My Grandmother's Chinese Kitchen Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  ONE - MY GRANDMOTHER, MY TEACHER

  TWO - TO THE MARKET

  THREE - IN THE GARDEN

  FOUR - FROM POND AND RIVER

  FIVE - INTO THE LUNAR NEW YEAR

  SIX - THE LANTERN FESTIVAL: DINING WITH THE NUNS

  SEVEN - FAMILY FEASTS AND FOLKLORE FESTIVALS

  EIGHT - FROM GRANDMOTHER’S HOUSE

  NINE - TO MY KITCHEN

  TEN - FOODS OF MY CHINESE KITCHEN: INGREDIENT NOTES FROM A TO Z

  AFTERWORD - EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN by Fred Ferretti

  INDEX

  About the Author

  BOOKS BY EILEEN YIN-FEI LO

  The Dim Sum Book: Classic Recipes from the Chinese Teahouse

  The Chinese Banquet Cookbook: Authentic Feasts from China’s Regions

  China’s Food (coauthor)

  Eileen Yin-Fei Lo’s New Cantonese Cuisine

  From the Earth: Chinese Vegetarian Cooking

  The Dim Sum Dumpling Book

  The Chinese Way: Healthy Low-Fat Cooking from China’s Regions

  The Chinese Kitchen

  The Chinese Chicken Cookbook

  A HOME BOOK

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at

  the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for

  changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not

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  MY GRANDMOTHER’S CHINESE KITCHEN

  Copyright © 2006 by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo

  eISBN : 978-1-557-88505-0

  An application to register this book for cataloging has been submitted to the Library of Congress.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written. The publisher is not responsible for your specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision. The publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipes contained in this book.

  Most Home Books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, or educational use. Special books, or book excerpts, can also be created to fit specific needs. For details, write: Special Markets, The Berkley Publishing Group, 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

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  This book is, as always, for those I love, and upon whose counsel and taste I rely:

  my husband, Fred, and my children, Christopher, Elena and Stephen.

  To this small family I add, with joy, my granddaughter, Elliott Antonia,

  to whom I have given the name Siu Fung, or Little Phoenix,

  and whom I call Siu Siu. A special thanks belongs to

  Carla Glasser, my agent, who works very hard

  on my behalf. Very hard.

  INTRODUCTION

  MY GRANDMOTHER

  NOW THAT I AM A GRANDMOTHER, I realize how important it is that I impart some of my experiences to my granddaughter, Siu Siu. Her mother will, as did my mother, give her most of her basic lessons in life. Reserved for me will be two pleasures: first simply enjoying and loving her, and second, seeing to it that my granddaughter learns and keeps whole many aspects of her ancestral, partially Chinese, culture and, quite important to me, her culinary heritage. It was what my grandmother, my Ah Paw, gave to me when I was a girl in China, in those many, many times I visited her and her kitchen. I learned manners and discipline, aspects of proper behavior that I adhere to today, patience and traditional tested ways of doing things. Not only did she teach me to cook practically, but saw to it that I learned as well the methods and philosophies of cookery, the joy of creation. She inculcated in me the truth that cooking well for someone is giving love in a most tangible way. The dishes I learned from my grandmother I cook to this day, very much in her way, her classics, her tradition. I am her heirloom. These my granddaughter will learn, as she grows.

  Allow me to share my Ah Paw with you.

  My maternal grandmother, my Ah Paw, was a most unusual and wondrous woman. When I was growing up in the Guangdong district of Sun Tak, I would not mind walking the more than two hours it took to go from my village to hers because I wanted to be with her as much as I was able. I spent most of my holidays from school as well as many weekends with her, and much of my extended school vacation time, with the blessings of my mother, Lo Chan Miu Hau, her daughter.

  Her formal title was Loi Joh Moh, or grandmother of my mother’s side of our family, and she had been our matriarch since the death of her husband, Ah Gung, in the Sino-Japanese War. In fact, because he had been so actively anti-Japanese, all traces of him in our family had been burned—photographs, letters, clothing, official documents of his standing as a municipal mandarin. These were followed by similar burning of all family records so as not to provide information that might be used by the Japanese invaders, which explains why few pictures of my family exist, and none of my Ah Paw.

  The words Ah Paw are actually a diminutive, quite like Grandma in English. She was a small woman, very thin, and weighed only about seventy pounds. Her feet had been bound as a baby and were only three inches long, always encased in tiny black silk slippers over white socks, a vivid vestige of that almost feudal custom wherein women’s feet were bound to demonstrate not only that they were high-born but were so well off that it was never necessary for them to need to walk, that everything would be done for them. Bound feet were symbols of a life of ease for Ah Paw, who never walked more than a few steps, the shortest of distances, in all the years I was with her. She was helped by her servants, occasionally by me. For her meals, a table was brought to her and whatever family attended sat arrayed around her. She was not, in fact, pleased that my mother, when she was a little girl of ten, tore off her own foot bindings and refused thereafter to have her feet bound.

