichuan pepper (see
listing
). For a savory balance, rice wine or sherry and a pinch of sugar will join the mix, with some toasted peanuts often tossed in for crunch and a bit of creamy relief from the spicy sauce.

Of course, you aren’t really expected to eat all, or even most, of the peppers. Rather, as you wend your way through the morsels of chicken and nuts, you pick up bits and pieces of crumbly chile flakes with your chopsticks. Invariably, that leaves most of the peppers on the plate, which is a painful sight for those disinclined to waste. If this describes you, consider taking the flavorful leftovers home in a doggy bag and using them to approximate this dish at home. The chiles will have lost a bit of their fire, a fact your family might well appreciate.

Where:
In New York
, Wu Liang Ye, tel 212-398-2308,
wuliangyenyc.com
;
in Chicago
, Yan Bang Cai, tel 312-842-7818,
yanbangcaichicago.com
;
in San Francisco
, Ton Kiang Restaurant, tel 415-752-4440,
tonkiang.net
.
Further information and recipes:
Mrs. Chiang’s Szechwan Cookbook
by Jung-Feng Chiang with Ellen Schrecker and John Schrecker (1987);
chinesefood.about.com
(search chengdu ji chicken);
ifood.tv
(search chengdu ji chicken).
See also:
Sichuan Eggplant
.

Vendors cooking up after-hours treats at the Shilin Night Market.

The food of Chiu Chow (also spelled Teochew, and situated in the northeast corner of China’s Canton province) makes for a unique and memorable stop in a journey among China’s seemingly endless regional cuisines, but it’s relatively unknown outside the country. Marked by the mild flavors typical of Canton, it also shows the influence of the neighboring Fujian region.

One of the most savory Chiu Chow dishes is the oyster omelet, a version of which is a particular favorite in the night markets of Taipei. The success of the richly filling street snack depends upon the freshest, tiniest raw oysters, a handful of which are stirred into beaten eggs, along with a small amount of a binder such as potato, rice, or cornstarch to create a pancake effect. Green onions are another possible addition.

After being cooked in a hot iron pan greased with either rendered lard or vegetable oil, it is flipped once, frittata-style, so both sides take on a lightly golden laciness. The finishing touch is a pungent, winey aged soy sauce blended with spicy chile sauce and a tangy splash of lime juice, all to enhance the flavor of the silky, saline oysters.

The most fitting way to wash down an oyster omelet is with a tiny, espresso-size cup of Chiu Chow iron tea or Kung Fu tea, brewed from aged tea leaves native to Fujian. As strong in aroma and flavor as its name and gray-black color imply, iron tea has drily astringent overtones and is always taken as a sort of digestive before or after meals, in shot-size portions lest it prove too harsh for the stomach.

Given the similarity between the Chiu Chow oyster omelet and San Francisco’s famed Hangtown fry (see
listing
), one cannot help wondering if a cook hailing from Chiu Chow and working in the gold-mining camps near Placerville, California (nicknamed Hangtown), did not first present this dish, never mind that the oysters in the Gold Rush version came to be fried, and that crisp bacon served as a garnish. We may never know for sure, but the long and influential history of Chinese cuisine in California, and in the American West in general, would certainly back up such a theory.

Where:
In Hong Kong
, Pak Loh Chiu Chow Restaurant, tel 852/2576-8886,
pakloh.com
; City Chiu Chow Restaurant, tel 852/2723-6226;
in Queens
, Main Street Imperial Taiwanese Gourmet, tel 718-886-8788.
Further information and recipes:
The Best of Taiwanese Cuisine
by Karen Bartell (2002);
food52.com
(search taiwanese oyster omelet);
seriouseats.com
(search taiwanese oyster omelet).

Lobster Cantonese, a garlicky, gingery delight.

Just as Italian American red-sauce cooking has been snootily denigrated by champions of “authentic” Italian food for decades, so too were Cantonese American dishes downgraded in the late 1960s and the 1970s, when Americans were introduced to the so-called “real” cuisine of China. Oddly, these inexpensive Americanized Italian and Chinese dishes we first came to know and love represented the southern cooking of each country, and would be dismissed in turn, as the new-to-us northern chefs won the culinary high ground. Yet, many who grew up with the old favorites miss them still, partly out of nostalgia, but also because they were, in fact, very good, whatever their origins. No dish exemplifies this more than lobster Cantonese and its less-expensive spin-off, shrimp in lobster sauce.

