by James Steen
The crowds were pleased. Very soon others were selling sushi to passers-by. After Tokyo was hit by the earthquake of 1923, many of the vendors left the city and moved to different parts of the country, introducing sushi as they went. Sushi’s popularity was boosted on a global scale in the 1970s, when Hollywood stars and Wall Street bankers viewed it as fashionable.
There are different types of sushi, which include makisushi: finely sliced fish and vegetables are rolled up in seaweed to form a cylinder, which is then sliced downwards, forming little rolls. Sashimi is slices of raw fish, served without rice (hence no mention of sushi in its name). Sashi means to pierce; mi is the word for flesh. Dipping sauces often accompany sashimi; these include ponzu, the ingredients of which include rice vinegar and seaweed, as well as the juice of one or more citrus fruits, be it lemon, yuzu, or the bitter orange daidai. Daidai aids digestion and at Japanese New Year is presented with mochi cakes as a decoration (it is too bitter for most people to eat).
DIM SUM
Prawn dumplings, taro cake and spongy, deep-fried chicken feet. Dim sum in a dim sum parlour is a memorable taste of China.
The Chinese have a saying: ‘To be born in Suzhou, to eat in Guangzhou, to be attired in Hanzhou and to die in Luzhou.’ Suzhou is a place of great beauty, Hanzhou is home to the finest fabrics and Luzhou has the best wood (for a coffin). Guangzhou, meanwhile, is considered to be home to the best food in China. It is the ancient and capital city of the Guandong province in China’s south, an area abundant in great produce and chefs who know how to cook the great Cantonese dishes.
A few thousand years ago, the story goes, five immortals, riding rams that had rice grains in their mouths, flew to Guangzhou on clouds. The immortals blessed the people and promised them glorious harvests for eternity. Thus, it became known as the City of Rams or the City of Rice Grains. It is also said that its culinary reputation was ensured during the overthrow of the Ming Dynasty (AD 1644) when chefs from the imperial household fled south, bringing with them their recipes and kitchen talents.
Guangzhou became an important stop on the Silk Road of the sea, the network of trade routes which linked China with South-east Asia and later, Europe. In the late 1800s, following the Opium Wars, Guangzhou was the only port open to outside trade. It became rich and its food became known and loved by foreign travellers. Soon the chefs would travel themselves, taking their cuisine across the globe.
The city of the 1800s was not short of restaurants. Many of these were vast and two or three storeys high. The elite dined on the top floor while hoi polloi sat downstairs, eating noodles, roasted meats and soups. All of the customers went into the building via the kitchen. That way, they could check out the cleanliness of the chefs and, of course, see what was on offer, food-wise. Wander through any Chinatown and you will notice the custom continues in the West, with roasting ducks and pigs on view from the street. Apart from these large, often noisy and boisterous restaurants, there was another style of eating out – a visit to the tea salon.
The tea salon was a gentle way to spend an hour or two, and customers would turn up with birds in cages: they competed to see whose bird could sing the sweetest and longest song. To the challenging soundtrack of high-pitched trills, twitters and squawks, waiting staff served pots of tea and little snacks: savoury dishes of minced meat or shellfish in thin-dough dumplings, as well as small, sweet pastries. This was what the modern-day Westerner might call finger food, though always to be eaten with chopsticks and never fingers (at the Chinese table it is rude to handle the food with fingers). These dishes were so delectable, dainty and loveable that, you felt, they almost touched your heart as you ate. Inevitably, they became known as dim sam, or dim sum, the Cantonese for dot heart.
Tea salons did not use to be places for women, but nowadays families often spend Sunday mornings there together, enjoying dim sum and tea. Waiters dash about the room, pushing food on table trolleys. Tea is the drink, and when the tea runs out, the lid of the pot is turned upside down – this tells the waiter a top up is required. There are countless types of dim sum. Steamed dumplings might be filled with shrimp or pork, or there is wu gok, which is dumpling made with taro. Taro crops up in a dim sum cake, while turnip is grated and mixed with dried shrimp to become a fried cake. Pig sells well. There are steamed pork buns, baked pork buns, pork spare ribs and roast pork and honey wrapped in pastry.
