S
ome years ago, when I lived the life of a family man in one of those two-story, skylighted ateliers in the genteel bohemia of West Sixty-seventh Street, I dreamed of living one day in the far-west, as yet ungentrified, industrial reaches of Greenwich Village, or on the shabby border of Chinatown, still contained in those years within a few blocks of Chatham Square. I imagined entering through a narrow, dark iron doorway, set in a nondescript façade behind which lay a hidden pleasure dome of Ottoman gardens and splashing fountains. There, under dappled light, I would cook for friends and family and even agreeable strangers, who would come and go as they pleased. I have no idea from what fragments of childhood memory this fantasy of a pleasure dome arose, but the persistence of these buried memories led me to my present address, not far from where SoHo and the touristic remnants of Little Italy
converge at the encroaching northern boundary of rapidly expanding Chinatown.
SoHo is the stylish neighborhood south of Houston Street (hence SoHo) of million-dollar lofts carved out of antebellum grand emporiums with their cast-iron façades and bold fenestration. In the 1950s, this vital area was threatened with demolition by an insane scheme to build a multilane highway across lower Manhattan, from the Holland Tunnel to the Manhattan Bridge, which would obliterate the thriving neighborhoods between Houston and Canal, including the Italian and Chinese districts, while cutting the island in half at the waist. It was my friend and author the late Jane Jacobs, the savior of cities, who organized the neighborhood to protest this scheme and after a twelve-year struggle prevailed over the highwaymen, developers, and their servile politicians. The result is one of the liveliest, most architecturally distinguished and varied parts of the city: indeed, of any city.
Here, on a typical morning, I walk along Grand Street with my dog, Hamlet, who drags me willingly at the corner of Mott into Di Palo’s sublime cheese shop, a Manhattan landmark and the most illustrious of the few remaining institutions of the old Italian neighborhood, its counters piled high with wheels of Reggiano, Montasio, and Piave, its polyglot customers chatting as they wait their turn. Then, when Hamlet has had his morning snack of pecorino, we dodge Chinese butchers’ boys in long white coats with dressed pigs slung over their
shoulders, and forklifts laden with winter melons and crates of bok choy, and cross Grand Street to enter the teeming Chinese market along both sides of Mott between Grand and Hester, the liveliest of several such markets in what has become a vital Chinese city tucked into the city of New York.
I am expecting a guest for lunch and am looking at sea bass displayed in an outdoor stall, atop a bed of crushed ice, their black scales glistening in the pale winter sun. The trawlers must have hit a good school, since all three Mott Street fish markets display these three-pounders in abundance. Prices, as usual, are mysteriously uncoordinated, reflecting the bargains struck earlier this morning at the wholesale market—$3.19, $3.24, $3.20—but will soon be coordinated as the penny-wise shoppers assert their power. At the stall where I usually shop, the bass are marked $3.20. I shop here not because the price is lower by a penny or the quality higher: quality here is policed by the finicky customers and seldom a problem. I shop here because the clerk and I are used to each other. I jabber at him in English, and he jabbers at me in Chinese, and somehow we understand each other. I select a plump bass, check its eyes for brightness and its gills for redness, and hand it over to be scaled and filleted. With a shout, which I assume means fillet, the clerk tosses my fish to a colleague at the rear of the stall to be scaled and boned. How do you say “sea bass” in Chinese? I ask. “Seebah,” he shouts excitedly, then, pointing to tilapia, sole, sardines, octopus, fluke,
yellowfish, squid, and whiting, he rattles off their names in Chinese, none of which I understand, but I am pleased to know “seebah” and will use it next time.
Beside me stands an ancient Chinese gentleman bent over a box of live turtles, which have attracted Hamlet’s interest as well. Because the turtles violate the city’s humanitarian ordinances, the box had been partly hidden behind a wooden barrel half filled with frogs, gazing pathetically skyward. “Soup. Soup,” shouts the clerk, gaily pointing at the turtles. “Twelve dollah. Fourteen dollah.” I think of buying the entire box and letting its occupants go—but how and where? Would the SPCA take them? Instead, feeling cowardly, brutal, hypocritical, helpless, I cross the street with Hamlet to see if pea shoots—called “tau mee-yu”—might still be in season. I need a pound for lunch.
