Salt (59 page)

In China, meals are put together by counterbalancing these combinations. Balance, making a complete flavor by blending opposites, like combining an acid and a base in chemistry, is an ancient concept in cooking. The fourth-century-
B.C.
Chinese belief that the world is made up of two opposing forces, yin and yang, has long been applied to cooking. The Chinese classify foods into warm and cold according to their attributes, not their temperature, similar to the way Europeans classified and balanced foods in the Middle Ages. All cooks do not agree on which foods are hot and which cold, but fat meat, hot spices, and alcohol are usually thought to be hot, while bland vegetables and fruit are usually considered cold. In the West, such ideas trace back at least to Hippocrates in fifth-century-
B.C.
Greece. Some scholars believe the idea originated in Greece and spread to Asia through India. Others argue that different cultures thought of it independently. Some scholars believe that indigenous North Americans held these beliefs before the arrival of Europeans. Such ideas were the basis of the Church’s lean and fat day interdictions. But in time they degenerated in Europe to such frivolousness as Grimod de La Reynière’s distinction between blond and brunette food—as with women, he preferred his food blond.

Ancient concepts such as hot and cold foods are still seriously discussed in China. Dishes that are ma-la or dishes that are very salty are contrasted with bland dishes. But also tian, sweet, is considered a good counterbalance to ma-la.
Tian shao bai
, which literally means “sweet white stew,” consists of thick bacon strips stuffed with sweet bean paste on a bed of sweet rice and sprinkled with sugar. Like many Chinese dishes, this sounds repugnant by itself. But a bite of tian shao bai is a perfect moment, almost an antidote, when the mouth is aflame from a bite of a ma-la dish.

This idea of using sweet as a countermeasure to salty or spicy used to be common in the West. Apicius prescribed adding honey to a dish that is too salty. Pliny phrased it in reverse: “Salt corrects our aversion when we find something over-sweet.” In medieval Catalonia, salt cod was served with honey. Platina prescribed sweetness as a counterbalance to la: “Sugar softens and tempers all dishes of hot and aromatic spices.” This is the reason the people of Collioure make their spicy sweet Banyuls wine to accompany their salty anchovies. But in the eighteenth century,
dessert,
a word from the French verb meaning “to clear the plates,” became such an elaborate showpiece in Europe that sweet was gradually eliminated from the rest of the meal.

When the dessert idea was first taking hold, a dessert was sometimes served at the end of each “course,” and a course was often a combination of dishes. In China, a course is still an assortment of foods in the middle of the table, often on a large rotating disk, a lazy Susan, which makes all the platters easily accessible. People sit around the table with only a small plate or bowl and with chopsticks take a bite of one then another dish, mixing the combinations—a bite or two of hot, then a taste of sweet.

In all of the courses, vegetables play a significant role. In Sichuan, wild mountain vegetables such as mushrooms are a specialty, as are numerous varieties of bamboo shoots eaten raw, cooked, or preserved in salt.

The first course is usually an assortment of foods that are cold in temperature, the second an assortment of heated ones. The last course, especially in Sichuan, where by this point the palate has been through a great deal, is bland, usually a very bland soup. Sometimes a course of white rice is served before the soup with very salty paocai. Rice is usually not served with the other courses. Except among the very poor, many meals do not include rice at all.

H
ISTORIANS DEBATE EXACTLY
why food in China is seasoned with products fermented or pickled in salt, and not with grains of salt added directly to food. The idea of producing saltiness without the direct use of salt is Asian, though it is not that different from the Roman use of garum. The following recipe for the Sichuan classic
huiguorou
is an example of cooking with salted condiments—in this case three—but without using salt directly. The recipe is by Huang Wengen, a cooking instructor at the only accredited school of cooking in China, which is in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan.

For authentic huiguorou you must have these ingredients:

pork thigh, garlic greens, douban, dousi, soy sauce, sugar, and msg.

Boil the ham until it is nearly cooked. Cool it. Cut thin slices perpendicular to the bone.

Chop garlic greens.

In a wok with mixed vegetable oil:

Stir-fry meat until the slices begin to curl a little.

Add douban and dousi. When the sauce turns reddish add soy sauce and a pinch of sugar and a pinch of msg (use small amounts of all these ingredients). Finish with the chopped garlic greens.

Like so many Chinese dishes, this one uses pork. The eighteenth-century French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon speculated that the reason Islamic proselytizing was not very successful in China was the Islamic rejection of pork. The Chinese not only cook fresh pork but also have a long tradition of salt-curing pork into bacons, hams, and sausages. In 1985, the pig population of China was estimated to be 331 million, which is far greater than that of any other country in the world. According to a survey of rural China conducted from 1929 to 1933, pork and pig lard accounted for 70 percent of animal calories consumed. The cooking oil, usually a blend of sesame, peanut, and other vegetable oils, that is used in so much Chinese cooking is often a modern, healthier substitute for pork fat.

