The Shun Lee Cookbook - Michael Tong [0]
Shun Lee
COOKBOOK
RECIPES FROM A
CHINESE RESTAURANT
DYNASTY
Michael Tong
AND ELAINE LOUIE
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROGÉRIO VOLTAN
Contents
Introduction
The Chinese Pantry
Equipment
Cooking Chinese Food at Home
Hot Appetizers
Cold Appetizers
Soups
Fish and Shellfish
Poultry
Beef, Lamb, and Pork
Vegetables
Noodles and Rice
Desserts
Acknowledgments
Sources
Index
About the Author
copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
AS I WALK THROUGH THE DINING ROOMS of my restaurants, Shun Lee Palace and Shun Lee West, I am often stopped by customers who regale me with stories of how the restaurants changed the way they enjoy Chinese food. They tell me about the first time they had Mu Shu Pork, or how, as children, they loved hearing the gong that accompanied the arrival of Beijing Duck, or that they learned to use chopsticks at our tables. I am delighted and proud to be a part of their lives.
My personal story is also the story of how the real cooking of the most important regional Chinese cuisines came to America. Over the decades, the New York City restaurants I worked in, and then owned, introduced American diners to authentic Chinese dishes that are now classics, found on Asian restaurant menus all over this country. Crispy Orange Beef, Lake Tung Ting Prawns, Crispy Sea Bass … they all originated at Shun Lee. In addition to creating these dishes, we also exposed the collective palate of New York diners to the complex Chinese seasonings that are now part of the American culinary landscape.
When I first came to the United States more than forty years ago, it wasn’t difficult to find Chinese food, as long as you were satisfied with the elegant but restrained cooking of the province of Canton. Menus in the Chinatowns of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, and Chicago were strictly limited to fare that restaurateurs believed would appeal to their American clientele. For example, shrimp with lobster sauce—with no lobster in sight—was on every menu. A number of dishes that seemed Chinese (to Americans) but were never served in my homeland were also offered up, including egg foo yung, chow mein, and barbecued spareribs. In China we barbecued entire pigs, not just the ribs!
If the first Chinese chefs in America came from Canton, the Communist takeover of the mainland in 1949 changed all that. Cooks on Chinese merchant vessels, unwilling to return to the changed political landscape, jumped ship in Manhattan and received political asylum. These cooks, who came from all over China, opened storefront restaurants, the first Chinese restaurants to offer non-Cantonese fare. These operations were far uptown near Harlem, where the rent was cheap. The decor may have been basic, with fake wood paneling and linoleum floors, but the food was something else again. A Chinese culinary revolution was taking place in uptown Manhattan—but the only people experiencing it were Columbia University students looking for great, cheap food and Chinese immigrants longing for an authentic taste of home.
I was one of those Chinese, starved for the kind of cooking I loved. I grew up in Shanghai, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, three entirely different cities with radically dissimilar cuisines. My palate was similar to that of the American who loves to eat fried chicken in Atlanta, grilled salmon in Seattle, and pastrami in New York. I came to the United States as an engineering student, first at the University of Southern California, and then at Oklahoma State University. During the summer breaks, I worked as a waiter. In 1964 I ended up in New York, where I had family.
My uncle invited me to eat at a restaurant called Shun Lee, way uptown on Broadway at 91st Street. Here were the dishes that my mother and grandmother cooked—recipes from all corners of China, but especially Shanghai and Sichuan. Shanghai was represented by dishes like the famous Lion’s Head (pork and cabbage meatballs) and Sichuan by Slippery Chicken. There were also specialties of Beijing, like Bejing Duck. The food was spectacular. The chef was Tsung Ting Wang,