Beat up some eggplant mud, baked a blitz torte

not a beauty, but confident

The Chowhounders who cooked from The Hakka Cookbook by Linda Lau Anusasananan back in January had a lot of nice things to say, but the word “bland” did pop up every few posts. The stir-fried chicken with cucumbers I made the other night was the blandest stir fry ever. About as bland as it sounds. This was perhaps the first time I've ever put a Chinese dish on the table and watched everyone reach for the salt. 

Happily, the mashed eggplant and spinach I served alongside was salty, zesty, and delicious. You boil wedges of eggplant until soft, then add spinach and boil for another 30 seconds. Drain. Dry the pot. Heat up a little oil and stir fry the vegetables with some garlic. Finish with a splash of fish sauce. From the recipe headnote: “Mashing releases the eggplant’s earthy essence and creamy texture. The soft pulp readily soaks up the robust spiciness of the garlic and chile. . . . The Ho sisters call this dish ‘Beaten Eggplant Mud.’”

I’ve become a fan of emojis when texting and my first impulse was to insert an emoji right after that last sentence. Do you think emojis will become an integral part of our written culture, like periods and question marks? I hope not, but why do I hope not? What's wrong with emojis? Didn't I just want to use one? Am I becoming an old crank who resists change?

Anyway, the beaten eggplant mud had wonderful, almost fatty quality that makes you think it must contain a gallon oil, which it doesn’t. I ate the leftover mud for lunch yesterday and it was even tastier than it had been the night before. As you can imagine, there was a lot left over. My family doesn’t do eggplant. 

At this point I should probably explain the meaning of the term “Hakka” for those of you who do not know. Until an hour ago, I was not 100% sure myself. I knew it denoted a Chinese subculture with a distinct cuisine because when I was a child some dear Chinese friends of my parents took us to a Hakka restaurant in San Francisco. My sister and I have extraordinarily vivid memories of a salt-baked chicken. 

Thirty-five years later, I can now tell you that the Hakka are a people who were driven out of their homeland in north central China many hundreds of years ago and drifted around the country as a lowly minority. Eventually, they fanned out over the rest of the globe, keeping their culture to some degree intact. Like the Jews, they are a diaspora people. Linda Lau Anusanananan has tried to capture the way their cuisine has adapted to different regions and ingredients, so there are Hakka recipes here that originate in various parts of China, Tahiti, Peru, Malaysia, and on and on. What are the defining characteristics of Hakka food? According to Anusanananan Hakka cooking is "strong flavored, salty, fatty." Lots of pork and soy sauce. Her brother describes Hakka food as "honest, earthy, and rustic -- the simple comforting soul food of the peasant."

I'm not going to take pictures of things like beaten eggplant mud. Sorry! I know how disappointing that must be. Fortunately, I baked a pretty blitz torte the other day and that is what you see in the photo at top. A few of you recommended blitz torte in the comments and so I baked one and loved it. You mix a golden butter cake batter with egg yolks and then you whip up a sugary meringue with the egg whites. Spread the meringue on the butter cake batter, sprinkle with sliced almonds and cinnamon, and bake all at once. The meringue was slightly crispy and crusty, but also light and soft, while the cake beneath was rich and dense. I sandwiched the layers with pastry cream, but I think whipped cream might work better. Or maybe pastry cream with some whipped cream folded in? Recipe is here. Really lovely dessert. Thank you.

Just to be clear!

Although his views on cooking and animal husbandry drive me nuts, Mark is a super-nice guy and when I write about him and our disputes, it's never serious. He's got a sort of sardonic, caustic persona and can come off in the blog as a curmudgeonly character, which he really likes. In fact he's very kind, funny, and considerate. He would never tell me to "fuck off" except when he was joking around. I worried I got the tone wrong in the last post.

I'm so happy I pulled The Hakka Cookbook off the shelf yesterday because last night's dinner was a smash hit. It's been ages since I delved into a Chinese book and it feels like coming home.

"The Hakkas' humble dishes have stayed largely sequestered in home kitchens, rarely appearing on restaurant menus."

More detail on Hakka coming soon. For now, I'll just tell you what we ate:

and

You can find the recipe for the pork here and the spinach here and the fantastic Dorie Greenspan strawberry shortcakes I made for dessert right here. Everyone loved everything. Best meal I've cooked in ages.

A rambling post about a really happy Thursday

Here's a sentimental little story about a day that started badly and ended well. There's a lesson in here, one I manage to repeatedly unlearn.

