My teaching, my cooking lessons always begin in the Chinese market. Heaps of vegetables, familiar and exotic; the pork butchers; the herbalists and their shops comprise my classroom, my laboratory. In them I find recurring veins of discovery. In them I teach and simultaneously I learn. Sometimes when I am at home in my kitchen, my mind focused on the foods I am preparing, my thoughts will suddenly shift to a particular shop, along a particular street, in my Chinatown. I know that the next time I visit that shop I will find the greenest, smallest, most crisp bok choy, the liveliest striped bass swimming in tanks, and mounds of freshly picked lily bulbs and garlic flown in from China.
My mind is ever filled with the memories of a lifetime of cooking, learned and tested, gifts to me from the cooks and chefs, the dim sum artists and the da shi fu (kitchen masters), the farmers and fishermen in the many parts of China in which I have lived and cooked. They have given me the permanent legacy of a love and respect for food, its cultivation, and its preparation. It has been my life’s work to try to transmit to my students the appreciation I have for the traditions of my native foods.
All of this begins in the market, and my markets are many. Few markets in the world can match the freshness, breadth, and variety of those found in China, and few markets in China can compare to the Qing Ping market in Guangzhou. This unstructured retail space, which snakes its way through a zigzag of tiny alleys, began as an underground free market decades ago when vegetable and fruit growers, fishermen and poultrymen, and the driers and blenders of spices and herbs rebelled against the rigid communes of the Mao Zedong era, which they believed cared more for numbers than for freshness and quality. I have shopped in the Qing Ping market often, and on any morning I have found live chickens and ducks and their eggs; whole pigs, live and roasted; fish swimming in shallow zinc pools; crawling crabs and piles of fresh mussels and clams; and small mountains of vegetables, the dirt of the fields still clinging to their roots. Preserved and pickled foods fill ceramic barrels. Crude wooden stands and sheds, quickly nailed together, offer fresh herbs that are weighed on tiny bronze scales. This market is a visual and aromatic joy.
Similar markets, less imposing but equally dedicated to the freshness and quality so in demand by the Chinese, are to be found in Beijing. Most of them are movable markets, such as those along streets like Donghuamen and Bai Wan Zhuang and along the edges of Temple of Heaven Park, each determined by the unceasing urban expansion of the Chinese capital. But people will not be denied their morning dumplings, no matter where they have to go for them. Similarly, the unabated growth of Shanghai has seen the repeated upheaval of neighborhood markets, though, again, morning and afternoon shoppers remain undeterred. In Chengdu, Sichuan’s capital, the markets are home to the rice-flour dumplings beloved by the locals, and to the special dried reddish peppercorns that are indispensable to the cooking of western China. Fuzhou markets are a treasure trove of the fine teas and imaginative sweets of Fujian Province, in southeastern China. Regional variety, provincial smells, the foods of tradition—these are the many markets of China.
In Hong Kong, just south of Guangzhou, the rivals to Qing Ping are Sham Shui Po, a sprawling enclave on the route north out of Kowloon toward the New Territories, which border on China proper, and Yau Ma Tei in central Kowloon. I regard them highly, and they are my neighborhood markets when I am in Hong Kong. Sham Shui Po spreads its web among avenues, streets, and tiny dead-end alleys, offering live chickens, ducks, and squabs. Its fish swim in tanks, where they wait to be chosen by housewife or amah, netted, and once approved, bopped on the head with a wooden mallet, scaled, slit, gutted, and then packed into a plastic sack of sea or river water for the trip home. Yau Ma Tei is a vast, open market, a collection of working pork butchers, chicken pluckers, and fishmongers, with knife sharpeners honing cleavers on rotating stones, next to vegetable and fruit stands and herb growers and driers. On my periodic trips to Hong Kong, I never fail to visit these markets, if only to look at and inhale the sights and smells I remember from my childhood in the markets of Sun Tak Yuen, the district near Guangzhou of my birth.
Because Hong Kong’s residents are intensely preoccupied with food and eating, all manner of different markets thrive in this former British colony, now a special administrative region of the People’s Republic of China. In Wanchai, near the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club, a market catering to what was once a lively neighborhood of boat people exists in the remnants of the Causeway Bay Typhoon Shelter. West of Hong Kong Island’s Central District lies the Western District, possibly the world’s largest collection of shops selling dried herbs and spices imported from all over Asia. Here, too, are hundreds of dealers who trade in the dried exotica of China’s cuisine: shark’s fins; very special, very dear abalone from Japan; sea cucumbers; and bird’s nests, the saliva-woven homes of Southeast Asian swifts, destined for soups believed to heighten female beauty and prolong youth.
