Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking (35 page)

Put the pea sprouts in a serving bowl and pour the hot soup over them. Scatter the other ingredients on top and serve immediately.

SOUP WITH VEGETABLES AND MEATBALLS
YUAN ZI TANG
丸子湯

I remember, one warm evening, walking with a friend through the tranquil old lanes of central Chengdu a year or two before they were demolished. We came across a woman sitting at a low bamboo table in the street, eating her supper. I couldn’t help gazing at the simple meal laid out in front of her, which consisted simply of a lovely looking soup of meatballs and winter melon and a bowl of rice. I still have a photograph, taken by my friend, of myself bending down towards the seated lady, and a detailed description, written down in my notebook, of what she was eating.

This soup is so easy to make and so delicious to eat. You can use any vegetable you like as an accompanying ingredient: beansprouts, Chinese cabbage, tomatoes, choy sum or winter melon. If the vegetable you choose takes a few minutes to become tender, such as Chinese cabbage, cook it before you add the meatballs; if it cooks almost instantly, like pea sprouts or choy sum, add it when the meatballs are just about ready. If you want to make this into a one-dish meal, like the lady in the old lanes, use your chopsticks to pluck out the meatballs and vegetables and eat them with your rice, then drink the soup from your empty rice bowl. Served like this, with rice, it will easily feed two people.

For the meatballs

1 dried shiitake mushroom

A small piece of ginger

4 oz (100g) ground pork with a little fat

½ egg, beaten

1 tbsp finely chopped spring onion greens

½ tsp sesame oil

1 tsp potato flour

Salt

Ground white pepper

For the soup

6⅓ cups (1½ liters) chicken stock

1¼ lb (500g) winter melon, or other vegetable of your choice (the exact quantity is not critical)

2 tbsp finely sliced spring onion greens

Soak the dried mushroom for 30 minutes in hot water from the kettle. Crush the ginger, then put it in a glass with cold water to cover.

When the mushroom is soft, chop it finely. Place the pork in a bowl, and add 1 tbsp of the ginger-soaking water and all the other meatball ingredients, seasoning with salt and pepper. Mix vigorously, stirring in one direction (this is supposed to give the meat a better texture). You will end up with a nice soft meatball mixture.

Bring the stock to a boil over a high flame. Peel the winter melon, then cut away and discard the soft, seedy section in the center. Cut the rest of the melon into ⅛–⅜ in (½–1cm) slices. Add the winter melon (or any other prepared vegetable) and simmer until tender. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Reduce the heat to a gentle simmer, then add the meatballs. The Chinese way is to take a small handful of paste in your left hand (if you are right-handed), make a fist, then gently squeeze the paste up through the hole made by your thumb and index finger. Use the other hand to scoop off walnut-sized balls of paste, and drop them into the soup. If you prefer, you can use a couple of teaspoons to mold the meatballs.

Simmer gently for about five minutes until the meatballs have risen to the surface and are cooked through. (If using tomatoes or greens that cook quickly, add them at this stage and let them heat through.)

Turn the soup into a warmed serving bowl and scatter with spring onion greens.

TARO AND ARUGULA SOUP
YU TOU WA WA CAI 芋頭娃娃菜

This is a variation of a simple and rustic Hunanese dish that is traditionally made with very young and tender radish sprouts, known locally as “baby vegetables” or
wa wa cai
. In my Hunanese
Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook
, I suggested using watercress as an easily available substitute, but my mother has since come up with an even better version, made with arugula. The peppery arugula is a delightful alternative to the
wa wa cai
, while the taro gives the soup a soft, silky consistency: comfort food, Hunanese style. You could use another green vegetable if you wish. I suspect the tender tips of nettles, picked with rubber gloves, would also work well.

I’ve suggested boiling the taro before you peel them, as their skins contain an irritant (neutralized by cooking) that will make your hands itch like crazy. If you insist on peeling them raw, make sure you wear rubber gloves.

1¾ lb (800g) taro

6⅓ cups (1½ liters) chicken stock or water

3 tbsp cooking oil

7 oz (200g) arugula leaves

Salt

Ground white pepper

3 spring onions, green parts only, finely sliced

Wash the taro, place in a saucepan, cover with cold water and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer until tender (about 20 minutes). When the taro is cool enough to handle, peel and rinse.

Cut the taro into slices about ⅜ in (1cm) thick, put them in a pan with the chicken stock or water and simmer for 20–30 minutes. This step can be done some time in advance of your meal.

When you are ready to eat, heat a wok over a high flame. Add the oil, then the arugula, and stir-fry until just wilted. Then add the soupy taro mixture, bring to a boil and season with salt and pepper. Simmer for a couple of minutes to allow the flavors to meld, then turn into a serving bowl or tureen. Scatter with the spring onions.

SIMPLE CHICKEN SOUP
QING DUN QUAN JI
清燉全雞

As in many other cultures, a simple stewed chicken, served in its own rich broth, is a Chinese tonic and pick-me-up. Find a good chicken—preferably an old free-range hen—and the flavor of the soup will be almost miraculous: I’ve never forgotten a chicken soup I ate in rural Hunan, made with an old hen that had spent its life pecking around my friend Fan Qun’s farm.