 

My sister-in-law Amy is visiting from Connecticut, along with her 8-year-old son J. It was just J and me the other day, after everyone else went off to job, conference, or school, and I figured we'd hang around the house, he'd play with Legos, I'd do some work, do some cleaning, and wallow in sadness and anxiety over my mother. It's become one of my favorite pastimes.

Right after breakfast, J came into the room and said brightly, "Do you think we can maybe leave the house sometime?"

 

Tipsy: Sure. What would you like to do?

J: Maybe we could take a walk to, like, an ice cream store?

Child after my own heart. Suddenly the lack of a decent plan for J's day seemed unforgivably lame. His special trip to California and the mopey aunt can't change out of her robe?

So I took him to Chinatown. We went to the live poultry market, the Clarion Music Center, old St. Mary's Cathedral,  and the Golden Gate Bakery, where they sell the best warm egg custard tarts.  

J did not care for the tart. I always make people try these custard tarts, but they never love them as much as I do. 

 

We rode a cable car, which I have not done in 30 years. I couldn't tell if J thought it was super-cool, or boring, because he was so grave and watchful. I thought it was super-cool. The City has a completely different aspect when you observe it from a side-facing position in an open vehicle. Everyone looks at you like you're a clueless tourist, but jaded San Franciscans who go 30 years without riding the cable car are the clueless ones.

Then we walked to Hang Ah Alley to have lunch at the Hang Ah Tea Room, where my father used to take me when I was a child. 

There's something about the feng shui of Hang Ah Alley that's very special. You enter from the middle of a extremely steep and busy Chinatown street, but the alley itself is always calm and quiet. It adjoins a playground, and right next door to the tea room is a mysterious club where elderly Chinese people sit around all day playing mah-jongg. (I thought it was dominoes, but did some research and it seems more likely that they are playing mah-jongg.) If you stand silently you can hear the tiles softly clicking and kids shouting and cars going up and down the hill and it's really nice. That's the best I can do by way of explaining the magic of Hang Ah Alley.  

Since the tea room was closed, we found another dim sum restaurant and did some serious over-ordering. My children are delicate, nervous eaters, but J is neither and ate the way I used to eat when presented with exotic fried and steamed tidbits involving shrimp, pork, and garishly colored sauces. It was fun to watch.

Those look like an alien life form, but were extremely tasty.

After lunch we tried to buy gifts for everyone we could think of at the cheap trinket shops. J took great care with his selections, and we examined many small green buddhas, swords, and tacky paper fans. He got a license plate with his name on it for himself, a black satin jewelry box for his sister, a pink jewelry box for Isabel, a dragon pendant for Owen, and a tiny creamer shaped like a cow for Amy. At one point he picked out a cute little bronze chicken and held it up with a triumphant expression on his face. I said, "You want to get that for Owen?"

He said, "Maybe for you?"

I almost burst into tears. Love my chicken.

 

Then we collected Owen from school and finally made it to the ice cream store. 

An unexpectedly lovely day.

Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Smacked Cukes, Slivered Potatoes & Steamed Spareribs

Those, my friend, are deep-fried peanuts (you su hua ren). And they are as wickedly good as they look, salty, with a deep, reverberant crunch you never dreamed possible from a goober.

Last night was the first family meal from Fuchsia Dunlop's Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook. I haven't had time to read every line, but I will say right off the bat that I am predisposed to revere this woman who, like me, is a pale Westerner obsessed with Chinese cooking. I'm extremely envious that she actually learned Chinese and went to China and wrote amazing books, but I will try not to hold it against her.

A rundown of our meal:

-Succulent steamed spare ribs with black beans and chiles. Too ugly to photograph, but these had the earthy, lipsmacking savor you only get from fermented black beans. 

-Smacked cucumbers. You really do smack the cucumbers (with flat edge of a knife, a rolling pin, a hammer) until they shatter and collapse, then you chop them into bite-size chunks and toss with a vinegar-chili dressing. Sadly, the best thing about this bland salad is its name. If you want something awesome and very similar, here's a link to the late Barbara Tropp's fabulous recipe for ma la cucumber fans.

-Finally: Potato slivers with vinegar. You sliver potatoes, blanch, then stir fry with peanut oil, chilies and clear rice vinegar. Unlike anything you'd ever get in a Chinese-American restaurant, and worth the price of the book. Imagine delicate shards of potato, a little tart, a little spicy, a little mysterious, utterly delicious. Discovering that the stodgy spud can be cut into skinny slivers and sauteed with vinegar is like learning that your dowdy best friend has a glamorous secret life.

This is why I have so many cookbooks.

