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A la Chinoise
By ELIZABETH DAVID I WANT everything Chin- ese tonight, says the girl in the restaurant advert- isement in the West End theatre programmes; lady, if you study the latest Penguin hand- book* you could almost have it—and without going to a restaurant.
What you will have done is to spend your day cutting, chopping, slit- jog, shredding, opening tins, soaking dried squid, mushrooms and prawns, washing your rice. You will have a chicken cut up into about forty-eight Pieces, each the identical size and all laid out in neat rows on a scrubbed board. Your vegetables, You slieeil on the bias (there is a sketch in the book to tt how), will look like pieces of material t for dolls' clothes by some great Paris dress- maker and the colours, translucent green of cucumber, orange of carrot, pearly white of Prwg onion, will be clear and clean as in a new Paint-box. The scrubbed order dazzles. And when you come home from your theatre '°t1 take a quick swig of rice wine (or substitute Sherry,' as Mrs. Chao advises) and then into the Pall With the sesame oil and one after the other of the ingredients, and in a second everything is s,14.7-141g and smoking and after five minutes Lurrin 8, turning, shaking (no, there is the rice C " .eook, that does take a little longer), your „I/Mese dinner is laid out in little bowls and cliches all ready to eat. A likely story. this way. I enjoy Chinese, or Anglo- ( inese, food in London-Chinese restaurants ,bc-Igh I wish some of their cooks weren't and duffers at doing rice) quite enormously, Chinese an) convinced that the invasion of the but caterers can eventually have nothing it a beneficial influence upon our own. Already, fancy, the Chinese under-cooking of vegetables tas Made some small, very small, dent in the until conviction that they should all be boiled 9"tlitil limp; the system of making an infinitesimal rolantny of chicken, duck, meat, prawns, mush- ws°1is do duty for what. in European cooking Wwonderful be a half-pound of each is always a anrderful demonstration of ingenuity; and gen- ser.bly s the approach seems to be as isle- t() I d by Mrs. Chao in a paragraph on how pietget your fishmonger to give you a fish cotn- �tt with its head and liver; in Chinese cook- ia''AeverYthing that can be eaten is eaten, and th'`olerican cooking—the book was written for also American market, but the remark applies be a great extent here- everything that can utrossit away is thrown away. And above all Way food is served in Chinese restaur Y cook ang oot. AND ...AT IN Clam:sr. By "o c Deutsch. ins. fld t (Penguin. 6s.) ants, each item in its own dish or bowl and all put on table heaters in front of you, infinitely alluring. It is this civilised aspect of the service which draWs me to Chinese restaurants s s much as the food itself; and, once experienced, the English system of bringing platefuls of hors- d'oeuvre or meat and vegetables all dished up to- gether seems abrupt and gross in comparison. The French too have always understood the importance of the visual appeal of food in its own serving dish, and of giving the customer the chance of helping himself; in even the scruffiest of bistros and mutter restaurants the food is brought on dishes which are left upon the table, and however cramped the space there stili always seems to be room for them.
What l feel about any serious attempt to cook Chinese food at home—an isolated recipe or two one can always manage—is that while French. Italian and other styles of European cooking may be vastly different from our own, the sys- tems are still Western systems, basically intelli- gible to us. In Chinese cooking there is so much we simply do not apprehend and which we cannot learn from books. Even the handling of a frying pan demands a different technique from the one we know; come to that, the frying pan itself is differently shaped, although if you use a rounded omelette pan you won't be far out (and anyone interested to know what some of the traditional Chinese kitchen utensils and serving dishes are like will find informative drawings in Frank Oliver's excellent Chinese Cookingt); the cutting and chopping and slicing followed by the last-minute frenzy of frying and stirring is daunting; and having to get so many of the ingredients out of tins without knowing how much resemblance, if any, they bear to the fresh product, depresses me. All of which is by no means to say that Mrs. Chao's book is not extremely intelligent and enlightening and written with so much common sense, such convincing advice as to the right and wrong ways to adapt Chinese cooking to Western tastes and tech- niques that even somebody who has never eaten any kind of Chinese food at all and doesn't in- tend to start now should still find valuable kitchen sense and recipes which they could use; if we could appropriate into our national cook- ery no more than just a couple of her simple cabbage recipes, Mrs. Chao would not have laboured in vain; and of course it V, OUld be very wrong to infer that all Chinese cooking is of the split-second stir-fry variety, although this may seem to be the most characteristic to Westerners. There are just as many different methods in Chinese cooking as in French cooking, which means more than in our own; they arc very clearly explained and set out in this book; and then there are all the lovely duck dishes, for which Mrs. Chao's recipes appear easy and straightforward, worlds away from the honey- bedaubed. sherry-soaked and pineapple-garn- ished fancies of maeazine Chinese cookery (when we get to work adapting the recipes of other countries we tend to elaborate rather than simplify them, whereas the reverse would be preferable).
Curiously, a dish which Mrs. Chao calls 'Salt- water Duck,' or 'Nanking fresh salted Duck,' is almost identical with that salt duck which is a perfectly genuine traditional and most delicious Welsh speciality, except that—and oh! the dif- ference—in the Principality the duck was eaten hot and with an onion sauce, whereas the Chinese serve it, and rightly so, cold; Mrs. Chao explains how it should be cut, too—and this is illuminating, for it is both neater and more economical than our system. I may say that to my mind the salting and the subsequent water- simmering of the duck produce a far finer dish than roasting. And a- dish called 'Soo Chow Duck' which alas Mrs. Chao doesn't give, but which may be found at the Good Earth Restaurant in the King's Road, Chelsea, includes among its ingredients a most extraordinarily good dried mushroom, called in Chinese dung koo and in Japan, as I am reliably informed, cortinellus shiitake. Never mind, the dish is worth trying if you go to the restaurant, and the mush- rooms can be bought from King Bomba, 37 Old Compton Street, Soho. (In passing, the. Puget olive oil which I mentioned a fortnight ago in these columns is also now on sale there, and so, usually, is some French bread which is the only kind at all resembling French French bread which I have ever come across in this country. It is baked by a Frenchman from flour imported from France.) And as well as the shiitake mush- rooms—useful for enriching, for a change, the flavour of any kind of braised or stewed .meat, duck, chicken and game dishes, the shop has French dried morels (ntorilles); these are very successful as far as flavour is concerned, but they tend to be gritty; so they should be soaked in several changes of water and finally very care- fully rinsed before cooking. Stewed in a little butter and stock and served with veal or a saute of chicken with a white wine and cream sauce they have an unusual charm. One ounce of these or any other dried mushrooms is normally quite enough for four people.
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