Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [96]
While one of the assistant cooks brings Fang a live slipper lobster—a clawless but sizable langouste—for his next dish, we take a lingering look around the immaculate kitchen. The only obvious things that would rile an American health inspector are trays and bowls of some prep ingredients sitting on the clean floor and the wood cutting boards, all round cross-cut sections of giant trees, usually about six inches thick. A couple of sous-chefs are intently carving squashes, making methodical, intricate cuts into the surface with the tiniest of knives. They fasten two pieces of their vegetable sculpture together, one on top of the other, to form a two-foot-high golden dragon destined for the center of the banquet table. Another squash, the size of a Halloween pumpkin, is being hollowed out to make a soup tureen. The carver selected it for its delicate shades of green, yellow, and pale orange, which he uses in incising images of birds in flight to highlight their graceful shapes and movements.
Fang holds the scrambling lobster firmly and splits it down the center, removing the meat meticulously by hand so that the shell can be reassembled. He picks up a handful of ginger and scallions and squeezes them forcefully to drip the juices on the meat, which he then sprinkles with a little rice wine. He allows the lobster to marinate briefly in this mixture before draining and cubing it to make wrapperless dumplings. After topping each neat cube with a sliver of ham and a perfect cilantro leaf arranged to look like a flower on a stem, the chef swathes the pretty packages in lacy-thin pork caul fat, a prized fat from the abdominal cavity that will nearly melt away during the steaming process. “Damn,” Bill whispers to Cheryl, “that makes our salsa seem ridiculous.”
Next, Fang squirms his right hand into a large, pastel spiraled shell, wrestling out a foot-long live whelk. He gives it a quick bath in a rice-wine marinade and tucks it back into its former home, placing the shell over the fire of a small charcoal brazier to roast slowly for two hours. At this point, the action and cameras switch across the table to Chef Su, who is cutting into a whole fish flopping around on the counter. It looks like the pomfret we saw in India, but no one knows the name of the fish in English. Su slices the meaty white flesh into plump rectangles, lays the pieces on a platter, and adds between each slivers of dark forest mushrooms, lard, ginger, and Yunnan ham, similar in smoke and salt flavor to an American country ham. He puts the platter into a large steamer to cook, later restoring the fish’s head, tail, and top fins to the serving plate at mealtime so that it looks whole again.
Fang draws our attention to cooks working on shark’s fin soup. “One of them,” he says through Vicky, “got here hours ago, in the middle of the night, to start the broth,” which contains at least chicken feet, pork, beef, scallion, and ginger from what we can gather. Neither of us would order the soup in a restaurant—because of the brutal way the fins are harvested from live sharks—but we won’t refuse it in this situation because the Chinese regard it as a delicacy to give to honored guests. The cooks eventually remove the long-simmered fin from the broth, pull it into hundreds of gelatinous bits, and serve it in bowls topped with cilantro and black vinegar. It tastes like a meaty version of bean-thread noodles.
Moving into a more instructional mode, Fang shows us and the assembled chefs how to slice and cross-hatch squid steaks to make them resemble a ginger flower when steamed. He does it a dozen times, but the technique sails over our heads. Explaining that a garlic-vinegar sauce goes with the squid blossoms, he demonstrates how he wants the garlic sliced into tiny bits rather than mashed, and passes around tastes of it in vinegar treated both ways to illustrate the subtle difference. Grabbing a couple of tail-on shrimp, he talks next about cutting them to achieve the desired presentation effect. If you want them to curl up,