The Seventh Daughter: An Earnest Summation

I did not expect to love this book.

But I loved this book. Clearly, I'm a sucker for any cookbook that shows even an iota of personality or soul.

Cecilia Chiang's Seventh Daughter is the drama-packed memoir of an extraordinary woman from her pampered childhood in pre-communist China through the famine-stricken war years, revolution, flight to Japan, then a second blooming as a celebrity restaurateur in San Francisco. The story is the perfect backdrop to the clear, strong recipes for dishes ranging from the red bean cakes of Chiang's youth to the crowd-pleasers at her posh Mandarin restaurant, like Prawns a la Szechwan, a sweet-sour stir fry you can easily imagine 1960s Californians finding both exotic and accessible.

I made 32 recipes from the book.

Flat-out bad: 3
So-so: 7
Good: 13
Great: 8
Worth the price of the book: 1

This is a strong performance, and mirrors the ratios in my earnest summation of Niloufer Ichaporia King's Bombay Kitchen. The "failures" probably have more to do with my own errors of execution and Western taste limitations (I'm thinking of the walnut soup and aforementioned red bean cakes) than slipshod recipe writing. I do think there were places where diagrams and more detailed directions would have been helpful, like in the recipe for scallion pancakes. But that's a small complaint. This is a wonderful volume, a treasure. I can't imagine parting with it.

I hope all my cookbooks don't turn out to be "treasures," or this will be an extremely boring blog.

In a few weeks the James Beard Foundation will give an award to an Asian cookbook, and I've cooked the hell out of two of the three finalists. If I had to choose between them right now, I would go with Niloufer Ichaporia King's Bombay Kitchen both because there are so few books on Parsi cooking, and because the volume has a sly charm that the more formal Chiang -- mediated by co-author Lisa Weiss -- couldn't quite muster.

But I really had to think about it.

I would love to spend a few weeks cooking from another part of the world, maybe a place where every dish doesn't begin with minced ginger and a quarter pound of ground pork. But to complete my self-imposed assignment, in a few days I will start on Fucshia Dunlop's Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: The Cooking of Hunan Province. Brace yourselves for smoked tofu, salted duck eggs, and Yueyang velveted fish. 

I certainly hope my children have.

The Seventh Daughter: The Truth about Family Dinners

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

But mostly the worst. I'm talking about the hallowed institution of the American family dinner, which everyone from Mary Pipher to Alice Waters considers a cornerstone of our civilization. And here's the crazy thing: So do I, despite ample evidence to the contrary.

Last night was a doozie. At one point, I couldn't keep track of who was shouting at whom. Mark, understandably upset by a $400 traffic ticket, was uncharacteristically saturnine. Owen raced around trying to sneak cherries, climb on his father, and irritate Isabel, who approached her meal with the haughty disdain of a duchess who has just spotted a fly in her vichysoisse.

To lighten things up, I attempted to photograph dinner table reality for Tipsy Baker, to record the faces contorted in tears and fury; the children eating with their fingers and ducking under their chairs; the rolled eyes, the expressions of indignation, the atrocious table manners. Then Mark roared that if I continued teasing in this vein he would SHUT the blog down!!!

Let it be known that the photograph above was taken with the permission of the subject.

Now to the food. We're closing in on the last few nights of Cecilia Chiang's Seventh Daughter and I've been cooking like a banshee. I made some fine dishes for our hellish dinner, starting with Prawns a la Szechwan, which, according to Chiang, was a bestseller at her late, great San Francisco restaurant, the Mandarin. This garish red melange features shrimp napped in a syrupy, slightly acidic sauce full of ketchup. I've made a version of this before and though tasty, it's not one of my favorites.

On the side, I served noodles, specifically zha ziang mian, which Chiang describes as a cousin of spaghetti bolognese. Because I couldn't find a way to photograph my zha ziang mian attractively, you will have to imagine a glorious pile of snowy white noodles topped with a supremely zesty, chestnut-colored pork sauce. There was also some undistinguished but healthy baby bok choy with garlic and ginger.

For dessert, I attempted the sweet walnut soup, a painstaking delicacy made from pureed nuts, red dates, sugar, and cream. Chiang prepared the soup for her father shortly before he died, and recommends serving it in demitasse cups. The recipe requires that you boil and peel the walnuts, which resemble tiny crenellated brown brains and cling stubbornly to their translucent skins. "Make sure you really love the people you make this soup for," Chiang warns.

I do dearly love the people for whom I made this soup, however difficult it can be. Sadly, they didn't like the sludgy brown soup. And, to be honest, neither did I.