The ingredients used in the basic soup are minimal: just the bird and water with a little rice wine, ginger and spring onion to refine its flavor. You can, though, add other ingredients if you wish: dried mushrooms of any kind, first soaked in hot water to plump them up and cooked with the chicken, or perhaps some fresh greens added just before you serve the dish. Many Chinese people would add tonic herbs such as Chinese angelica, milk vetch root or a handful of scarlet gouqi berries (you can buy selections of mixed herbs intended for use in tonic soups in larger Chinese supermarkets). The berries are normally added for the last few minutes of cooking time, so they don’t lose their color or disintegrate.

If you cook the chicken in a clay pot, you can bring it straight to table; otherwise, the whole, cooked chicken is normally transferred to a deep tureen and the broth poured over.

To serve, give each guest some chicken meat and some soup in a small bowl, or scoop out the chicken and serve it separately, with small dipping dishes of tamari or light soy sauce for the meat. Any leftovers will give you a glorious bowlful of
Stewed Chicken Noodles
the next day. You can, of course, use exactly the same method to cook a chopped or cut up chicken, or just a chicken leg or two if you are cooking for a small number of people. Other birds, such as ducks, pheasants and pigeons, can be cooked in a similar way.This recipe makes a larger quantity than the other soups in this chapter and will serve six to eight people.

1 chicken, about 3¼ lb (1½kg)(preferably a mature, free-range hen)

½ oz (25g) piece of ginger, unpeeled

2 spring onions, white parts only

1 tbsp Shaoxing wine

Salt

Ground white pepper (optional)

For best results, start by blanching the chicken for a few minutes in boiling water to allow any impurities to rise to the surface, then rinse it thoroughly under the tap. Smack the ginger with the side of a cleaver or a rolling pin to crush it slightly.

Place the chicken in a saucepan or a large clay pot with a lid: the pot should be large enough to hold it without too much space around (the flavors of the soup will be faint if there is too much water). Cover the bird with cold water and bring to a boil.

Skim the liquid, then add the ginger, spring onion whites and Shaoxing wine. Cover the pan or pot with a lid and simmer very gently for two to three hours, with the surface of the liquid just murmuring, until the bird is tender and the broth rich and delicious.

Remove and discard the ginger and spring onion. Season with salt and white pepper, if desired, to taste, simmer for another 10 minutes, then serve.

RICE

In May the landscape is intensely green. The terraced paddies follow the curves of the hills, their watery surfaces glistening silver in the sunlight, pricked by narrow spears of seedling rice. Whole mountainsides are rimmed and ribbed with these incredible fields. Viewed close-up, the water quivers with the feet of water boatmen and the kicks and wriggles of half-seen creatures. Out of the red clay banks spring chilli plants, their tiny white flowers peering out from the leaves. Every spare inch is sown with crops: broad leaves of pumpkins sprawl in one corner; in another fava bean runners cling to bamboo poles. Tight little hedges of tea plants run along the slopes, mulberry trees stand here and there, and the whole landscape twitters with insects.

Rice not only shapes the scenery in southern China, it is the foundation of the diet. Most meals, including breakfast, are based on rice (wheaten noodles, dumplings and breads only play a supplementary role). Someone from the south of China, deprived of rice for a few days, is likely to feel the same pangs as an Englishman forced to live without potatoes. The word for “cooked rice” (
fan
) crops up in many contexts, including the old-fashioned greeting “have you eaten your rice yet?,” and expressions as disparate as those for restaurant (
fan guan
, “rice building”), livelihood (
fan wan
, “rice bowl”) and a greedy eater (
fan tong
, “rice bucket”). Once you have your rice, the rest of your diet is negotiable. You might have a plethora of rich and delicious dishes if you can afford them, or simply a couple of cubes of fermented tofu and some pickled vegetables: in both cases, the purpose of the other dishes is to “send the rice down” (
xia fan
).

Glutinous and non-glutinous, long-grained and short-grained rices are all eaten. Glutinous rices, including black glutinous rice that has a dark purple color when cooked, are most often used in snacks and sweet dishes, while rarer varieties such as the purple rice of Yunnan Province and the reddish blood rice (
xue nuo
), grown in just a few parts of the country, are eaten either as local delicacies or as an exotic banquet treat.

Plain white rice, which is typically boiled, then left to steam gently in a covered pot (or these days in an electric rice cooker), is the most common form. For more casual meals, and especially for breakfast, thick rice congees or runny rice gruels may be served. Rice can also be soaked then ground with water to make noodles or dumpling wrappers. Brown, unpolished rice is almost never eaten in China, despite its vast superiority in nutritional terms. (I love brown rice and increasingly serve it with Chinese food for simple suppers at home.)

In the past, children were told to eat up every grain of rice in their bowls, not only out of respect for the farmers who produced it, but because any future spouse would have a pock mark on their face for each discarded grain. There is still no excuse to throw away leftover rice, because there are so many wonderful things to do with it. You may stir-fry it with an egg and spring onions to give a fragrant bowlful that can be a meal in itself. You may reheat it with water or stock, adding greens or titbits of meat or fish to make “soaked rice” (
pao fan
), a delicious soupy brew that can be eaten on its own or with other dishes. Cook your soaked rice for longer, until the grains rupture and form a smooth mass, and you have congee (
zhou
), a particular favorite in the Cantonese south, that can be jazzed up with all manner of added ingredients. Or just reheat leftover rice quickly with a lot of water to make “watery rice” or rice gruel (
xi fan
), which, eaten with fermented tofu, pickles, boiled eggs, steamed buns and any leftovers you have, is the staple of the Sichuanese breakfast table. In China, all these are invariably made with white rice, but I like them with brown rice too.