GOTTA LOVE YOUR MOTHER

I’ve been continuing to read and enjoy Fuchsia Dunlop’s Invitation to a Banquet (I admit that my fingers keep wanting to type Invitation to a Beheading).

 

And I’ve been especially taken with something she describes called “Loving Mother’s Dish.”

The story goes that there was once a woman whose son travelled to Beijing to sit the imperial civil service exams.  While waiting for his return she prepared his favourite dish, a slow cooked stew of pork and eggs.  

But travelling in imperial China was no better than traveling on British railways and the son didn’t get back on the day he was expected.  She took the stew off the stove, went to bed, and got up next day and simmered it some more on the second day. 

Again the son didn’t arrive so she stewed it some more, but he did arrive on this, the third day. Dunlop writes, “the stew had been heated up three times, and the meat was inconceivably tender and unctuous, the sauce dark and profound.’? All of which I can believe.  But what about the eggs?   

         I have never eaten an egg that’s been stewed for three days but I think the end result would not be profound in any ordinary sense of the word.

       I haven’t been able to find a recipe for “Loving Mother’s Dish” but I did manage to find this on a website called fooddelicacy.com 

It’s braised pork belly and eggs in soya sauce: the cooking time is an hour and 15 minutes.

INVITATION TO THE EXOTIC

I can’t remember when I first heard of, and started reading, Fuchsia Dunlop, the great scholar, eater and creator of Chinese food.  In some ways it seems like she’s always been there.   

Illustration by Anna Higgie

But I do know she was in the anthology The Wurst of Lucky Peach, a celebration of the sausage, in which she writes about opka hesip — sausage and stuffed lung — a favorite of the Uyghur people apparently.

Fucshia Dunlop wrote in that anthology “Cooked, the sausages are pleasantly piquant, the lung a strange hybrid of savory custard and offal that appeals, surprisingly, to those who like English puddings.” Now as then, I have to take her word for that.  Apparently opka hesip looks like this: 

Anyway I was in Hatchards bookshop last week and I bought a copy of Fuchsia Dunlop’s Invitation to A Banquet – The Story of Chinese Food. And it’s signed!!

 

It’s a deeply serious and erudite history of Chinese eating culture, with chapters on rice, knife scraped noodle, shunde and cultural appropriation, among many other topics.  But that doesn’t mean it’s not fun. 

 

It may be a measure of my own shallow-mindedness that the chapter I’ve liked best so far is titled ‘The Lure of the Exotic.’

 

Now we all now that in these days of saving the planet there are all kinds of things we’re not supposed to eat, including Chinese delicacies such as bear paw and shark skin soup, and Fuchsia Dunlop is a great cheerleader for sustainability, but back in the day she was obviously an enthusiast for eating the unusual if not the downright forbidden. 

 

     Mea culpa: I did once eat bear, which was terrific, cooked (and I assume killed) by Steve Rinella.  And it is in fact legal to hunt and eat bear in much of the United States.  I’m rather more upset that once, at a Chinese wedding, I did have shark fin soup – I only knew what it was afterwards – and I don’t think it was worth killing a shark for.

 

Nevertheless, I do still get a frisson when I read Fuchsia Dunlop’s tales of the eating of leopard foetus which might on occasion be imitation leopard’s foetus, or the ovarian fat of the snow frog which can look like this:

 

And then there's the Moose face.  Fuchsia Dunlop has a friend who gave her a dish called ‘red braised qilin face’ (hongshao qilin mian).  The qilin is a mythical creature, somewhere between a unicorn and a musk deer, and is sometimes depicted like this:

 

But the one she ate was made with the face of an elk.  “And there it was, an actual elk’s face, or rather its large nose, bizarre and amazing, lying in a pool of sauce on a great round platter and there I was staring into its enormous flared nostrils.’ Reader I salivated.  She continues, “it was utterly delicious, neither meat nor fat for skin, springy and sticky, while also soft as butter.” I’m convinced!  And she adds, “I knew I would probably never taste such a thing again.”  

Anyway, I’m glad she said probably and didn’t rule it out altogether.

 

 

 

VERY SIMILAR FOOD

 

There was a great article by Fuchsia Dunlop in the Financial Times at the weekend, headlined ‘Stone Feasts: Verisimilar meat, fish and poultry carved from rocks are part of a long Chinese cultural tradition.’  I don’t believe I’ve ever seen ‘verisimilar’ used in a sentence before.