Chinese shoppers, many of whom are recent emigrants from the Chinese countryside, are unused to refrigeration and want to buy their fish live. This is impossible with wild fish, but farm-raised fish like tilapia, catfish, carp, or freshwater striped-bass hybrids are delivered every morning to Mott Street from black plastic tanks the size of backyard swimming pools mounted on flatbed trucks. Some are displayed for sale in bubbling aquariums. Live eels, catfish, and carp are sold from smaller tanks, or simply left to flap their lives away on piles of ice while Chinese grandmothers indifferent to this drama poke through bushel baskets of writhing crabs. Though non-Chinese are increasingly in evidence
at these markets, most shoppers here are Chinese women who scrutinize every long bean and snow pea before parting with their money. On the day I bought my sea bass, green onions were three bunches for a dollar at one stall and four bunches for a dollar at the next stall. That same day, at a Whole Foods Market, scallions of similar quality were a dollar a bunch. In Chinatown, fat asparagus were $1.50 a pound, spinach seventy-five cents for a large bunch, and a pound of shiitake mushrooms $3.60. I was amazed to find littleneck clams at $4.25 a dozen, oysters at $4.00 a dozen, and langouste at $5.00 a pound. Fresh Portuguese sardines and octopus were $1.99 a pound. Six dollars gets you a pound of barbecued spare ribs, and for ten dollars you can buy fifty shrimp dumplings ready for steaming.
But these prices don’t tell the whole story. In the fancy Chinatown shops specializing in rare delicacies, birds’ nests to make a mildly flavored gelatinous soup base go for $2,380 a pound, wild American ginseng for $1,880 a pound, dried abalone for $495 a pound, and first-quality shark fin a mere $328 a pound.
STIR-FRY OF SEA BASS
The restaurants in Chinatown range from quite good to pretty poor, but they are on average good enough that I seldom cook Chinese meals myself, as I did when I lived uptown. But I do use the ingredients for my own concoctions. On the day I bought the sea-bass fillets, I also picked up a half-pound of mung-bean sprouts, a plastic bag of fermented black beans, some fresh shiitakes, green onions, a red bell pepper, and a piece of
ginger. I also bought a package of ready-cooked Hong Kong yellow noodles. When Hamlet and I got home that morning, a half hour before my guests were to arrive,
I cut two “x”s through the skin of each fillet without cutting into the meat, to keep the fillets from curling up, and dropped the precooked Hong Kong noodles into warm water to loosen them, drained them, and flavored them with a teaspoon or so each of dark sesame oil and soy sauce. I then filmed and heated a sauté pan with a little peanut oil and dropped three handfuls of noodles into the pan, which I shaped and flattened to the thickness of smallish pancakes. When the bottoms began to brown over a low flame, I turned them over and browned the other side, and set the crunchy noodles on three luncheon plates. To the same pan I added more oil and warmed some garlic, to which I added the bell pepper in small dice, some green onion split in one-inch segments, two shiitake-mushroom caps, sliced, and a large table-spoonful of fermented black beans chopped fine. I added a tablespoon of soy sauce and another of oyster sauce to the mixture and stir-fried for a minute or two. Then I added a cup of chicken broth from a carton and finished my stir-fry with a teaspoon of potato starch dissolved in a little water, cooking until the sauce thickened just a bit. Had it thickened too much, I would have added a little more broth. In a separate pan I warmed two tablespoons or so of oil, and when the oil was hot but not smoking, placed the bass fillets skin side down, side by side, and reduced the flame by
half. Then I weighted the fillets with a heavy pot half filled with water, so that they would color evenly and not curl. After a few minutes, I removed the pot and turned the fillets over to cook for another minute, until the flesh was just cooked through. I placed the fillets skin side up atop the noodles, and poured the black-bean mixture over, adding a garnish of cilantro leaves with stems. Meanwhile, I washed the pound of snow-pea leaves (tau mee-yu), sometimes called pea shoots, in cold water, trimmed the stems, and heated a scant tablespoon of oil—you don’t want the leaves to be too oily—in a wok in which I had lightly browned a garlic clove in the oil. Then I added the wet leaves. After a brief sizzle as the water hit the hot oil, I turned the leaves with tongs until they softened and the water evaporated. I served these with a dash of soy sauce alongside the bass.
Years ago, when I lived uptown, where the neighborhood Chinese restaurants were terrible, I taught myself to cook Chinese from a book. The
batterie de cuisine
was not complicated: a well-seasoned steel wok, a shovel-like Chinese scoop and ladle, some chopsticks, a sharp cleaver, wire strainers of various sizes with bamboo handles, a stockpot, and a few basic condiments, all of which were easily found in Chinatown at the time but now are routinely stocked as well in the Asian section of most supermarkets: soy, oyster, dark-sesame, and hoisin sauces; black beans in jars; five-spice powder; dried shiitake mushrooms; tins of water chestnut and bamboo shoots; peanut oil; fresh ginger root; star anise; and, of course, cornstarch, chicken stock, and inexpensive dry sherry. Today the
variety of sauces, aromatic dried fish, pickled vegetables, fresh water chestnuts, bitter melon, bamboo shoots, and lotus root, spices, condiments, and so on stocked in Chinese food stores can be bewildering, but the basics will support a substantial repertory of simple Chinese dishes.