Fung zao are chicken feet, deep fried so that they become spongy and they are served in a sweet-savoury sauce. The toenails should be removed before cooking. Sweet dishes range from daan taat (an egg custard tart) and do fu fa (tofu pudding) served with a ginger syrup. Fried sesame balls look like round doughnuts, and are filled with red bean paste and covered in sesame seeds.
CHICKEN SOUP
A cure for many illnesses; simmered and ladled by mothers and grandmothers the world over.
Chicken soup was the subject of a scientific study in 1993.
Dr Stephen Rennard, a physician and researcher at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, set out to establish why this particular soup is so good for us. Or, as the study put it: ‘A traditional chicken soup was tested for its ability to inhibit neutrophil migration using the standard Boyden blindwell chemotaxis chamber assay with zymosan-activated serum and fMet-Leu-Phe as chemoattractants.’
Moving on …
The study pointed out that chicken soup is ‘so widely recommended … in the Jewish tradition, that it is referred to by a variety of synonyms as Jewish penicillin, bohbymycetin, and bobamycin.’
Dr Rennard’s wife Barbara, also one of the researchers, played the role of cook. She made three batches of chicken soup. These were prepared according to a family recipe and, for the purposes of the study, the recipe was known as ‘Grandma’s Soup’. It was typical, traditional chicken-soup stuff. There were no noodles, but there were matzah balls.
Here is the recipe for Grandma’s Soup:
A two kilogram chicken is cleaned, put in a large pot and covered with water. The water is brought to the boil. In goes ‘a package of’ (let’s say six) chicken wings; three large onions; one large sweet potato; three parsnips; two turnips; twelve large carrots.
They ‘boil’ (probably more of a simmer) for one and a half hours.
As scum gathers on the water’s surface, it is skimmed and discarded.
Six celery stalks and a bunch of parsley are added.
The whole lot simmers for a further 45 minutes.
The chicken is removed. Its meat is not used for the soup (it can be used in other dishes).
Salt and pepper are added to your taste.
The soup is strained and the vegetables are finely chopped or passed through a strainer. Salt and pepper are added to taste.
Note: The report states that, ‘No strict quality control was performed, although each preparation was evaluated by taste and was felt to be satisfactory (if variably so).’
*
The study, which was presented at a conference in San Francisco, set out to show scientifically that chicken soup is good for the immune system and prevents colds.
None of the findings would have surprised, for instance, the Egyptian Jewish physician and philosopher, Moshe ben Maimon who, in the 12th century, recommended chicken soup for respiratory tract symptoms (and ben Maimon’s advice was based on earlier Greek writings).
But Rennard’s point was that there was little in the literature to explain how chicken soup is so good for us.
‘Everyone’s heard this from their mother and grandmother in many cultures,’ he said, but he wanted to demonstrate the soup’s anti-inflammatory properties.
The study concentrated on neutrophils. These are the most common white cells in our blood and they defend the body against infection. The study’s focus was to find out if the movement of these neutrophils would be blocked or reduced by chicken soup. A reduction of movement is beneficial to the body.
The researchers collected neutrophils – white blood cells – from blood donat
ed by healthy volunteers. During tests they found the movement of neutrophils was reduced, suggesting that chicken soup does have an anti-inflammatory ‘activity’. This may ease symptoms and shorten upper respiratory tract infections. If you’ve caught a cold, drink the soup and you’ll feel better.
‘A variety of soup preparations were evaluated and found to be variably, but generally, able to inhibit neutrophils,’ Dr Rennard said.
The researchers were unable to identify the exact ingredient or ingredients in the soup that made it effective against fighting colds. But they believed it may be a combination of ingredients in the soup that worked together to have beneficial effects.
As part of the study, thirteen shop-bought chicken soups were also tested against Grandma’s Chicken Soup. ‘Many of the soups inhibited neutrophil chemotaxis. Five inhibited more potently (at an identical dilution) than did Grandma’s traditional soup. Two soups were without activity, and one slightly augmented chemotaxis.’ The report added, ‘Omaha tap water had no activity.’