Over the years, these indelible pictures and smells—memories of Chinese-food shopping—have been, and continue to be, carried from China to Europe and to the Americas by immigrants in search of the golden mountain of the West. Nowadays, my memories, both old and new, are constantly refreshed in the ever-changing marketplaces of my adopted country, where Chinatowns, all of them havens for Chinese immigrants, have sprung up in the larger cities.
In San Francisco, all of the necessities for Chinese cooking are found in the shops and kiosks along Powell Street and Grant Avenue, and along Stockton Street, sandwiched between them. The vegetables and fruits, from close-by California farms, are fine indeed, as are Chinatown’s fish and meat markets. Its groceries will have the soy of your choice, and the rice wines and black vinegars you will need, and the shop next door will offer carbon-and stainless-steel woks of all sizes. All of this you will find repeated in that sunny-bright enclave of Chinese food just outside of Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles. In Philadelphia the traditional Chinatown hive of shops and restaurants is downtown along Arch Street, and in Boston the live chickens and ducks cackle and quack among the immigrant walk-ups and stores along Beach Street and Washington Avenue.
The new look in Chinatowns is the all-inclusive giant supermarket, found in Chicago along Argyle Street, out in the Arizona desert in Tempe, in the New Jersey suburbs of New York City, up north in Toronto, and out West in Seattle and Vancouver, all newer settings for Chinese immigrants. Many of these vast stores that consolidate all aspects of Chinese cooking under a single roof—supermarkets that can truly be called super markets—dwarf airplane hangers. They offer roasted ducks and pigs and prepare foods of limitless variety to take away. In one, a veritable aquarium of live, edible fish and shellfish swim in individual filtered freshwater and saltwater tanks awaiting nets: striped bass, sea bass, and black bass; flounders and catfish; the grass carp popular in southern China; the yellow croaker favored in Beijing; the yellow eel of Shanghai; and the giant Dungeness crabs from the waters of the western United States. Shelves are piled high with cans from every region of China, with jars and bottles of sauces, wines, vinegars, and pickles.
These huge markets are Chinese versions of that American phenomenon, the big store that has everything. To be sure, they are wonderfully complete, with a wide range of choices, and if a shopper knows what she or he wants and needs, they are time-savers. I use them to advantage; when I need something quickly, and I know exactly what it is, I head to one of these megastores. What they lack, however, is context. They are not, of course, traditional markets of the street, so familiar smells are absent. There is no chatter from buyers haggling with sellers. There is no comparison shopping, no judging of the snow pea shoots, the purple-white eggplants, the choi sum, the Tianjin bok choy, the Chinese spinach piled high in front of one sidewalk shop against the same vegetables stocked by a vendor just a few doors away. There are no aged women peeling gingko nuts and selling homemade bamboo leaf-wrapped glutinous rice dumplings on the corner, no careful shoppers picking through baskets of live blue crabs, looking for the fattest. There are no barrels of freshly cooked bean curd, no noodle makers. These big markets are cleaner and brighter, but it is difficult to get a sense of texture through heavy plastic wrappings.
For me, context is all-important. Anyone who hopes to learn to cook in the Chinese way needs to be aware of foods in their purest state possible. It is not sufficient to buy a product you have read about, take it home, and cook it in the way a book says to cook it. Foods should be touched, hefted, smelled, tasted when possible, tested for freshness and crisp-ness with a gentle squeeze. If you will be using sugarcane sugar in a Chinese sweet, pick up a length of the bamboo-like cane, ask a grocer to cut off a small piece, chew it to a straw mash, and you will understand sugarcane. Do not buy a fish lying on a bed of ice if you can avoid it. Buy it live from a tank, have a fishmonger scale and gut it, and then ask to touch it, to smell it. You will instantly understand fish better. To do all of these things, to experience them, go to a Chinese market. It is what I do.
My market is New York City’s Chinatown, once two parallel blocks of Lower Manhattan named Mott and Mulberry streets, now a spreading city within a city, a place where hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants live and work. New York’s Chinatown is irreplaceable as a market and as a piece of history. Before its streets were Chinese, they were where the gangs of New York fought, where the Dutch, Irish, Scandinavians, Italians, and Jews first settled in America before moving on to other parts of the city and to the suburbs. All immigrants bring their culture, their myths, their foods, and their traditions, but no group seems to have accomplished this with more fervor and breadth than the Chinese. I love my Chinatown, as a market, as a place. There are days when its smells remind me of the streets of the Guangdong village of my childhood. Other times I see in it, feel in it, bits and pieces of the China and Hong Kong that I know. Always it is where I begin to cook and to teach.
Written by Eillen Yin-Fei Lo in "Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking", Chronicle Books, San Francisco, USA, 2009, excerpts pp.11-15. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.