The Secrets of Cantonese Cooking, America's First Chinese Cuisine _ Serious Eats

The Secrets of Cantonese Cooking,America's First Chinese CuisineOct 15, 2014 11:15AM

Joe DiStefano Chinese food court sleuth

[Photograph: Robyn Lee]

"Chicken," the dim sum lady said to my

father when he gestured at the steamed-up,

inverted glass bowl atop a white plate. He

nodded and she handed over the chicken

and stamped our ticket. He lifted the bowl

and my brothers and I gasped as we beheld a

tangle of gnarled chicken feet in a dark

sauce shot through with fermented black soy

beans. The old man gamely dug in.

Regular trips with my parents to New York City's Chinatown were a major part of my

culinary education as a child. One of my earliest and most cherished food memories isn't

about my father's Italian cooking; it's being hoisted up to steamy window to ogle glistening

hunks of char siu.

We always visited the Chinese grocer, where my father purchased mushroom soy sauce.

Next stop: the noodle factory, a bustling, decidedly non-retail production space where my

father would peek behind the curtain and shout "wonton skin" to whichever white-clad

worker was closest at hand. Dad used the wrappers for homestyle chow funthe same dish

that taught me to use chopsticks when I slurped down rice noodles with my brother Tony on

Mott Street.

Char siu. [Photograph: Max Falkowitz]

It wasn't until my twenties that I realized

that dim sum, roasted meats, and such offal

as chicken feet are all part and parcel of a

specific regional cuisine of China: Cantonese

food. Up until that point, I assumed that

what I'd been eating in Manhattan's

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Chinatown was "real Chinese food," as

opposed to the battered-and-fried Lotus

Garden variety of Long Island strip mall Chinese.

It'd take even longer before I learned about the golden rules of Cantonese cooking: the

importance of subtlety and letting ingredients speak for themselves. Yes, soy-sauced

noodles, epic meals of dim sum, and fatty roasted meats are all indeed hallmarks of

Cantonese food. But so are delicate steamed or fried whole flounder and light vegetable

dishes. Even today, there's a lot more to Cantonese cuisine than what we Americans think.

China's Most Cosmopolitan Cuisine

"Cantonese cooking, which is from the province of Guangdong, has an undeserved

negative reputation," says Kian Lam Kho, the author of Chinese food blog Red Cook who is

currently working on a definitive cookbook on classic Chinese cooking techniques.

"This is unfortunate, since Cantonese cooking is one of the most refined and celebrated

cuisines in China. Go to any large city in China, or indeed in Asia; Cantonese restaurants

are the most popular and highly sought after."

The Pearl River Delta area of Guangdong province, anchored by the city of Guangzhou, was

the first region sanctioned by the Qing Dynasty imperial court to be opened for trade with

the outside world in the 18th century. As foreign merchants arrived in the region, they

established trading posts and brought along with them not only their merchandise, but

their culinary customs as well. Thus Guangdong cooking became the first truly

cosmopolitan cuisine of China. And as Guandgong residents were among the first in China

to immigrate to America, their food has cemented itself as the default Chinese cooking in

the States.

All About Subtlety

Fish waiting for their number. [Photograph:

Max Falkowitz]

Cantonese cuisine is typified by simple

dishes that are all about clear, natural

flavors, reflections of the region's abundant

seafood and agriculture. While cooks in

Sichuan and Dongbei may blast their food


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with spice, Cantonese cooks employ very

few heavy spices, letting main ingredients

speak for themselves. Also unlike the cuisines of Northern and Western China, lamb and

goat are rarely seen on the Cantonese table. Pork, beef, chicken, fish, and seafoodand

often all parts thereofare the primary proteins. (Game meats like civet, finch, and snake

are consumed for medicinal purposes.)

Ed Schoenfeld, the New York City restaurateur behind American-Chinese icons Shun Lee,

Pig Heaven, and Red Farm, and sage of Chinese food in America, regards the Cantonese

obsession with freshness thus: "Food is meant to taste like what it is. There might be a lot of

manipulation, but the end product is meant to be something that tastes like itself."