The book from which I learned the basics of Chinese cooking was called
How to Cook and Eat in Chinese,
by Buwei Yang Chao. It had been published in 1945 and was out of print, but I had found an old copy and eventually republished it in a paperback edition, which sold well but is now also out of print, lost in the avalanche of Asian cookbooks that have been published since. As far as I have been able to discover, Mrs. Chao’s book is the first successful attempt to publish in English authentic rather than Westernized Chinese techniques and recipes. It includes more than two hundred recipes, with an informative introduction to Chinese culinary culture that covers ingredients, techniques, politesse, terms, and tools. Mrs. Chao’s recipes are accurate and easily mastered, and her commentary remains fresh and useful. With her help I created my own polyglot improvisations long before fusion became the fashion.
The author explains that the word for chopsticks—“k’uai-tzu”—means “something fast,” as when a rude tourist orders the waiter to move “chop-chop”; “small meals between meals” are called “tien-hsien,” or “dot hearts,” literally something to touch (dot) the heart. These are now transliterated as “dim sum,” though when they first became popular with New Yorkers,
before the Second World War, they were called “tea lunch,” because, as the author explains, the Chinese typically do not drink tea with their three regular meals, but only with their dot hearts between meals.
Nom Wah Tea Parlor, on the dog-leg bend of Doyers Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown, was serving tea lunch long before Mrs. Chao’s cookbook was published in 1945, but as far as I can tell hers was the first book to introduce dot hearts or dim-sum recipes to American readers. Several common terms were coined by her with the help of her husband, Yuen Ren Chao, a distinguished if whimsical professor of comparative linguistics at Berkeley. For example, the term
ch’ao
“with its aspiration, low rising tone and all cannot be accurately translated into English. Roughly speaking ch’ao may be defined as a big-fire-shallow-fat-continual-stirring-quick-frying-of-cut-up-material with wet seasoning. So we shall call it stir fry….”
Mrs. Chao was a physician who had “never stirred an egg” until she attended the Tokyo Women’s Medical School, where she found the Japanese food “so uneatable that I had to cook my own meals.” She adds, in an author’s note to the first edition of her book, that “by the time I became a doctor I also became something of a cook.” Since she admits that she hardly knows English, it must have been her scholarly husband who chose, in his wife’s name, the word “eatable,” from the Old English “etan,” he explains, rather than the more pretentious “edible,” imported from the Latin
edibilis.
In
fact, it is obvious from the text that the professor wrote the entire book in his wife’s name, using her recipes. This also explains why he coined the pronoun “hse” for “he/she” to refer to himself and his wife together, given the lack of a third-person singular pronoun of common gender in English except for the word “one.”
I met the Chaos only once, when they visited New York. Professor Chao was tall, handsome, lean, and slightly stooped, with thick gray hair combed straight back, a Chinese Rex Harrison. His glasses were in the Chinese scholarly style, jet-black circles resting at the tip of his nose, and he wore one of those indestructible gray cardigans favored by elderly Chinese gentlemen at the time. His manner was shy, grave, affable—he was a punster. His wife, much shorter and excitable, was a plump canary, hopping from twig to twig. I could not understand a word she chirped. Had it not been obvious that the whimsical professor had written the text, I would have wondered why the Chaos were still on good terms, since the author’s note was brutally insulting to the husband and their daughter, Rulan.
“I am ashamed to have written this book,” hse wrote. “First because I am a doctor and ought to be practicing instead of cooking. Secondly, because I didn’t write this. I speak little English and write less. So I cooked my dishes in Chinese, my daughter Rulan put my Chinese into English and my husband finding the English dull, put much of it back into Chinese again. Thus when I call a dish Mushrooms Stir Shrimps, Rulan says that’s
not English and that it ought to be Shrimps Fried with Mushrooms. But Yuen Ren argues that if Mr. Smith can go to town in a movie, why can’t mushrooms stir shrimp in a dish?” To which one might reply that Mr. Smith goes to Washington under his own power, whereas mushrooms, being passive, must be stirred by the cook.