Wednesday September 23, 2009

Of food and potions

Ziying's Brush

The hearty cuisine of Hunan offers surprises for the adventurous.

PEOPLE travel with diverse interests and expectations but regardless, food is one aspect of the experience that no one can avoid. I have had some superb meals in China as well as some forgettable ones but venturing into the unfamiliar culinary territory of Hunan was quite something else.

I was prepared for robust, fiery cuisine and eagerly anticipated the famous smoked ham whose reputation is well-deserved. What I had not imagined was that some of the specialities would be, well, so different.

Wild herbs and vegetables feature prominently in the Tujia cooking of Changde city en route to Zhangjiajie.

Pork seemed to be a constant feature of our meals in Hunan and one evening, at dinner in a packed restaurant in Changsha, our menu ran the gamut of different parts of the pig. Besides the ham (but of course), the congealed pig’s blood soup with bite-sized chunks of velvety blood pudding was, to my taste buds, a winner.

We also had stir-fried strips of slightly crunchy pig’s ears and slices of pig cheeks. Obviously the grimacing, flattened pig’s faces that hang at the entrances of ham and blood pudding shops in places like Fenghuang are not merely there for decoration.

In Zhangjiajiem, I had my first taste of the Tujia minority’s baba – small, flat pan-fried dumplings of black glutinous rice flour flavoured with herbs. There are different versions of this chewy treat but the mildly sweet baba with a slightly gritty texture was my favourite.

Somewhere between Zhangjiajie and Fenghuang, there is a town made famous by a 1986 movie titled Furongzhen (Hibiscus town). The place was known as Wangcun but has since adopted the name of the town featured in the film. The drama tells a tragic tale of suffering and deprivation under a reign of terror inflicted on the villagers by debased cadres and crazed Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. Hu Yuyin, the central character, was targeted for persecution as she ran a successful business selling a snack called midofu.

Furongzhen has since become associated with midofu which can be had at numerous small, hygienically-challenged eateries that are probably little-changed since Cultural Revolution times.

As the name suggests, the snack resembles dofu but is made of rice flour. Eaten in a slightly soupy base and with a sprinkling of scallion, garlic, coriander leaves and chilli paste, it tasted bland and non-descript but the locals seem to like it.

In Fenghuang, we had the pleasure of sampling a Miao dish whose main ingredient was a pudding of congealed duck blood mixed with glutinous rice.

A Tujia favourite, viz, soup with four varieties of mushrooms is served with local ‘satay’, spring onion crepe, corn bread, and garlic and chilli marinated in soy and vinegar.

Cut into bite-sized chunks and fried with capsicum and pieces of pork, it was, however, more interesting for its chewy texture than its taste.

The dense pudding is available shrink-wrapped in rectangular bricks at the ubiquitous smoked ham shops in the old city.

An item that invokes as much debate as blue cheese or durian fruit is the chou dofu (stinky fermented dofu).

I had my first whiff of this substance outside a subway station while schooling in Hong Kong and have been hooked since. The delicacy can be found in many parts of China where they are prepared in different ways though crispy is best. In Hunan they are served as blackened chunks dipped in local chilli sauce but are less flavourful than the deep-fried chou dofu of the Shanghai area.

One day, on our way to the Miao village of Dehang, our guide Likun told us about a Miao “menu item” of a different kind, with an even more exotic recipe. She asked if we had heard of fang gu, or using poison to cast spells.

For love potions, she said, you sink a jar containing some bait into a hole in the ground during the Love Song Festival on the 3rd day of the 3rd lunar month. Wait for poisonous creatures like scorpions, centipedes and spiders to crawl inside, then cover the jar.

The creatures will begin to fight and consume each other until only one is left; having eaten the rest, the “champion” will have the highest concentration of poison. At this point, you prick your finger and add a few drops of blood to the jar before heating it till nothing is left of the creature but white ash. To activate the concoction, Likun says there is one last crucial ingredient but she refused to reveal it.

When all is done, secretly add some of the ash to the food of your intended and he will be yours for life. Likun explained fang gu is also a key reason why the Miao are so fond of silver. Since the metal turns dark in contact with poison, it can warn the wearer of potential spells.

I was somewhat sceptical about this “recipe” until I re-read Nobel-prize winner Gao Xingjian’s novel Soul Mountain (Lingshan) and found a (slightly different) description of Miao fang gu. In fact, I think the secret ingredient Likun refused to divulge is in that chapter. It seems that in some places, there really is more to food than meets the eye.

Ziying can be reached at ziyingster@gmail.com.

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Wednesday September 23, 2009

Of food and potions

Ziying's Brush

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