According to Huang Wengen, “You cannot cook Sichuan food without douban. We went to France, and I brought douban because the douban in France is no good. It was a six-week cultural exchange program of cooking teachers—a school near Lille by the narrowest part of the Channel, Le Touquet. But it was impossible to teach Sichuan without the products. Huajiao, for example. We brought what we needed that was practical to carry: huajiao, douban, dousi, zhacai.”

All of these irreplaceable ingredients except huajiao are salt products. Zhacai is vegetables in salt. Douban is a bean paste from a big, flat, green soybean that is dried until it turns hard and yellow and is then fermented with salt and hot pepper. Dousi is a black paste made from fermented yellow beans, very salted but without chili.

Another ingredient seen by the Chinese as a salt alternative is MSG, or monosodium glutamate. While it has no flavor of its own, for reasons that are not completely understood MSG brings out flavors that exist in foods, especially the flavor of salt.

Yu Jiamin at Bejing’s Sichuan Restaurant said, “MSG is a different flavor than salt but also brings out flavor the way salt does.”

As more Westerners visit their country, many Chinese cooks are growing frustrated by what they see as a Western prejudice against MSG. Liu Tong, a cooking instructor of the Sichuan Cooking School in Chengdu, said, “It is not a chemical. It is made from fermentation of cereal. We have always used it in Chinese food.”

Actually, the Chinese have not always used it, but the Japanese have. In food history, MSG swam upstream, from Japan to China, instead of the reverse direction of most Asian food. Traditionally, the Japanese got it naturally from a seaweed known in Japanese as
kombu
and in the West as
laminaria
. MSG was first isolated as a substance—a sodium salt of glutamic acid—in a Japanese laboratory in 1908. Since the 1950s, it has been made by fermenting wheat gluten.

Liu Tong said that MSG was needed because Chinese food does not directly use salt.

T
HERE ARE NUMEROUS
Chinese salt and bean condiments such as douban and dousi, and the Japanese have their own assortment. But the most important is the ancient soy sauce. In China, schoolchildren learn a jingle from the Middle Ages with the seven necessities needed every day: firewood, rice, oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar, and tea.

In China, there is an ancient tradition of soy sauce made by peasants, but such sauce is becoming a rarity. Today, in both China and Japan, soy sauce is made in factories. Most Chinese say that it is a complicated process and the factories do it as well as the peasants ever did. Anyone who has tasted the thick peasant product might dispute this. Huang Wengen, for one, said the old farm product was incomparably better. The farmers in Dayin said they stopped making soy sauce in the early 1990s, even when they were still pumping brine with foot pedals. They said it was too much work and that factories sell it so cheaply, they could not compete.

But by a strange twist of economics, an artisanal soy sauce is still made in the Sichuan town of Lezhi. Lezhi is a provincial town whose main street has almost no traffic other than busy little three-wheeled bicycle rickshaws. And yet most of the old buildings have been torn down and replaced with what is becoming China’s ubiquitous white tile architecture. At night it looks as if a tricycle gang has taken over the deserted streets of an abandoned housing project.

The Lezhi Fermented Product Corporation was a private factory that was nationalized after the 1949 Communist takeover, known here as “the liberation.” The state factory made an industrial soy sauce. But in 1999, in a fit of privatization, the state announced that it was no longer going to produce soy sauce in Lezhi. Since no one was interested in buying the company, its 100 workers were given severance pay and left jobless. Ten of them used their settlement money to buy the company. In order to get operating capital, they sold the large downtown plant and moved up a three-flight outdoor mud-and-stone stairway to a storage area on a hilltop at the edge of town.

They no longer had the equipment or the capital to be an industry. So they decided they would have to make their soy sauce the way peasants used to make it. Xu Qidi, the general manager, said, “We had to start all over. This is the old way to do it.”

Factories use the crushed refuse from soy oil production for making soy sauce, but the new Lezhi company uses fresh whole beans that are steamed until soft. The beans are then placed in a storage room on flat, round, straw trays that are about four feet in diameter. Yeast is then added. The trays are left on bamboo racks in the concrete storage room for three days, until mold forms on top.

At this point, factories speed up the fermentation process by delaying the addition of salt and keeping the beans in heated bins. But in Lezhi the moldy beans are mixed with water and salt and stored in big, three-foot-deep crocks. The pots are left outdoors to ferment for six months to a year or longer, depending on weather conditions. When it rains, they are covered with coneshaped lids made of sewn palm fronds. Eventually, the paste looks like mud. Water is added, and the mush is slowly filtered through piping. Then it is sterilized by steaming.