Now,
my stomach can handle a lot. I won’t say I ‘pride’ myself on being able to
shove many a ‘strange’ (to our delicate western sensibilities) dish down my
throat (also partially because I recently read an article on deep-fried spiders
and literally avoided any fried food for a few days while my mind calmed down
again, therefore I guess giving up any claim to being able to stomach anything),
but I do take great pleasure in finding new food that I’m unfamiliar with and
eating enough of it that I can’t move for a day and a half. This is one of the things I love about traveling in China - in few other places can one find such a variety of food distinctly different from Western food styles and preparation.
This
approach will sometimes burn you.
Szechuan
Peppers and the Banality of Fear (of food)
A
few days ago, each floor in our dorm went out to dinner together, in the area
around 北大. I don’t exactly know if the restaurant had any particular theme, but
in any case, food was piled onto our table in a fashion that only a delicious
Chinese family style dinner can provide. But, hidden within the mountains of
rice, broiled meat, and vegetables, was my first entry into this list of
‘things that prove Kevin’s mouth is too weak for this shit’. It was contained
within a Sichuan boiled fish dish. The fish came mostly submerged in a pool of
oil and broth several inches deep, topped with a layer of floating red peppers
(chile de arbol, I think?) and other pretty strong flavorings. The fish was
deliciously tender, and with just enough of a kick to allow me to still enjoy
it with my central European taste buds. But with the fish, I had shoveled some
of the peppers and spices onto my plate as well. I avoided the peppers at all
costs, worried about what terrors lay within. But then I met my new enemy.
During a brief lull in the otherwise nonstop
consumption of food that was going on, I started absentmindedly chewing on some
small peppercorn-type spheres on my plate. They were slightly crunchy, and
seemed to give a perfect occupation for my mouth to busy itself with while I
waited for my stomach to allow more food. I went through about six or seven of
them before it hit me.
My mouth lit on fire. It felt as if hot gas
was forming spontaneously in my mouth and instantly trying to escape. Just as
it felt as if my mouth was about to get badly burnt, the feeling suddenly shifted
drastically colder, as if the heat was being sucked out through my now open and terrified mouth.
And then, just as suddenly as the coming of the first two phases of this weird hellish
feeling, a tingling sensation began to spread around my entire mouth. Soon my
mouth felt as if it was being vibrated into submission from the inside, and
everything from my tongue to my gums started going numb. The feeling is the kind that makes your tongue constrict and do weird things to try and escape it. The only thing you can taste is a weird, slightly metallic sting, that resists any attempts to replace it. I quickly shoveled
steamed rice, hot water, even other spicy food to try and counteract the
effect, to no avail. There was nothing left for me to do but wait out the new uselessness
of my mouth for the next 10 minutes.
See, it turns out I had decided to pick a
fight with 花椒 (huājiāo) – Szechuan Peppers – an infamous Szechuan spice that gains its
terrifying powers from small amounts of hydroxy-alpha sanshool, a still only
partially understood chemical compound that manages to supremely confuse human
taste receptors like nothing else I’ve ever eaten. Results from rubbing ground花椒
on the lips of some incredibly willing participants (probably some poor UCL undergrads
who were excited at the flyers proclaiming ‘food study! Get paid to eat!’ lying
around their campus) found that the tingling sensation consistently averages
around 50 Hz, supporting a hypothesis that nerve receptors (specifically,
Meissner receptors, if that says something to anyone) involved in touch were
activated by the peppers as well (in addition to heat and cold receptors).
Essentially, your lips were tricked into thinking they’ve been vibrated pretty
quickly, causing the brain to interpret the resulting signal as numbness. The
reason why people can eat this on a regular basis is that it is usually ground
up and distributed over a large sauce, and probably never just munched on
absent-mindedly (past Kevin: take note).
Honestly,
the feeling is kind of cool. Not something I would suggest doing regularly, but
I feel it’s the kind of culinary experience you should try at least once.
I
start this next section off with an apology to fans of Beijing cooking, 北京人 in general, and the staff of the steamed
dumpling restaurant on 鼓楼西大街 for having to throw out a 99% full bowl of what I am about describe
after I left the establishment. I will make no claim about the objective
quality about this dish, since that would be impossible, both from a general
perspective that taste is entirely subjective, and with the admittance that I have not had the
opportunity to get used to this sort of food enough to make such a statement
(hey, my people put horseradish on sandwiches, you probably think that’s weird,
too). Anyways. Here goes.
After a few hours
wandering about various hutongs within the Second Ring Road between 南锣鼓巷
(nánluógǔxiàng) and 积水潭
(jīshuǐtán) subway stations, I had
decided I needed some food. After some wandering, I came across a restaurant
promising great steamed dumplings. So far so good. I enter, and am faced with a
wall of pictures, showing different dishes. So far, so better! I order the
combination depicted on the first one (primarily by pointing – it appears to be
some sort of meat-filled dumpling and soup combo), pay, and am directed to the
pickup counter next to the kitchen in the back. My dumplings arrive, and the
cook picks up a bowl. That’s when I first saw 炒肝 (chaogan). It was
brown. It had meat-looking things in it. This by itself didn’t worry me; many
Chinese broths and soups that I very much enjoy look similar from far away. But
I quickly realized something in my taste buds was going to be amiss when he ladled
the mixture into my bowl. It had the consistency of gelatin. My bowl was filled
to the top, and quietly jiggled to itself. I became worried. I carried my tray
of dumplings and炒肝
to a table after picking up some dipping sauce (soy sauce, surprisingly – I had
expected vinegar, which seems to be the significantly preferred option in most
of China, unlike in our own kitchen in Chicago). I took my spoon, dipped it
into the炒肝,
and moved it towards my mouth. Suddenly the whole experience of this dish hit
me. It jiggled like Jell-o on my spoon, it smelled like the worst smells at an
old folks home, and it was filled with more unidentifiable meat than I had
experienced in memory. I would later find out that this meat is boiled pork
liver and intestine, and the consistency comes from starch added in the last
step of the process to thicken the broth. But at this moment something about
the combination of smell, consistency, and sight made my mouth attempt to run
screaming the other way. I couldn’t even finish one dumpling that only so much
as touched an errant glob of炒肝
that hit my table. I left the entire rest of my bowl on the table and quickly
walked out in shame. I had faced a new food, and I had most definitely lost.
 |
| Here is our friend, on the left |
Having
read up more on this stuff, I think I might have gotten unlucky and just picked
a bad batch. The soup is apparently supposed to be clearer, and more like a
thickened broth than gelatin, and a large part of the taste is supposed to be
the garlic/soy/vinegar combination (a usually quite winning combination) in the sauce. So maybe, just maaaaybe, I’ll try it again, for
example at Yauji Chaogan, allegedly the best in town for炒肝 (good enough to attract
Joe Biden, who came… but ordered the black bean noodles instead). On the other
hand, to quote a slang expression about炒肝 –
‘eating Chaogan is an internecine struggle’ – maybe I’ll pass just this one.
(Fun
fact: as legend has it, the name炒肝
(fried liver), despite being a misnomer (the liver is boiled, not fried), comes
from a suggestion by a food critic contemporaneous to its invention, who
posited that it would sound more appetizing)
No comments:
Post a Comment