Let me get this out of the way first: I love Eileen Yin-Fei Lo. I love her cookbooks and I own all but one of them. I use her cookbooks frequently and I read them for inspiration. I love the way she teaches in her cookbooks. I love her opinionatedness. I adore her stories about her grandmother. I credit her 100% for the success I’ve had with making vegan “barbecued pork” because I have based my sauces and my procedures on her char siu and, well, let’s put it this way: when you can make totally vegan char siu bao whose tastes and textures are so spot-on that confirmed omnivores are convinced have meat in them, well, you’ve done pretty good.
Which is all part of why I am stunned, right now. I decided to make Lo’s classic Cantonese chicken stock from her enormous and well-worth-the-money teaching cookbook, Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking. It’s on page 54 in case you’re wondering. It has all the signs of an excellent recipe. Indeed, even now it is beginning to perfume my house with the most wonderful scents. But the recipe is a bit deceptive. Let’s just say that what I thought I was going to end up doing turns out to be something very different from what I’m actually doing.
Essentially, it has become clear to me that Ms. Lo has a different idea of what a “large” stockpot is than I do. As a home cook – and this book is geared to the home cook — I have a couple of stockpots around the house. The largest is around 3 gallons, maybe three and a half, a respectable size for a household stockpot. In addition to this pot, I also have the bottom portions of a couple of very large multi-tiered Chinese steamers that I use when I am cooking dumplings either for a crowd at home or at a public event. One of these, an aluminum behemoth, can hold a solid four gallons of water, which is enough to keep you turning out bao for a good long time. Beyond that, I have a great big enameled iron canning kettle for hot-water bath canning. And that’s pretty much the large pots scene around here.
Lo’s recipe calls for 2 whole chickens, 4 pounds of chicken wings, 12 1/2 quarts of water, and a bunch of aromatics — onion, scallion, ginger, garlic, cilantro, boxthorn seeds — and some salt. It’s actually a pretty simple recipe, and a rich one, with all that meat.
She starts you out blanching your chicken and wings in “a large stockpot,” bringing them back up to the boil to cook off any surface proteins or wayward blood. Clarity and color are very important to Chinese stocks, as important as they are to a classic French consomme, and of course different schools of cooking have different ways of achieving that clarity. Blanching the meat will remove a great deal of the protein that is not intrinsically bound up in the chicken’s meat, bones, and skin, the stuff that usually forms a scum on top of the broth if it’s boiled. So by boiling it intentionally, you can remove it.
So far so good. I boiled a gallon’s worth of the 12 1/2 cups of water in my largest stockpot, as directed. I figured I had better go with the biggest one because two chickens plus four pounds of wings is a mighty large pile of chicken parts, and I didn’t know how right I was. When I added the chicken to the boiling water, I could barely get it all into the pot. A festive thicket of wing-tips poked up above the waterline despite my best efforts. I was clearly going to need a larger pot in which to cook the actual stock.
I brought the chicken parts back up to the boil while I got out the big four-gallon bottom to my big aluminum steamer. After having removed the chicken parts from the blanching water (which is now a really nice “chicken tea” sitting in a big bowl cooling while my dog gazes at it devotedly, having apparently already figured out that he’s getting some of it for his dinner), I rinsed the chicken as instructed in the recipe and placed it into the steamer bottom with the aromatics. Then I began adding the remaining 8 1/2 quarts of water.
It was right about quart number five that I realized I had suffered a failure of imagination: I had only gotten about half the water necessary into the pot, and I was running out of room.
Now, had I thought this through a little better, I would’ve known this would happen. The stock itself calls for more than twice the amount of liquid that I used to blanch the chicken. Increasing
the pot size to just the next available increment up was never going to be sufficient. But as it was, I hadn’t imagined things accurately and so I stood there in my kitchen, staring at the cookbook page and shrieking “Eileen, what on earth were you thinking? This is never going to fit into a large stockpot!”
Wordlessly, my Belovedary, who has been home sick today, got up, pulled a kitchen chair over
to the high shelf where I keep my canning pot, and fetched it down. I thanked him and began the process of shifting everything over to yet a third “large stockpot.”
Now all I have to do is wash all these pots. But that’s okay, I have five hours of simmering time to do it in. And I can tell by the way this stuff smells already that I am going to have completely forgiven Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, her editors, and the utter lack of specificity about pot sizes before the day is done.
I do encourage you to try making this stock. Or anything else from one of Lo’s books. Just bear in mind that when she says “large,” the woman means large.