FISH AND SHELLFISH
FISH AND CHIPS
‘Salt and vinegar?’ Three words which every night echo around Britain’s 27,000 chippies.
The chip was most probably introduced to Britain in the mid-1800s by the Belgians. But it had to wait a while to be united with the fish.
That happened in about 1860 with the opening of the nation’s first fish and chip shop. The man behind the business was Joseph Malin, a Jewish immigrant and cook who lived in the impoverished East End of London.
His shop was located at 450, Old Fort Street, in Poplar. It was a working class area, inhabited by labourers, servants and railway workers. But then fish and chips has always been a working class treat, and it is only recently that it has become a fixture on the menus of Michelin-starred restaurants.
Trade was strong (Malin’s customers, perhaps, included couples who came to walk on Sundays in the park opposite his shop) and word spread. Britain now has 27,000 fish and chip shops (also known as chippies, fish shops or chip shops). And while Malin’s marriage of deep-fried fish with chips is loved around the world, his name has not travelled further than a gravestone in the land of cockneys.
What of the fish? In the 17th century fried fish was introduced by Jewish immigrants who came to Britain from Portugal and Spain. Here is Paul Levy, writing in the Daily Telegraph:
Claudia Roden’s 1996 The Book of Jewish Food, the ultimate authority, says battered fried fish ‘was a legacy of the Portuguese Marranos (crypto-Jews) who came to England in the 16th century, many of them via Holland’. Nominal Christians, they were secretly practising Jews, who fried their fish on Friday (the Christian world’s fish day) and ate it cold on their Sabbath later that night or the next day, when they were forbidden to cook or even light a fire.
Originally, the fish was dipped first in egg and flour before frying. Batter, however, was a far better preservative and became a popular coating. Batter – a mix of egg, flour and milk – has been around since medieval times, featuring in savoury and sweet, often fruity dishes. Without it, there would be no American pop-over, French cherry clafoutis, or English puddings, such as Kentish cherry batter pudding or Tewkesbury saucers: a sort of fruit sandwich made with two small pancakes.
PAELLA
A huge pan of saffron rice, shell-on prawns and opened mussels, maybe some chicken thighs or pieces of rabbit, as well as red (bell) pepper and wedges of lemon. Entirely Valencian, of course.
You are a cook in ancient Rome and you awake one morning with a desire to cook, not for the family, friends or neighbours, but for the gods. You’re not quite sure what to make, but you know for sure which utensil to cook it in. You raid the kitchen cupboards, with dust dirtying your toga, and pull out the patella. That’s the one!
The large patella was bronze, large, concave-based and had two handles. It was fit for the gods and great feasts. Otherwise, it could be the vessel for a simple but impressive supper with the neighbours al fresco.
When the Romans invaded the Iberian shores and settled in Valencia, on the south-east coast of Spain, they unpacked patellae galore. The patella dropped a ‘t’ to become paella and it even increased in diameter, enabling the pan to sit comfortably on a long-burning fire of small branches and twigs. (Up until the 16th century the French called their pan a paele before it became poêle). The paella is made from iron, never known as a paellera, and originally the Valencians used it to fry fish and meat with vegetables. (The ‘ll’ of paella is pronounced as either the ‘lli’ in million, or as a ‘y’ – pieay-ah. It is never pie-ella.)
Next, the Moors pitched up in Valencia in the 8th century. From North Africa and the Near East they brought trees of oranges and almonds. They planted expansive plantations of sugarcane. They brought a cultured lifestyle enriched by poetry, art and architecture. They introduced an irrigation system that would help to increase farmland, crops and improve health. And by the time King Jaime of Aragon liberated Valencia in 1238, the Moors had created vast and fertile fields of rice – paella’s advent had occurred. Spain had a new food with a new word – arroz (rice) originates from ar-ruzz, the Arabic word.
Although conceived in Spain, paella was therefore a gastronomic collaboration of the Romans, the Moors and the Valencians. Indeed, there is a strong case for bringing China and India into it too, as that is where the rice travelled from, to the Moors. Paella is a shining example of what, hundreds of years later, would be known as ‘fusion food’.
