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Wednesday October 7, 2009

Palate adventures

ZIYING'S BRUSH


Many tour meals in China these days are unforgettable for their excellence and variety.

I REMEMBER when I first accompanied my parents to Beijing in the mid-1990s, our travel agent warned us to be prepared for the food. Or rather, he suggested that we brought along some snacks just in case.

That turned out to be good advice for during the entire eight days we were there, we ate little but the same few dishes of greasy stir-fried vegetables with meagre strips of fat meat, a near-colourless watery soup and the ever-present scrambled eggs with tomatoes. Everything seemed to be drowning in oil.

A mere decade and a half later, those oil-soaked spreads seem to have become a distant memory. Every trip to China the last few years has brought new culinary discoveries, and though tour meals are often repetitive, they have improved beyond recognition.

Just a week ago, a reader wrote in sharing his impressions of the country. Among other things, he described the food as “sumptuous”. How things have changed.

Culinary gems: Xinjiang’s fragrant naan bread is a staple of the province’s lamb-dominated meals.

I am not particularly demanding when it comes to food and am certainly no gourmand but the repasts on a Shandong tour were truly memorable for both quality and variety. Some of the best jiaozi (dumplings), for example, were in Qingdao – stuffed with meat or the garlicky jiucai chives, they were fine-textured and so flavourful. The city is famous for seafood and I shan’t forget the succulent steamed clams that, among other things, I had with a friend there six years ago.

Then there was the fabulous huoguo hotpot in Tai’an at the foot of Shandong’s holy mountain, Taishan. It came with huge platters of melt-in-your-mouth, paper-thin marbled beef (and mutton) and four kinds of vegetables – spinach, Chinese cabbage, lettuce, mint, as well as just-picked black fungus, dofu skin and four kinds of fresh noodles. The emperors of old used to worship and perform sacrificial rites at the Daimiao (Dai Temple) before they ascended the mountain and I wonder how much of our near-imperial feast was due to their influence.

Besides sweet, juicy pears, fresh dates about the size of a quail egg are another late Autumn delight – honey-flavoured, slightly dry and crunchy with a pale green skin flecked with maroon.

The dates in Shanxi province west of Shandong were especially sugary and crisp perhaps because of the cold snap when I was there. And the warm spiced flat bread of Wutaishan, mountain of the Boddhisattva Manjusri, proved a big success after a day spent visiting temples in sub-zero temperatures. Like Shandong, Shanxi has great food, helped no doubt by the wealth of the jinshang, the province’s astute merchants who flourished and built magnificent manors in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Out west in Gansu, I remember the cold sliced camel’s paw pads in Dunhuang as well as the province’s wonderful handmade noodles whose flawless texture, it seems, results from the addition of the ash of a Gobi desert plant. Xinjiang has fragrant naan bread, mouth-watering roast lamb and barbequed lamb skewers besides incredible raisins, some as small as a pin-head and some more than 2cm long, each with a different flavour.

In Gansu, a dinner in Dunhuang included handmade noodles, jiucai rolls and pumpkin stewed in honey.

Though never included on a tour itinerary, in Fujian I am a die-hard fan of a particular Fuzhou chain eatery’s rotund fishballs with its savoury, soupy minced meat stuffing; also the octopus with pork rib soup and Xinghua mifun, the ultra-fine rice noodle fried with small oysters, baby broad beans and a host of other things.

As a child, I remember my grandfather eating pickled, fermented mini clams with plain rice porridge and after years of hankering for it, I was delighted to find it in a restaurant in Fuqing.

Some say Fujian is the original home of the orange. I can say unequivocally that the large, juicy, honey-sweet oranges there are without rival, particularly if you buy them from the farmers at the peak of the season in winter. In addition, no other longan can match the fragrance and texture of those from the orchards of Putian and Fuqing.

Fujian has muaji made from glutinous rice flour and either filled or coated with crushed peanuts or black sesame but the mother of all sinfully sweet dumplings has got to be the plump green tuanzi of the Shanghai-Hangzhou area. Soft, sticky, smooth and flavoured with an aromatic herb that gives it its green colour, they are generously filled with the silkiest red bean paste and are available around the Qingming season in April.

Still in the same vicinity, Yangzhou’s famous fried rice does live up to its reputation and we had an excellent meal in this city on the Grand Canal with shizitou (lion’s head meatballs), white “tiger-fish” and dofu noodles.

A famous American television chef once said it would take a whole month to sample the snacks in just one city block in Chengdu. Imagine how many lifetimes it would take to explore all the gastronomic delights in China.

> Ziying can be reached at ziyingster@gmail.com.

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