By night all hell broke loose. As none of the windows had screens nor the beds any nets, and since no one had thought of shutting the bedroom windows on this hottest summer in Europe’s history, we awoke to find our bodies littered with mosquito bites beyond anything resembling an infestation of bedbugs. But that wasn’t the worst of it. What truly terrified me that night was a sudden, piercing shriek just above my head that made me think that a piglet on the farm was being butchered on our bed. It proved to be, once I turned on the lights, a panic-stricken bat circling madly about the room until I chased it away with a large towel.
‘All you had to do was light a citronella candle and place it on the window ledge. It stays lit through the night and repels all insects,’ said the landlady when we complained the next morning. What about the zanzariera, I asked, referring to the mosquito net. The zanzariera was in the closet. As was the citronella. ‘All you had to do was ask. We’re not savages, you know,’ muttered the splenetic old lady as she shuffled away on her aching knees. She’d seen the likes of us for ages and had no patience.
To make matters worse one of the couples was on the verge of divorcing and was constantly heard sparring and bickering—politely, but in perpetual whispers as they hissed at each to each, while their pouting twins were constantly texting to their friends in New Jersey. The other couple was no better. They had what they were persuaded was a six-year-old genius girl who was already being taught a child’s version of The Divine Comedy. ‘Tomorrow we’re doing Michelangelo,’ the father said on our second night there. And on Wednesday La Traviata, I jeered. ‘Aren’t your boys interested in Italian culture?’ asked the father in front of my sons, who were just coming out of the pool.
‘Not in the slightest,’ replied one of them.
‘Why so?’
‘Because we wade in ignorance,’ retorted my eldest, who couldn’t stand either the father or the daughter or the soft-spoken mother.
Two things put the finishing blow. Early on Monday morning we awoke not only with mosquito bites all over our bodies again—despite the citronella—but to the loud snarls of a tractor chortling away at precisely 8am When we left to visit one of the wine villages nearby, the tractor was still chuffing away and giving vigorous belches. When I finally mustered the courage to knock at the landlady’s door to complain that the tractor had woken all of us up, she said there was nothing she could do. ‘This is a farm, you know. Not everyone is a tourist here.’ ‘But couldn’t they start an hour later?’ I asked. ‘They have to eat, poor people, don’t they? Olives, wine, and pigs, they don’t just happen, you know.’
‘We’ve been had,’ we said that night over our usual fare of spaghetti, tomatoes, salad and gelato.
The next morning, same thing: impossible to sleep past eight. Expecting to hear one of the farmers gun the engine gave our morning sleep a restless quality. To say nothing of the loutish farmers hollering at each other, when all they were doing was having a friendly little chat.
The coup de grâce came on Wednesday. We had been to visit Montalcino, about an hour and a half away, because the father of the genius girl was very keen on buying a case of Brunello wines and having it shipped to the States. It was a very hot afternoon and, eager to get back and rest, the father of the twins had accelerated the engine as he forded the long dirt road leading to the house. Because of the bumpy road, the gas tank of his rented Mercedes happened to scrape a boulder he hadn’t spotted. He stopped the car, as we all did behind him, and could easily observe a large gash leaking gas. We called the house and asked the landlady to call the car rental service. ‘Why did you need to speed?’ she asked.
Which is when the father of the twins let the old lady have it: we should have been told about this dangerously long stretch. The bickering wife started yelling as well: why were we misled into thinking this was a secluded house. Not to be outdone, I too lost it with her and gave her a piece of my mind. We were going to report her to the tourism agency, we were going to ask for our money back, we were going to blacken her name and her property on the web. And by the way, this is not even a pool. E una secchia, è una vasca, è una vergogna, I yelled in Italian. This isn’t a pool, it’s a bucket, it’s a tub, it’s a shame.
We were a tinderbox. What blew the fuse was calling the car rental agency. They would arrive the next day. When I asked at what time, the agent said he didn’t know. So basically some of us were going to be prisoners in the house. We were already prisoners, said another. ‘So now you’ll have to relax,’ said the matron. ‘We can no longer relax. You’ve made sure of that.’
By the end of that day, we were no longer on speaking terms with her.