 

Now, Fuchsia Dunlop appears to know pretty much all there is to know about Chinese food and culture, but even she seemed to be taken aback by the practice of collecting and displaying, in some cases after carving and cutting, rocks that look like food. 

 

She describes a ‘stone banquet’ she visited at the Ningxia Museum in Yinchuan, assembled by ‘self-declared stone lover’ Xie Nin, and says it looked as though Henry Moore and Alberto Giacometti had collaborated on dinner.

 

Inevitably, as you see from the pictures, some of the rocks look rather more convincingly like food than others - belly pork seems especially persuasive, but the general effect as shown in these pictures both from the newspaper and from Fuschia Dunlop’s Instagram feed is downright wonderful. Speaking as someone who loves both food and rocks, this is about as good as it gets.

 

I pick up a lot of rocks on my meanderings, but I’ve found very few that look like food, apart from the odd one that looks a bit like a potato.  But I’ve always been intrigued by restaurants or other establishments that display ‘verisimilar’ food. I found myself digging through my files looking for example of fake food I’ve photographed over the years.

 

Obviously a lot of restaurants don’t have the time or the staff to go hunting in the mountains looking for rocks that resemble their fare.  They have to rely on more mundane and easily available materials.  Some of these may be quite straightforward and literal like these replicas displayed outside a restaurant in Koreatown in LA, simply giving an impression of what the food served inside looks like.

 

But more often that not there’s some gigantism involved.  Ice cream is very good for this:

 

In Manchester you’ll find the Vimto monument. I think those are giant raspberries and grapes – I mean, those are the ingredients of Vimto - but those really are some funny looking grapes:

 

Hot dogs too are popular, and this may be more of an American thing.   This is, or anyway was, on Hollywood Boulevard:

 

This was, and I believe still is, Jimmy’s Hot Dog Company in Bisbee Arizona

 

And perhaps best of all – instead of finding a rock that looks like a hot dog (which I think is not entirely unlikely), or making one out of wood, you could build a motor vehicle that looks like one.  This is the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile:

 

There are plenty more where they came from.

Today while on my morning constitutional I picked up these three little rocky morsels – they look ‘almost’ but not quite good enough to eat.

 

And then I remembered, well I hadn’t really forgotten, that Dining on Stones  is the title of a novel by the esteemed Iain Sinclair.  

 

So … a cultural tradition with an international pedigree.

 

FREE IMPROV SANDWICH

 St John Restaurant put up this image on Instagram:

 

The caption was, ‘”Creating a sandwich is like jazz,” says Fergus (Henderson). “You must find your unique sounds.”  Fergus always orders the Egg Mayonnaise sandwich from the chalkboard bar menu, and requests the addition of brown shrimp or anchovy.  The perks of being the boss.’

 

I’m not sure that creating a sandwich is really very much like jazz but I would never argue with Fergus Henderson.

 

 

And then Fuchsia Dunlop put up this image on Instagram: 

 

with the caption, ‘Scotch woodcock (a scrambled egg and anchovy dish, no bird involved) and crab on toast …” A Scotch woodcock is a version of the Welsh rarebit – the anchovies can be on top of the egg (as in the pic) or below the egg as in Gentleman’s Relish.  

Both would be OK by me.

 

I decided the kitchen gods wanted me to make an egg mayonnaise sandwich with anchovies.

 

The truth is I never willingly make an egg mayonnaise sandwich without anchovies so I boiled my eggs readied my mayo and anchovies and in due course began assemblage.  

But the fact also is that I never willingly make an egg mayonnaise sandwich without smoked paprika - and I suddenly realized I’d run out.  I’m not prepared to drive to the supermarket just for a jar of smoked paprika, so I improvised.

 Here is my egg mayonnaise sandwich with anchovies and ... turmeric. 

 

It tasted pretty good. To be honest I think that was because of the egg and the mayonnaise and the anchovies rather than the turmeric.  Does turmeric really have much taste at all? I don’t think so, but I stand to be corrected.  But it looked reasonably jazzy.

Do you want to see a picture of a young Rachel Riley (of Countdown fame) dressed as an egg salad sandwich?  Well, of course you do.