Eating - Jason Epstein [38]
Mrs. Chao’s Chinese-style sashimi makes a good starter for an egg-foo-yung lunch. If you have the basic ingredients on hand and a good fish market nearby, you can whip it up in minutes, but you will have to let the dish stand for ten minutes or so while the fish marinates.
CHINESE-STYLE SASHIMI
You will need a very sharp thin-bladed knife with which to cut a pound of very fresh wild salmon, tuna, or wild striped-bass fillet, or a mixture of all three, into very thin, very neat oblong slices, as in Japanese sashimi. Then mix a tablespoon or so of dry sherry with another of soy sauce, a few grains (no more) of sea salt, a little fresh-ground pepper, a green onion trimmed and chopped very fine, and a teaspoon of sesame oil. Let the fish steep in this marinade in the refrigerator for ten minutes or so, and serve with a few sprigs of fresh cilantro.
Recently, my old friend Eddie Schoenfeld cooked for me and a few friends at his home in Brooklyn. I have known Eddie since the seventies, when I was startled one day at lunch with a Random House colleague at Uncle Tai’s, then the hottest upscale Chinese restaurant in New York, to find what appeared to be a bearded Chasid in a black suit, but without the usual hat, and with a nonregulation black bow tie, handing out menus. Eddie was not a Chasid. He had begun his odd career by arranging banquets for his friends at authentic Chinatown restaurants, and soon this became a business. One of these restaurants had made a great success by introducing spicy Szechuan cuisine to the United States, and its owner, David Keh, decided to try his luck uptown with Uncle Tai in the kitchen. He took Eddie with him. Eddie brought his clients along. The place was a huge success. And so we met.
Our friendship took root and blossomed. I suggested to Eddie that he and Uncle Tai write a cookbook. Uncle Tai’s so-called Hunanese recipes had caught on with uptown diners, and some would become classics, ubiquitous today on Chinese menus. To illustrate this success, Eddie multiplied for me the number of Chinese restaurants in the United States by the presumed proportion that include General Tso on their menus and calculates that Americans now spend over a billion dollars a year on these sweet, gooey, high-margin chicken thighs. Later, Eddie explained that these were not necessarily Uncle Tai’s recipes, nor were they Hunanese. Hunan is an impoverished province, and its cooking is undistinguished. But the name was easier to pronounce than “Szechuan,” and so Uncle Tai’s enterprising backer, David Keh, launched Hunan haute cuisine for the uptown trade. Moreover, some of the recipes were actually created by Mr. Peng, a reclusive genius from Taipei. Uncle Tai, a master chef with an unpredictable temper, adapted many of his dishes for Americans. When we signed the contract for the Uncle Tai cookbook, neither Eddie nor I knew this complex provenance. Nor did we know that Uncle Tai’s third son would be furious with Eddie for revealing his father’s recipes, which the son considered family property. On a busy evening at Uncle Tai’s, as Eddie was serving a banquet to a table of twelve, the number-three son, a waiter and a judo expert, flew at Eddie, who landed unconscious for a few minutes on the carpet. Eddie, a cool professional, eventually got up, arranged his tie, walked out of the restaurant, and