You see the practice most in the Cantonese treatment of live fish. During my childhood trips

to Chinatown, I was always amazed by Fish Corner Market's bins of grouper, flounder, and

countless other aquatic edibles. Fish Corner Market is now long gone, but live fish plucked

from a restaurant aquarium to be steamed or fried to order remains a tradition in

Chinatowns from Queens to Hong Kong.

Cantonese fried fish should be as fresh and greaseless as the best tempura, and even subtler

steamed fish should be light and delicate. "Cantonese people want that fish extremely

fresh. The beauty to them is the texture the cleanness of the fish," Schoenfeld says.

Kho counts himself a fan of steamed fish, which he says should be doused with a sauce made

from soy sauce, rice wine, and a little sugar before finally topped with finely julienned

ginger and scallion drizzled with fragrant hot oil. "This savory fish scented with the ginger

and scallion could make a gourmand cry if executed perfectly."

Cantonese Flavors

Sticky rice with la chang. [Photograph:

Robyn Lee]

Soy sauce, sugar, black vinegar, and

fermented bean paste are used all over

China, but in Cantonese food, "garlic,

ginger, and scallion is like the holy trinity,"

Schoenfeld notes. You'll find other

seasonings in the kitchen, like chili peppers,

five spice powder, black pepper, and star


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anise, but they're used sparingly.

In addition to soy sauce, which comes in a few varieties, Cantonese pantries call for sweet

and savory hoisin sauce, plum sauce, shrimp paste, and dried black beans. The latter is

known in Chinese as dou chioften translated as salted black beansand is used to make

the pungent, fermented-tasting black bean sauce. Dou chi are actually the oldest known

food made from soy beans, and they're not light on the salt. You can learn that the hard way

like my father did when he added more than the recommended amount to a recipe that

turned out inedible.

Other fermented, dried, or cured ingredients punch up Cantonese cooking's mild flavors.

Jiang yao zhu, or fishy dried scallops, are often added to clear soups or the rice porridge

congee. La chang, a sweet, fatty dried sausage that looks like a cross between a Slim Jim and

a pepperoni stick, lubricates sticky rice. Xian dan, wobbly black salted duck eggs, liven up

congee with their funky alkaline flavor. And mei cai, salt-pickled Chinese cabbage, is

typically cooked with pork fried rice.

All these flavors are brought together with a variety of techniques that includes steaming,

stir frying, shallow frying, double steaming, braising, deep frying, and roasting. The latter

is a technique known in Cantonese as siu mai (or shao wei in Mandarin) and includes all

manner of lovely roast meats, including that bright red, five-spice-inflected roast pork I

used to ogle in Chinatown windows as a lad.

Crucial Carbs: Rice and Noodles

Bo zai fan. [Photograph: Max Falkowitz]

Steamed white rice is a staple in Cantonese

cuisine, a way to fill out barbecued meats,

steamed fish, or stir fries. Rice is also the

central ingredient in elaborate chao fan,

fried rice dishes, which far exceed what one

would find in the corner takeout shop. One

of my favorites, the grandly named Famous

Golden Fried Rice at Canton Gourmet, in the

bustling Chinatown of downtown Flushing, Queens, features savory XO sauce with dried

scallop and shrimp, chili, and garlic; golden raisins; and shreds of cured egg yolk to

delicious, sweet-savory-aromatic effect.


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Bao zai fan, or little pot rice, consists of rice cooked in a ceramic casserole dish of sorts

topped with other ingredients and served in the cooking vessel. Popular varieties include

spare ribs (pai gu bao zai fan) and Chinese sausage with preserved meat (la wei bao zai fan).

Then there's congeerice porridgea breakfast staple often eaten with such intensely

flavored items as fermented tofu or preserved eggs.