On the morning of our fifth day, the old lady had one of her farmhands bring us a large bottle of virgin olive oil and a small basket of tomatoes. When I made to tip him, he refused and sped away. We examined the bottle, sprinkled her oil over salt and the sliced tomatoes and were, almost against our will, suddenly in heaven. That same evening, after the rental agency replaced the car, two bottles of wine mysteriously appeared on our doorsteps. Though we drank the wine reluctantly and with resentment in our hearts, there was no denying it: this was superb. On my way out in the morning, I crossed the old lady and shouted a breezy remark that was meant to sound more offhand than genuine. ‘The wine was very good last night.’
‘Yes, it is fantastic?’ she said. But seeing I wasn’t about to make further concessions, she answered her own question: Of course it’s fantastic. It’s the best in the region, she grumbled. When we came back from visiting Volpaia, my favorite small town, three bottles were standing on our doorstep. Plus a huge basket of the most luscious figs we’d ever seen. And another basket of tomatoes. This is penance big-time, one of us said. But there we were, all twelve of us, sitting at a huge table under the trees, drinking her wine, eating a huge meal of pasta, with fresh tomatoes and the most redolent basil picked from her garden. This is the most beautiful place on earth. Even the swimming pool had become beautiful, and one day, I told everyone, we’ll even miss the damned tractor every morning and the belching pigs.
The next morning we greeted her warmly. Wearing a butcher’s leather apron, the old lady looked hunched and humbled and sad. Suddenly I felt as though we had offended her and she was repaying our makeshift gratitude with genuine kindness and understanding. ‘Tonight I have a surprise for you.’
‘What surprise?’ I asked, fearing the worst.
Vedrete, you’ll see. And off she shoveled on her grieving bunions.
Late in the afternoon, on our last day, on parking our cars after visiting Assisi, we spotted two handymen at our doorstep carrying two large, wrapped packages. ‘The signora wanted to give you this. They are the best cuts. She hopes you had a pleasant stay.’ I unfolded the mysterious paper wrapping and saw meat. What is it, I gestured. ‘It’s the maiale,’ he explained, the pig.
‘Which pig?’
‘The signora had it butchered this morning for your dinner tonight.’
When I looked again I saw that there was enough meat for a battalion. After a hasty swim, everyone got busy. My boys washed the salad, the twin girls put aside their cell phones and sliced the tomatoes, someone started boiling the large vat of water for our usual spaghetti, while the adults worked the grill outside. We picked oregano from the garden and the rosemary from one of the many bushes outside the doorstep and sprinkled it on the meat. Once the steaks were set on the grill a wonderful aroma began to permeate the air. Someone said that the meat should be juicy, not dry. Genius girl set the table for twelve, one of my boys lit the citronella on the table, and then the father who had bought a case of Brunello had a brainstorm and decided that life was only lived once and that at least one of his precious Brunellos needed to be opened tonight. No one objected, and right away we began comparing his Brunello to the signora’s artisanal wine. There was no comparison. The Brunello was sublime. But the homemade wine wasn’t bad either. And then one by one we sat at the table, feeling that this indeed was
a feast and that if we had to do it all over again, there was no doubt that we would. Including the gash in the car? Including the gash in the car. Including the mosquitoes and the tractor and the poor bat that fluttered like crazy in the middle of the night? Including bats and insects. Including the signora? Most certainly the signora. We were learning to do something we should have done from the very first minute we’d arrived. Enjoy ourselves, enjoy one another, and, in the words of the old signora, learn to relax.
FUCHSIA DUNLOP is a British cook and writer specialising in Chinese cuisine. She has written four books, including the award-winning Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China. Her work has appeared in numerous publications and she won James Beard awards in 2012 and 2013.
CHASING THE TAIL OF CHIUCHOW
Fuchsia Dunlop
It was noon in Shantou, the southern Chinese river port also known as Swatow. A party of chefs and food writers had gathered around the table, and lunch was about to begin. The waitresses started bringing platters of food from the kitchens: stewed goose with all its accoutrements, cold fish with yellow bean sauce, and tiny fried shrimp. As each beautiful dish emerged, it was greeted with a round of lusty noises of appreciation: Pwooargh! Ooooagh! Phfooagh! After nearly two decades of eating my way around China, I’d never heard anything like the raucous joy with which these Chiuchow gourmets expressed their approval of our lunch.
