Her turn. She put one in her mouth and bit; it burst with a big, popping crunch. Inside there was the soft, yielding essence of shrimp. “How do you make it pop like that?”
“Soak it in cold salt water first. That’s what I was doing when you first came in.”
“It’s great,” she said.
“Good,” he corrected. “Not great. I can still detect the presence of sugar.”
“I can’t.”
He smiled. “Remember I told you we strove for formal ideals of flavor and texture? This dish is a perfect example. One of the most important peaks of flavor is xian. Xian means the sweet, natural flavor – like butter, fresh fish, luscious clear chicken broth. Then we have xiang, the fragrant flavor – think frying onions, roasted meat. Nong is the concentrated flavor, the deep, complex taste you get from meat stews or dark sauces or fermented things. Then there is the rich flavor, the flavor of fat. This is called you er bu ni, which means to taste of fat without being oily. We love this one. Fat is very important to us. Fat is not something undesirable to be removed and thrown away, not in China. We have a lot of dishes that actually focus on fat and make it delectable. Bring pork belly to the table, when it’s done right, and Chinese diners will groan with happiness.”
“That’s different,” she said, scribbling. “What else?”
“That’s just flavor. We have texture. There are ideals of texture, too – three main ones. Cui is dry and crispy, nen is when you take something fibrous like shark’s fin and make it smooth and yielding, and ruan is perfect softness – velveted chicken, a soft-boiled egg. I think it’s fair to say we control texture more than any other cuisine does. In fact some dishes we cook have nothing at all to do with flavor. Only texture; that is all they attempt. Think of bêche-demer. Or wood ear.”
Maggie considered this. As a concept, texture was not new to her. Many of the greatest dishes she had experienced on the road delivered their pleasure through texture: fried oysters, with their dazzling contrast of inside and out; the silk of corn chowder; the crunch of the perfect beach fry. But all of these relied on flavor too. “You must do something to give them a taste, surely?”
“Yes – we dress them with sauces. But plain sauces, way in the background. Anything more would distract. The gourmet is eating for texture.
“Once you understand the ideal flavors and textures, the idea is to mix and match them. That’s an art in itself, called tiaowei. Then we match the dishes in their cycles. Then there is the meal as a whole – the menu – which is a sort of narrative of rhythms and meanings and moods.”
“My God,” she said, writing rapidly.
“Everything plays in. The room. The plates. The poetry.” He plucked up another shrimp with his chopsticks and chewed it thoughtfully. “The problem is, this shrimp falls short of true xian. Xian is the natural flavor. If it doesn’t taste natural, the chef has failed to create it.”
“So you’re saying, it’s the natural flavor, but it’s concocted.”
“And there’s the paradox,” he said.
She smiled and wrote it down. “You concoct it how?”
“By adding supporting flavors, mostly. Every flavor has a specific effect on every other flavor. But all this must be invisible. Believe me, a Chinese panel will know this. And this shrimp – right now – is not quite there.”
“So are you going to use it in the banquet?”
“Not unless I get it perfect.”
She ate another. “I think it’s pretty great.” There was a silence while they both ate and her eyes wandered to the prologue. “Could I borrow this?” she said, touching it. “I’d like to read it again.”
“Take it. I printed it out for you.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ll give you more of the book later, if you want.”
“I do. But right now I’m going to clear out and let you work.” She packed everything up into her bag.
“I hope you’ll come again,” he said. “Come on. I’ll walk you out.”
They pushed through the door and crossed the large, darkened dining room, him moving a few steps ahead to hold open the wood-and-etched-glass door out to the courtyard. “You know?” he said. “We’ve been talking about food all this time. I didn’t ask you – what’s the other thing you’re doing here, in Beijing?”
She turned, halfway down the steps. The raw sadness of the last year came back over her, the sudden slam that could never be undone, the frantic constriction, the struggle to get control. Sometimes even the ministrations of her friends couldn’t get through to her. It was in her job that she’d found a small tunnel of light, especially during the weeks of each month she spent away, writing about other people’s lives. There’d been the kindness of the Malcolms, the retired Maryland couple on the Eastern Shore who worked six commercial crab pots and consumed their entire catch, eating crab at every meal through the season. There was Mr. Loeb, the stout pastrami man in Nebraska, delicate and graceful with a knife, the last counterman in the Midwest to slice the fragrant rosy slab by hand. Being with those people helped her. In their normalcy they relieved her. They didn’t ask questions. She didn’t have to tell them about the mess that was her life.
Now Sam Liang was waiting.
“I’m a widow,” she said. “A year ago my husband died.”
She waited while he took this in, while compassion, and some of his own fears, crossed his face. She had seen it in people’s faces so many times by now. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Thank you. It’s been difficult, but I’m better. It’s been a year.” That, she thought, was enough to say. He didn’t need to know how raw it still felt. And he certainly didn’t need to know about the widening sea that separated her more and more from other people, about the long days this summer she had spent lying on the bunk on her boat, ignoring the messages on her cell phone. She made her voice brisk. “My husband did some work here, and some matters in China came up related to his estate, so I had to come.”
“I see.” A lift of his eyebrow acknowledged the potential for a challenge. “I hope it goes well. Good luck. Are you very busy with that? Do you have the time to come back again?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I’ll be going out of town in the next day or so, but until then I’m okay.”
“Do you want to come tomorrow, late morning?”
“That will work,” she said, and stepped past him over the sill.
“Maggie,” he said, as she turned for the street. “What you told me. I’m really sorry.”
“Thanks.” Not that you know anything about it.
“See you,” he said.
She raised a hand and walked all the way to the turn in the road along the lake before she looked back. In that blink she saw him withdrawing, his blue jeans, the old-ivory skin of his hands, and then, click, the gate closed.
4
Let us return for a moment to the popular view that poverty, specifically scarce food and fuel, stimulated China’s culinary greatness. Certainly it is true in the case of cooking methods, and when it comes to the unsurpassed ingenuity of Chinese cooks in making delicious dishes out of everything under heaven, all the plants of the earth and sea, all the creatures, all their parts. These are the legacies of scarcity. Yet truly great cuisine, food as high art, did not arise here; it arose from wealth. It was the province and the passion of the elite. Throughout history, gourmets and chefs tended to reach their heights in conditions of plenty, not need.
– LIAN G WEI, The Last Chinese Chef
The following morning Sam Liang came back home from delivering some birds to his poultry farm outside the city. It was not his farm, exactly; he leased space there for his fowl before slaughtering them. He followed Liang Wei’s dictum, which was that a bird one wished to eat must spend at least the last few weeks of its life running and exercising in the fresh air. This made for better meat, according to The Last Chinese Chef. It was a brutal way of looking at it, a Chinese way: care for the creature, love it, pamper it, then eat it. Of course anywhere one went one found eating to be a cruel business. Here, though, there was no pretense. You knew a healthy animal tasted best, and so you raised it or at least fostered it. You knew fresh meat and fish were the most delectable, and so you did the slaughtering yourself. There were even dishes with live ingredients. In drunken prawns in the Shanghai style, for example, the prawns were not quite dead when eaten but so inebriated from being soaked in wine that they lay perfectly still for your chopsticks. No Chinese diner would flinch at the faint flutter of movement in the mouth. On the contrary. To the meishijia, the gourmet, this was the summit of freshness.