More Cantonese Icons

Seafood

[Photograph: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

There's more to Cantonese seafood than

steamed and fried fish. Signature dishes

include snails stir fried with black bean

sauce, fried shell-on salt and pepper shrimp,

steamed scallops with ginger and garlic, and

other more exotic aquatics like sea

cucumber and jellyfish, the latter of which is

served as a cold salad.

Stir Fried Noodles

[Photograph: Max Falkowitz]

Chow fun, broad rice noodles, are a staple of

my childhood. They're also a close relative of

ho fun, also known as Shahe fen after the

town in Guangzhou where they originated.

Wok hei, literally "the breath of the wok,"

plays a large role in a perfect stir fried

chowthe noodles should have a delicate

smoky character from the wok's heat and

seared oil. A good chow fun should be just oily enough to feel slick and should maintain a

slight char without tasting dry or burnt.

Fried Chicken


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[Photograph: Max Falkowitz]

Cantonese fried chicken (zha zi ji) deserves

as much fame as its counterpart in the

American South. A whole bird is boiled with

such aromatics as star anise, cinnamon, and

nutmeg, then dried off and fried without

batter or dredging until the skin is

shatteringly crisp, not unlike Peking duck.

The glorious thing is then chopped up and topped off with heaps of fried garlic.

It's a common banquet dish, and the basis for more elaborate poultry preparations, like

swatches of chicken skin atop deep fried shrimp paste. But the prize for most complicated

poultry goes to Luk Yu Teahouse in Hong Kong, where an entire bird is deboned, then

stuffed with a mixture of glutinous rice, Chinese sausage, chicken meat, shiitake

mushrooms, and dried shrimp, among other things. The whole thing is then fried to a

shattering crunch by repeatedly bathing it in hot oil.

Soup

Slow-cooked soups (lao huo tang, literally "old fire soup"), are commonplace at banquets,

but are also consumed for medicinal purposes. "For me it's always about the soups," says

Yen Yen Woo the co-creator of Dim Sum Warriors, a graphic novel with a culinary edge (Yen

Yen and her husband are also active in Flushing's Chinese food scene). "There's a soup for

every season and every ailment, so you eat winter melon soup when it's too hot. Soups are

very important for Cantonese people," Woo explains. For instance, a soup of spare ribs with

watercress and apricot kernals (nan bei xing xi yang cai zhu gu tang) is also renowned for its

cooling effect upon the body.

Dim Sum


The islands of Hong Kong and Macao lie on

the coastal edge of Guangdong province at

the mouth of the Pearl River Delta and were

governed for many years by two European

colonial powers, the British Empire and


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Portugal, respectively. Both colonies have

left their mark upon Cantonese cuisine. The

best-known Portuguese influenced dish would have to be the egg tart, or dan tat, now found

in bakeries and dim sum restaurants from Vancouver to Hong Kong. "Few people realize

that it is a version of the pastis de nata that originated in Belm outside of Lisbon," Kho

notes.

At one time dim sum was humble, cheap street food, but these days, in Chinese

communities, it's served in palatial dining halls. The chicken feet that shocked me all those

years ago are one staple, poetically named "phoenix claws," (feng zhao), featuring chicken

feet that have been deep fried, boiled, marinated in a black bean sauce, and then steamed.


You eat them by nibbling on the savory skin

and cartilage while discreetly spitting out

the bones. "Chicken feet make you run very

fast," a Chinese table mate at New York

City's Jing Fong once said with a smile, as

she and I dug into a fresh bowl.

But for me, dim sum will always be about

the dumplings. I adore the pleated, open-topped siu mai filled with shrimp and pork and

crowned with crab roe. My heart truly belongs to har gao, though, the crescent-shaped

dumplings packed with shrimp and pork fat and wrapped in a chewy, slightly translucent

dough that are a must-order at any dim sum house.

More Eating Adventures With Joe DiStefano

More Than Ma La: A Deeper Introduction to Sichuan Cuisine

The 10 Commandments of Adventurous Eating

How I Learned to Stop Ordering 'Thai Spicy'


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The Secrets of Cantonese Cooking, America's First Chinese Cuisine _ Serious Eats

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