Cantonese cuisine is supposedly the best known of all China’s regional cuisines. It was Cantonese immigrants who flocked to the American West in the nineteenth-century gold rush, bringing with them their own ingredients and setting up the first Chinese restaurants in the country. Even today, most Chinese restaurants in the West offer dishes that are, broadly speaking, Cantonese, such as sweet and sour pork and lacquered roast duck. But perhaps because Cantonese cuisine seems so familiar, its true sophistication and diversity are rarely appreciated. And for evidence of the complexity of Cantonese cuisine, one need look no further than the Chiuchow, or Chaozhou, cooking region in Guangdong province.
This tiny pocket of northeastern Guangdong, named in English after its ancient capital Chaozhou but these days dominated by the modern metropolis of Shantou, is home to one of China’s most thrilling little regional cuisines. There are hotbeds of Chiuchow cooking in Hong Kong and Thailand, where immigrants from the region have settled, but if you live in Europe or America the chances are you’ve never heard of it. The only named Chiuchow delicacy that pops up with any regularity on mainstream Chinese menus in the West is the chao zhou fen guo, a translucent steamed dumpling stuffed with a mix of finely chopped pork, vegetables and peanuts. If you’re really lucky, you might come across some aromatic stewed duck made in the Chiuchow goose style, but in my experience, it’s a rarity.
I’d been chasing the tail of Chiuchow cooking ever since my first encounter with it in a small, cramped upstairs dining room in the Hong Kong district of Sheung Wan. There, thanks to my friend Rose, who brought me to the restaurant with some friends, I had my first taste of the region’s shellfish congees, raw marinated crabs, and strips of taro frosted with silvery sugar. From that moment on, I sought out Chiuchow food whenever I was in Hong Kong, mostly in the Chiuchow enclave of Kowloon City, where shopkeepers chop their braised goose on wooden boards and the Chong Fat restaurant cooks up scrumptious regional delicacies. I longed to travel to the Chiuchow region itself, but it wasn’t until many years later that I finally made it there.
‘Ma ma ma ma ma ma ma ma,’ said Xu Jun, trying to teach me the eight different tones of Shantou dialect. They all sounded similar to me, even though I’m a Mandarin speaker. But then the dialect of Shantou, the modern capital of the Chiuchow region, is notorious in China, where they say only native speakers can grasp its subtle modulations. (‘The most difficult language in the world to learn,’ one taxi driver assured me.) The proliferation of regional tongues is one of the great frustrations for a foreigner learning Chinese. You can slave away at your Mandarin, and develop a passing acquaintance with a few local dialects, but as soon as you visit a new part of the country, you won’t be able to understand a word people say when they talk amongst themselves. When it comes to food, however, this extraordinary regional diversity is a blessing, because the closer you look at so-called ‘Chinese cuisine’, the more it expands and proliferates, like a computer-generated fractal pattern.
Xu Jun, Zheng Yuhui and their friends took me in hand as soon as I arrived in Shantou, a grey metropolis in one of the industrial heartlands of southern China. Within a couple of hours, they had whisked me off to the home of a famous local food writer, Zhang Xinmin; to a market where we surveyed radiantly fresh fish and intriguing dim sum; and to the home of the secretary of the local gourmet association, who was putting the finishing touches to his precise mise-en-place for that evening’s gastronomic adventures. A large potful of pork, cuttlefish and Yunnan ham simmered away on a slow flame on his stove, perfuming the entire apartment. As we inhaled its gorgeous aromas, Zheng Yuhui showed me photographs of dishes he and Zhang had prepared for their dinner parties. From what I could make out, they spent most of their free time cooking in Zhang’s smartly appointed kitchen, amazing their friends with magnificent dishes and then posting the pictures to their weibo accounts, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, where they each have legions of followers.