  She only wore black sam fu, those loose blouse-and-trouser combinations, had her black, gray-streaked hair pulled back and wound into a bun. In the colder winter months she wore a wide black silk headband embroidered with pearls and jade. The only other jewelry or ornamentation I ever saw her wear were golden hoops in her pierced ears. She spent all of her days in her combined living room and parlor. Her servants Sau Lin, or “Beautiful Lotus,” and Ah Guk, “Chrysanthemum,” would support her if she needed to go any significant distance, such as a walk to her ve
getable garden. Otherwise she tottered by herself from her bedroom to her living room each day. Occasionally I would provide support for her as we walked into her open plaza so she could sit in the sun and talk with her friends, women only. She was quite independent despite her inability to walk properly.

  She was aristocratic, spoke softly, never raised her voice in anger that I can remember and was looked upon within the family as a final arbiter. She was an autocrat as well and called Yee Dai Yun by outsiders, which translated loosely as the revered first wife of the second son of my great-grandfather. Within our family she was referred to by her relationships to individual daughters, nieces, cousins and so on. I never knew her name. She was always only, Ah Paw.

  Ah Paw was steeped in the religion of Buddha and the manners and behavior of Confucius. She burned incense throughout her days to the heavenly gods, whom she hoped looked after her family members both dead and alive. She passed her prayer beads through her fingers very often each day, praying for her late husband and son, and the two grandsons who had died as infants. When she spoke it was with softness, very softly, and she taught, with traditional adages and aphorisms—most of which, as it turned out, was about food and its consumption—to illustrate her teachings. She called me Ah Fei, which to me was an endearment; to her it was a pet name that she said indicated I was intelligent and could fly. I wanted to be with her, just to sit on the floor next to her divan as she talked about proper, traditional ways of doing things, how things were, as they should be, in her world. I loved staying with her at her house because I would sleep with her in her big, intricately carved red-lacquered bed, the bed that had been part of her marriage dowry.

  Speak quietly and softly, she would caution me, bun hau tak yan jung, which meant that if you spoke badly of people, all others would never like you.

  “Bun leg tak wun moon dum dum,” she would say, as I listened, suggesting that if I used my energy to help someone, to do a favor, I would be rewarded with a bowl of rice or sweets.

  Do not be a fan tong, she would caution, which meant that I should not sit and do nothing in the manner of a fan tong: a rice bucket, which cannot move. Rather, I should be active.

  In tandem with this she would tell me not to be a bun tong soi, a half-filled bucket of water. Instead, I should finish whatever task I was given, even to the extent of doing it repeatedly until it was done right.

  Nor should I be a dai dun op: a big lazy duck too stupid to learn.

  I do not doubt for a moment that it was Ah Paw who taught the big black mynah bird that perched in her parlor to say, “Ah Mui. Ah Mui, mo hah sik, toh sahn seng,” in which the mynah would call to my cousin saying, “I don’t have shrimp to eat, my stomach is getting rusty,” which was an automatic signal for my cousin and me to run to a nearby river and catch a sufficient number of live shrimp to satisfy her mynah. The mynah was gone upon one visit when I was about seven years old. Ah Paw told me later that he had died and was with my grandfather in heaven. But the mynah’s message about doing something instead of nothing was never lost upon me.

  Ah Paw took it upon herself to teach me to cook, and to do this one should begin at the beginning: how to steam fish to the precise state of doneness, and to finish it with boiled peanut oil. I learned first to clean a fish and remove its scales, gills, intestines and membranes, then to wash it thoroughly before letting it rest. Then I salted and peppered it under the watchful eyes of the servants, seasoned it with soy sauce, a bit of peanut oil, ginger, scallions and coriander sprigs. I can still recall the first fish I prepared. I was most proud of myself, and brought the fish to my grandmother who looked at it, smelled it and said, quietly, “Ng gei dok lok sohk yau,” which translates as “You forgot the boiled oil, take it back to the kitchen and pour the oil.” I never forgot again.

  She suggested to me that vegetables should be chosen with at least the same care given to selecting in-laws, and that no vegetable should be eaten if it had been out of the ground for more than two hours. She warned me that for every uneaten rice kernel I left in my rice bowl my future husband would have a pock on his face. Meats were to be cut into perfectly matching lengths and widths as Confucius had directed. Furthermore I should never shout in the kitchen, nor berate servants, who to Ah Paw were less servants than they were constant attending members of her family. Such unseemly kitchen conduct would be reported by our Kitchen God, Tsao Chun, to the gods in heaven and would reflect badly upon our family.