Made with live lobsters pulled from bubbling tanks, lobster Cantonese was often one of the most expensive choices on what were generally modestly priced menus. It began with fresh chunks of moist, pearly lobster chopped into sections, shell and all, to protect the meat and add a distinctly oceanic flavor to the sauce. Bits of tender pork and lots of crushed garlic also went into the wok, along with shavings of fresh ginger, perhaps a little sherry or white wine, and sometimes fermented black beans. For a gossamer gravy, a little cornstarch was dissolved in chicken stock. And for the masterful finishing touch, half-beaten eggs were poured in to quickly set into cloudlets of whites and soft, custardy yolks. Topped with threads of scallion and nested on a hill of white rice to absorb the juices, it was—and is—as rich and engaging as any dish turned out for the Imperial Court of old.

Less expensive but equally delicious, shrimp in lobster sauce is so named because it is prepared in the same sauce and with essentially the same ingredients, except that in place of whole lobster, it is made with freshly shelled, butterflied shrimp. Both dishes, fortunately, can still be found in what might be deemed old-fashioned Chinese restaurants in the U.S., although occasionally they do make appearances on some upscale menus as well.

Where:
In New York
, Congee Village at two locations,
congeevillagerestaurants.com
;
in Toronto
, Crown Princess Fine Dining, tel 416-923-8784,
crown-princess.ca
.
Further information and recipes:
The Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook
by Gloria Bley Miller (1984);
Quick and Easy
by Martin Yan (2004);
nytimes.com
(search lobster cantonese);
epicurious.com
(search lobster cantonese).

A staple in the United States since the 1930s, a time when “Chinese food” meant egg foo yung and chop suey, chow mein has a unique social history. The words are an Americanized version of
chao mian
, Mandarin for “stir-fried noodles”—an age-old and decidedly simple Chinese dish composed of boiled noodles quickly stir-fried in a wok with a sprinkling of meat and vegetables and a drizzle of cooking oil and soy sauce.

The foundation of the dish is the Chinese art of stir-frying, the point of which is to show off fresh ingredients by cooking them quickly over very high heat, so that they remain crisp and distinct. It’s a technique that is fast and relatively simple, which is why one of the dish’s American origin stories places it as a practice of Chinese immigrants working the railroads in the late nineteenth century. As they saw their fellow laborers preparing these quick lunches for themselves, American workers became interested and had a taste. The rest is history—or at least apocrypha.

As chow mein became popular, it evolved to be made with both soft and crisp noodles, bulked up with shrimp, chicken, or pork, and paired with a cornstarch-thickened, vaguely sweet brown sauce. In this and other iterations, it proved just exotic enough to become wildly popular, in its time a late-night supper staple at swank eateries like the Stork Club in Manhattan and Trader Vic’s in Los Angeles and a common counter specialty at big-city dime stores and roadside cafés, often sandwiched between slices of white bread.

When freshly and carefully prepared, chow mein is a truly comforting dish marked by delightfully contrasting textures: al dente vegetables and silky noodles in a soothingly simple sauce, topped with additional noodles fried to crispy threads. Fortunately, this time-honored crowd-pleaser of the American culinary canon is here to stay.

Further information and recipes:
The Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook
by Gloria Bley Miller (1984);
The Fortune Cookie Chronicles
by Jennifer 8. Lee (2008);
cookstr.com
(search chicken chow mein);
saveur.com
(search two sides brown); for a discussion on the history and lore of chow mein,
Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads
by Sylvia Lovegren (2005).

When the world at large discovered the charms of Chinese food in the mid-twentieth century, a host of canned “exotic” ingredients appeared on supermarket shelves to help the trend along. Among these were bamboo shoots
(
chuk sun
or
zhu sun
), the sprouts of a tall, woody grass that may belong to any of several genera—and to several hundred species within those, only a handful of which are edible.

Although canned foods can be convenient, fresh bamboo shoots are a far and fortunate cry from the limp and salty preserved substitutes. The fresh shoots have a distinctly clean, sweet, green flavor and a satisfyingly crunchy bite. The level of crispness varies depending on the amount of fiber in each species, but they all deliver a suitable snap. And that matters, as bamboo shoots are prized most of all for the texture they lend to a variety of Asian dishes—whether they are slivered and added to soups and vegetable dishes, diced and mixed into fillings for dumplings, pickled for use as garnish, or shredded atop salads and noodle dishes.