In that huge private room at the Jianye restaurant, they gave me my first real initiation into Shantou cooking. I’d had the famous aromatic stewed goose in Hong Kong, but never with all its trimmings. Here, there was not only goose flesh, succulent and lightly spiced, with a garlic and vinegar dip; also, on separate plates were arranged creamy goose liver, crisp intestines, jellied blood, crunchy gizzards, wings, feet and heads, each laid on a bed of tender beancurd and drizzled with some of the bird’s delicious cooking juices. Later, we tried some of the seafood for which the region is also renowned, prepared with a minimalism I was told was typical of the local culinary style.
‘We really emphasise harmony between nature and man,’ said Zhang Xinmin. ‘We make stringent demands of our ingredients because, even by general Cantonese standards, our seasoning is so light. You see these crabs,’ he said, gesturing at a pair of the opened crustaceans, resplendent with orange roe, spread out with their claws and legs on a platter. ‘They are steamed with no seasonings at all. In Sichuanese cuisine, you have many flavours used in combination; here, it’s all about yuan zhi yuan wei, the original taste of ingredients, with seasonings often added afterwards, as a separate dip.’
Sure enough, the crabs came with dipping dishes of garlicky vinegar, and the cold steamed fish with a punchy, fermented bean sauce from the town of Puning. Later, we shared an oyster omelette served with fish sauce speckled with pepper, and deep-fried shrimp balls with a tangerine syrup. ‘In the Qing Dynasty,’ said Zhang, ‘this region produced most of China’s sugar, which is why you’ll find a certain sweetness in our food.’
While foreigners don’t even recognise Chiuchow as a separate cooking region, Shantou gourmets are fiercely insistent on the distinction between their own lively culinary culture and that of the ancient regional capital, Chaozhou. ‘Shantou people see Chaozhou as backward and bumpkinish,’ Zheng Yuhui told me. ‘So if you ask a Shantou person if they’re from Chaozhou, they may be offended. Moreover, you’ll always taste the finest food in Shantou.’ Zheng vehemently rejects the term ‘Chiuchow cuisine’, preferring to speak instead of ‘Shantou’ or ‘Chaoshan’ (Chaozhou and Shantou) cuisine.
After lunch, I persuaded Zheng and his friends to take me on a tour of the old part of the city, a relic of its status as a treaty port imposed on China by the Western powers after the nineteenth-century Opium Wars. Nothing could have prepared me for this glimpse of the lost world of Shantou’s foreign concession, which was like a ghostly shadow of the old French quarter of Shanghai. One or two buildings, like the English post office, had been restored and were still in use; the rest, street after street, block after bloc
k of early twentieth-century tenements, had been left to crumble into the polluted air. Shrubs sprouted from roofs and ledges; weeds had insinuated themselves between bricks and mortar. A few residents had clung on, their brightly coloured washing strung out on the shattered balconies, but most of the buildings were deserted. The whole quarter, I was told, was slated for demolition.
Before I left Shantou, Zheng took me for a breakfast crawl of the backstreets, seeking out some of his favourite snack shops. In London and Hong Kong I was used to the dim sum version of cheung fun, those slithery sheets of rice paste embracing plump prawns, deep-fried doughsticks or barbecued pork. Here, in a thriving breakfast café, cooks spread the thin layers of liquidised rice with broken eggs, minced pork, leafy greens, tiny oysters and prawns, steamed them swiftly and then roughly folded them. They served the pasta with a soy sauce dressing and steaming bowls of pork offal soup. In another café, we ate a soup of rice noodles and beef balls. The lean beef had been beaten by hand with metal cudgels, whipped up into a taut, springy state so the cooked meatballs were actually crunchy in the mouth.
Despite the withering scorn with which Shantou locals viewed the old city of Chaozhou, as a foreign visitor I found it irresistible. Although the city is now surrounded by ceramics factories, the historic part of town has the kind of sleepy charm that has been erased in many parts of China by reckless modernisation. Under the colonnades of the restored Memorial Arch Street I found long-established snack shops and bakeries that pandered to the notoriously sweet tooth of the Chiuchownese. In the Hurongquan café I tried the house speciality, ‘Duck egg twists’, glutinous riceballs stuffed with bean paste and served in a sweetened broth with chunks of sweet potato, gingko nuts, silver ear fungus and the white grains known as Job’s tears.
A Fork In The Road: Tales of Food, Pleasure and Discovery On The Road (Lonely Planet Travel Literature) Page 9