08.24.08
Feasting At Home, Chinese Style
To celebrate my Belovedary’s recent birthday, as well as our 12th anniversary, and additionally to roll in the belated birthday celebration of a good friend of ours, I decided to make a Chinese-style feast for the four of us. Four is, to be honest, too small a number for a real banquet, as far as Chinese cookery goes. Chinese banquets usually run into the double digits in terms of numbers of courses, and are intended for large groups of friends or family.
Nonetheless, one can still have an awfully nice feast by following the general principles of Chinese banqueting, which is basically that one pulls out all the stops and acquires large quantities of meat, seafood, and poultry — sometimes very exotic things, or in very exotic preparations, depending on how impressive the banquet is to be. Meat is a traditional food for feasts and celebrations all over the world, and always has been, and it is surely the case in China. In fact, the focus of Chinese banqueting is so much directed toward the meat-fish-poultry end of the spectrum that in many cases, rice is not served at banquets despite its centrality to Chinese eating and culture, unless possibly at the end of the meal as a near-formality.
The message encoded in the absence of rice from the table is quite alien to a culture like ours where we are both very affluent and very fond of large slabs of meat as a central part of our eating (and don’t kid yourself that these aren’t related things), and unlikely to be perceived by Westerners who rarely eat rice anyway and for whom it does not occupy the same mental space as it does for most Asians and certainly for the Chinese. In China, you don’t ask a visitor if they are hungry, or if they have had lunch or dinner already, you ask “hee ca fan mai?” (Cantonese; the Mandarin is ni chi fan le ma?), which means, quite literally “have you eaten rice yet?” The same sentiment is a common greeting in other places too, notably Thailand. Like the word “bread” in the phrase “give us this day our daily bread,” rice is not just a food, rice is food.
When rice is absent from the table at a Chinese meal, it means that you are, at least temporarily, so prosperous and that you don’t have to think about the stuff — rice — that the common people use to fill their bellies. You can and in fact you are encouraged to do something that under normal circumstances has been almost unthinkable, both culturally and economically, for everyone but the highest of elites. You can eat your fill of meat.
(Yes, there are Buddhist banquets that are 100% vegetarian. Most are in fact vegan. And other Buddhist banquets that are vegetarian except for four or five types of seafood that are considered permissible. But even they are remarkably concerned with, and centered around, meat… albeit in the form of mock meats made from seitan, tofu, and various kinds of mushrooms and fungus. The symbolism of meat and prosperity, and meat and largesse, is insistent.)
It should thus come as no surprise that our four-person feast was a fiesta of animal protein.
Clockwise from upper middle: ginger-scallion oil for dipping, boiled dumplings with pork filling, white cut chicken, ginger-soy dipping sauce, roasted chili oil (in center), ginger-scallion explosion shrimp.
The least glamorous looking of these dishes is actually one of my favorites, white cut chicken. It is a Cantonese favorite, and the method of preparing it is one that makes many Western cooks look very worried indeed, although I have made it dozens of times without mishap. It is essentially a boiled whole chicken (you cut it into chopstickable pieces, with or without the bones still in as you prefer, to serve it), cooked with ginger and green onion. But what makes it special is that it is boiled only very briefly, so that it remains juicy and sweet and firm, rather than getting the stringy, cooked-to-death texture that is so common to boiled poultry otherwise.
I take mine off the bone, removing the meat in the largest pieces possible and then cutting them into chopstickable chunks, because I dislike the inevitable bone fragments that chopping through the bones (more traditional) generates. It is served with ginger-scallion oil and usually with soy sauce as well, for diners to dip the meat into as they like. It is a subtle and very pleasing dish, very treasured, and one of those traditionally served at ancestor worship rituals like Ching Ming and the Feast of the Hungry Ghosts.
Method for White Cut Chicken:
Take a small to medium-sized whole chicken, very fresh and of very good quality, plucked, drawn, cleaned, and well washed in plenty of cold water, and put it in a large pot. Fill the pot with cold water until the chicken is submerged to the depth of about 2 inches. Add a large bunch of green onions, cleaned and pared, and a three-inch chunk of peeled fresh gingerroot cut into thick coins. Place the pot over a brisk flame and bring to a full rolling boil. Let boil for about 5 minutes, then remove the pot from the heat, cover, and let cool until the chicken is cool enough to handle.
Note: this takes some time, usually several hours, but it depends on how warm or cool the room is. However, this is part of the cooking process! Residual heat helps ensure that your chicken is completely cooked. Don’t try to rush the cooling artificially, in other words. Just let it happen.
When the chicken is cool enough to handle, lift it out of the broth (this cooking liquid makes a wonderful base stock for many soups, as well as for congee, so don’t throw it away!) in a large wire scoop, or using two large slotted spoons. Put it in a shallow pan to let the liquid drain off. When it is no longer dripping wet, either cut it into manageable-sized pieces bones and all using a cleaver (remove the wings and legs, chop them crosswise into chunks, then cut along either side of the spine and flatten the torso, then cut it up), or else remove the meat from the bones in large pieces, then cut the large pieces into chopstick-ready ones. Generally, if you cut the bird up bones and all, you should leave the skin on. This is not possible when you are removing the meat from the bones.
Serve at room temperature or chilled.
A note about the above method: some cookbooks will tell you to place the chicken into a pot of already-boiling water, return it to a boil, and proceed from there. Sometimes they will not only do this but will also tell you to remove the chicken from the pot before it has cooled down as much as it should. I have tried this method and have never ended up with satisfactory results. All too often, plunging a raw bird into boiling water merely means that the outer margins of the bird get cooked instantaneously and come up to heat quickly, and the boiling water thus returns to a boil rapidly, but the water does not get hot enough for long enough to thoroughly cook the bird. It is very discouraging to start to cut up the chicken for serving only to find that it is still raw at the thickest bit of thigh or breast, and recooking, while possible, tends to dry out the meat. Putting the chicken into cold water and bringing it up to a boil ensures that the whole contents of the pot, including every cubic centimeter of that chicken, will come up to boiling temperature together. Likewise, having it stand in the hot water until the water and the chicken are cool enough to handle is part of the cooking process. This is not a dish to attempt if you don’t plan to be knocking around the house most of the day. The actual time you spend doing hands-on cooking is minimal, but the cooking time, strictly speaking, is extensive.
You serve white cut chicken with plain soy sauce, but also with what I think of as “mad scientist” or “magic” oil made with lots of ginger and green onion to complement the perfume of green onion and ginger from the cooking liquid.
Method for Ginger-Scallion Oil:
Combine 1/3 cup minced fresh raw ginger and 1/2 cup thinly sliced fresh raw green onions or scallions in a largish heatproof nonreactive bowl (ceramic or stainless steel are usually best). Heat 1 cup peanut, canola, corn, or other neutral-flavored oil (not olive oil) until it is just at the smoke point. Pour the
hot oil over the ginger and green onion: it will foam up and seethe and billows of fragrant steam will erupt from the bowl like the stereotypical mad scientist’s lab flasks or witch’s cauldron. Give it a gentle stir with a chopstick or a spoon and let it stand until it cools to room temperature, after which it should be covered. Leftovers should be refrigerated.
Leftover ginger-scallion oil can be used in a variety of ways, not least to flavor congee, plain rice, eggs, or tofu.
Tomorrow, if I get a chance, I will post again and write out my recipe for these:
