when loret was a grad student at ucdavis, her classmate and his wife had invited us to dinner. after hearing their daughter wendy give a stirring rendition of 'lightly row' on the violin, we sat sipping our drinks: water, lemonade, tsingtao beer. sun poured in the window of their tiny married student apartment. having tried to stir-fry for years - skinny idealistic vegetarian that i was - i'd usually muster something vaguely edible, occasionally even 'not bad.' without a doubt, his question intrigued me.
'no, i don't; i'd love to hear it.'
he got right to the point - 'bean sauce: that the secret!'
i nodded, smiling, then narrowed my eyes. bean sauce? sounded like some kind of delicate and savory condiment you could only find in chinatown: just go down the alley between waverly and stockton blvd., open the iron gate on your left, rap a secret code on the door. ask for taitai lin. cash only.
before i could ask, he pointed to a bottle on the table: 'kikkoman.' of course, soybean sauce. ba dump bump.
'thanks wu-seng, now i know the secret!' i reached for another beer.
later i heard the wok tool click-clacking; i went back to the kitchen, perhaps i could learn from his technique. as he scraped and stirred with his right hand, his left occasionally took a spoonful of granular white substance from a bowl on the counter, and tossed it in.
'so, are there really bicycle traffic jams in china?' davis claimed to be the bicycle capital of the u.s., but i imagined our transit system was even further from the chinese variety than my bland stir-fry was from the meal he was about to serve up. he stirred in another heaping white spoonful.
'every day, sunday too! bicycles -very slow - cars better. american system, much faster!' bright smile, one silver crown on each side of his mouth. i kept my dark cloud opinions from raining on his automobile exuberance. and i continued to wonder about the mysterious white substance. msg is white, i knew, but i thought it was much finer - a powder. i could no longer resist the temptation and took a pinch, sprinkled it on my tongue.
'sugar, you like? wendy very likes candy, much sugar!' he said.
'sweet jesus!' i felt like columbus sighting land, i'd just discovered the real secret: so hidden the chinese didn't even know it was secret.
the meal was fantastic, especially the deep-fried tofu (another good secret). i've learned from dining at chinese restaurants - certainly not by my own cooking efforts - the art is to find a balance of flavors salty, sweet, sour, and bitter. a balance, or middle way, emblematic of chinese philosophies through the ages, from confucianism to buddhism. a balance that, with the ascendance of maoist-industrial-capitalism, seems to have been lost.
hopefully it's not too late to get it back: maybe a bit more sugar would help? or maybe less?
Japanese use sugar as a seasoning too. i think it's cheating.
ReplyDeletebetter than high-fructose corn syrup.
ReplyDeleteCorrection: this was in Charlottesville, I remember when you came home from that dinner and Loret recounted the exchange about "bean sauce."
ReplyDeleteSort of related: for the last few months we have been eating twice a week (usually takeout) at a new Chinese restaurant in town, it was so good and so cheap, we couldn't get enough. Then this week The New Yorker has a four page article about how amazing "our" restaurant is, and suddenly we can't get in and they won't even let us order takeout any more...
Ironically, the article is mostly about how whenever Peter Chang opens a restaurant, it becomes so popular that he is forced to move on. Thanks.
i guess maybe you're right about c'ville...or maybe you spoke on the phone? not that i don't have plenty of senior moments these days/years/months/decades.
ReplyDeleteand bummer about the take out place. fortunately you have a resident chef par excellence.
Mmm, I actually do love bean sauce (not soy sauce--black bean sauce, like this: http://chinesefood.about.com/od/sauces/f/blackbeansauce.htm), too. I thought that was what he meant at first, as it is indeed poured all over lots of things in Chinese restaurants (especially dim sum). That, and oyster sauce. In the end, they're all a little bit sweet, a little but salty, and a little bit gooey, so I suppose if you took that soy sauce and sugar, and added a little corn starch, you'd have something similar...
ReplyDeleteMy favorite, though, is bean paste--sweet and grainy. Not sure why I love grainy textures so much, but I sure do!
once i get to the site, what's the secret pass code for it?
ReplyDeletedid you get the giver? (don't answer here - hopbunnymango@yahoo.com)