The early paella consisted of rice from the fields, onions, garlic and rosemary from the garden, and fish and seafood – mussels, squid, octopus – fresh off the coast. Perhaps, after a hard day’s toil of rice harvesting, it was cooked on a fire beside the fields, snails tossed in as well. Traditionally, it is cooked by men and indeed there are those who say (erroneously) that the dish takes its name from the words para ella, for her (as in, here is a meal that was made by a man for his wife).
The essential saffron, another gift from the Moors (and originating from India), makes the paella a smiling sun within a black halo.
*
Digressing for a moment, saffron is ridiculously expensive – in fact, the most expensive spice – and that is because of its laborious harvest. It comes from the stigmas of crocuses which have to be picked by hand. The strands are extracted from the flowers, and then dried. When used in dishes, saffron adds a wonderful aroma and a highly appetising yellow-orange colouring. (Some cooks add turmeric instead of saffron: this will colour the rice, but it’s a cheap trick because one mouthful and you know the saffron is missing and you’ve been duped.)
In the 16th century, the European fascination for spices saw the cultivation of saffron across the continent. It was grown in Britain, and the Essex town of Saffron Walden was simply Walden before its inhabitants started growing saffron in the 16th century. Saffron cakes, bread and buns are still often eaten in England. In Devon, they baked ‘revel buns’ which contained saffron and were eaten at church feasts known as revels. Should you find yourself in Sweden on 13 December, do not be alarmed if you are approached by young girls dressed in white robes with crowns of lingonberry twigs, carrying trays of cakes and saying ‘Lussekatter’. They are celebrating the feast of Santa Lucia and the delicious, plaited buns are made of saffron, currants, nuts and candied peel. Lussekatter means Lucia’s cats, the name given to the buns.
Take bun dough, place it in the oven and see how it swells and contemplate the origin of the word bun. It derives from bugne, the Old French word for swelling. A bugne in the oven.
Elizabeth David, in French Provincial Cooking, writes that ‘about 500,000 pistils, or about 170,000 flowers, go to make up one kilo of dried saffron, which goes to show why saffron is so expensive and why it has often been falsified’. Before use: soak half a dozen pistils, or threads, of saffron in a little hot water allowing them to infuse and turn the water yellow-orange. This liquid, along with the threads, is added to the dish.
*
Rabbit,
chicken and pork were later additions to paella, something of a luxury to the Valencians who lived mostly on a diet from the sea. Tomato and red (bell) pepper would also be incorporated but, of course, only after they started to make their way from the Americas to Spain in the 1600s.
When King Jaime arrived in Valencia, having gone to a great deal of trouble to capture the city, he was surprised to find rice fields all over the place. He feared constant malaria epidemics would eventually result in a city with no inhabitants. So he ordered rice cultivation to be restricted to the Albufera lagoon area.
This brings us to the rice, which is paramount to the success of paella. The wrong rice will render it a failure because the authentic flavour will not be acquired. (A few notable Spanish cookery books suggest long grain rice, but it is not quite right.) The Bomba variety, which is cultivated in this part of Spain, is perfect for paella. Calasparra is the second best. (For risotto, use Carnoroli, which is far less gloopy than Arborio and distinctly superior).
When cooking this dish, as with any rice or pasta dish, imagine that you are ‘feeding’ the rice: each liquid which is added will be lapped up by the thirsty carbohydrate, adding layers of flavour to the finished dish. Unlike risotto, when the rice is heated in the pan before liquid is added, paella calls for the rice to be added to the bubbling liquid.
Note: Paella is not the only dish which takes its name from the utensil in which it is cooked. The French who went to settle in North America and Canada in the 17th and 18th centuries, travelled with une chaudière, a trusty iron cooking pot, perfect for thick soups made with a hearty hotchpotch of ingredients.
In their new homeland, and in between farming and furrier duties, the settlers used ingredients which were new to them but popular with the Native Americans. And so, with the unity of American ingredients and French culinary technique (and cooking equipment), a new form of soup was created in the chaudière. It was chowder. Globally, New England’s clam version is the most famous, but seafood can be swapped for vegetables such as sweet corn. Potato helps to thicken the soup.