  Ah Paw taught me to cook because my mother could not, completely, and because my father, Lo Pak Wan, who was a fine cook, was away from our home for great lengths of time. My mother had come to my father’s house in marriage with a dowry that included three servants. She cooked but rarely, because that was part of the servants’ work. The war years in China, however, led to upheaval. Servants left, were married, or both, and my mother found herself without her servants, without anyone to cook for her. She had to learn, and my initial forays into the kitchen were with her, both of us discovering as we went. Out of this experience came my mother’s belief that I should learn to cook as early, and as well, as possible.

  My father, when I was a baby, was away for years seeking the golden mountain as far away as South Africa. Later he was an adviser to my uncle, who was described in our family as a senator-soldier initially in Canton, then later elsewhere in war-ravaged China. This kept my father away from our family for much of my girlhood. It remained for my older brother, Ching Moh, to become my substitute father for such things as school attendance and permissions. Thus it was this combination of circumstances as well as Ah Paw’s love for me, and my desire to be with her that led my grandmother to see to my cooking education through stories and practice.

  Ah Paw knew instinctively, I believe, how things ought to be done without ever having put a spatula into a wok, without ever setting a bamboo steamer over boiling water, without ever having set foot in a kitchen. She knew which foods wedded, which clashed. She was a brilliant kitchen chemist with an encyclopedic knowledge of foods. She would tell the servants what foods to buy at the market, what to pick from her vast gardens and orchards, what fish to fetch and then instruct them with fine precision how to cook them, and for how long. She was never wrong, that I can remember, and she amazed me with her knowledge, which she continually transmitted to me. She made certain, despite the presence of her servants, that every visit to her house, whether on school holiday or at family festival involved me being in her kitchen.

  I would listen wide-eyed, all ears, as she imparted kitchen practices. Most of what I know about food, its meaning, its truth, its preparation has come from her. I truly believe that my palate is my inheritance from her. This culinary education came from the time I was four through the last years of the Chinese-Japanese Wars and into the beginnings of revolutionary China when I fled China for Hong Kong before my twelfth birthday. Ah Paw was more than sixty-five years old then. To this day my various cousins tell me that as I have grown older I have come to look more and more like my Ah Paw. This pleases me.

  On the pages that follow, I will share my Ah Paw’s wisdom and some of the recipes she taught me—the ones I treasure the most.

  ONE

  MY GRANDMOTHER, MY TEACHER

  THE PATH TO MY GRANDMOTHER’S HOUSE wound through waving fronds of sugarcane, groves of mulberry bushes being grown for silkworms to eat and rice fields, a meandering way from our village of Siu Lo Chun to her larger town of Sah Gau. Both lay within Sun Tak Yeun, or the Sun Tak District, an important wedge of Guangdong Province, between Guangzhou, or Canton, of which it was a suburb, and Macau to the south.

  It was a pleasant journey of more than two hours through this greenery, and my mother and I used to enjoy the serenity away from the main road. When I was a very little girl walking with my mother, however, our peace was occasionally marred by vestiges of the Chinese-Japanese War, wrecked carts and military trucks, even a stray dead soldier. These were the remains of the retreating defeated Japanese army. When we spott
ed such horrifying sights, my mother would tell me to shield my eyes and run ahead until I could see nothing but plantings, which I did.

  MY MOTHER, LO CHUN MIU HAU.

  These I recall with vivid clarity, but by the war’s end, when I was about eight years old, I was able to go to my grandmother’s house alone, the walk sweet with anticipation, the arrival even sweeter because my Ah Paw was always there to welcome me with, “Ah Fei, I have been waiting for you.”

  My grandmother’s house, brick, two stories tall, with its own small plaza, was the center of her small but nevertheless significant empire, which consisted of four houses that provided shelter for relatives and servants, a vast plot of several acres planted with vegetables and fruit tree orchards, a stretch of fish-bearing river and several large man-made freshwater ponds (really more small lakes than ponds), in which different varieties of carp were farmed. It is no wonder that among the many shrines to the gods that stood about her house, one of high prominence was the paper image of Shen Nung, the God of Agriculture, who it is said wrote the first book ever concerning food, a compendium of hundreds of herbs.

  The core of her house was its kitchen, watched over by the paper image of its own god Tsao Chun, the God of the Hearth, whose function it was before each New Year to tell the gods above only good things about our family after we had smeared the lips of his picture with honey and then burned it to send him skyward.