Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking

INTRODUCTION

THE CHINESE MARKET

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.

PART 1

THE MARKET AS CLASSROOM

My classes begin in a market street, of which there are dozens in my Chinatown, in one of the many varieties of food shops. These are centuries-old streets with narrow sidewalks up against venerable tenements, three-story walk-ups of chipped bricks, iron fire escapes, and red stone smooth with age. Some buildings have been refaced, others sandblasted, and still others are as they were left by preceding waves of immigrants. Their ground floors are where change has come. Shops, festooned with signs and awnings dense with Chinese calligraphy, most of them selling fresh and prepared foods, and restaurants, new and old, nestle among storefront Buddhist and Taoist temples. Here a noodle maker, and over there a bean-curd cooker, fashioning what the Chinese, who invented it, call doufu and what much of the rest of the world calls tofu. Nearby, under the slanted tin roof of a tiny lean-to that has attached itself to a new bank, a man wearing a New York baseball cap cups his hands as he makes and fries dumplings on a portable steel grill. Chinatown opens early.

I begin early as well because I want my students to see and smell freshness, to begin to experience all aspects of the foods they will first cook with me, then later, I hope, cook by themselves with confidence. I want them to begin to become familiar with, rather than daunted by, the supposed mysteries of Chinese food. What are we going to make today? asks one of my students, as we meet a few steps away from shops selling rice wines from Shaoxing and black vinegars from Zhejiang and Guangdong. I am always asked that question, and I find that the asking of it allows me to rein in the impatience, the anticipation, of the class. I tell them what the menu will be, but quickly add that first we have to buy the ingredients we will need. And then the adventure begins, as I attempt to instill in my new students a basic respect for the foods we will be cooking and the importance of precision when buying them.

It is not sufficient to simply buy soy sauce or oyster sauce, bamboo shoots or snow cabbage, red rice vinegar or peanut oil just because particular recipes call for them. I believe that everyone should know something about the properties of these ingredients—some history, some folklore, perhaps a bit of mythology, surely a touch of tradition. I impart this information in bits and pieces and in different ways. We stop at a vegetable and fruit store. There, I say, pointing to a pyramid of crisp, golden brown fruit, are Asian pears, usually, incorrectly called, Japanese pears. They actually are Chinese, native to China, and they are called sand pears because of their grainy texture. And these,—I point to a pile of melons—are Hami melons. I explain that the oval-shaped, green-skinned fruits are crisp and sweet and have pink-orange flesh like a cantaloupe. They are about the size of a cantaloupe, too, and are particularly prized in China because they are available for only a brief period each summer. I have them touch shiny, finger-shaped Chinese eggplants, some white, some white mottled with pale purple, some deep purple. These are usually called Japanese eggplants by those who haven’t done their homework. They are Chinese.

I walk them in front of a series of similar bulbous stalked vegetables stacked in rows. These are bok choy, I say. They nod. Everybody knows bok choy, correct? More nods. Not so, I say. I show them that bok choy, the most familiar, is white stemmed with green leaves and up to fifteen inches long. Next to it is another bok choy, smaller, with milky white stalks, and are thus called milk bok choy, as a reference to infants. Then I gesture toward yet another bok choy, even smaller, about four inches long, and still others that are smaller, no more than two to three inches long. These last two are called baby bok choy. As if all of this was not sufficiently confounding, I point to two other stacks. That is bok choy, too, Shanghai bok choy and Shanghai baby bok choy. The first is about six inches long and deeper green than bok choy, and the second is about three inches long. The students’ expressions become quizzical. Do we need to know all this? I believe so, and I explain that, although they all are essentially the same vegetable, I have distinguished each one to suggest that when shopping for bok choy, they buy with precision, and for good reason.

Regular bok choy, inherently the sweetest, is perfect for soups and for stir-fries, particularly as a complement to pork and beef. Baby bok choy is tender and sweet and brings its sweetness to soups. Smaller bok choy are usually cooked whole and used as a garnish, and the smallest, also cooked whole in stock, are served as a course of a larger meal or used to dress other dishes. Shanghai bok choy, less tender, is ideal for braising and for soups, but only after first being tenderized in stock. All of this is a tangible lesson in purposeful food buying. As we continue to walk this produce market, I point out choi sum; snow peas and their tender shoots, the latter called dau miu by the Cantonese and doumiao by Mandarin speakers; jicama, the crisp, hard root from America’s Southwest that the Cantonese call sah gut and which is largely unknown in the north; lotus root and taro root; and fresh, hard red dates, unmatched for imparting sweetness to stocks.

As we shop, I often reach back into my family’s beliefs that I absorbed growing up in Guangdong. I tell my students that in my Cantonese village, people often ate the sounds and the symbols of individual foods. I gesture toward heads of Chinese lettuce that resemble romaine heads and that we called sang choy, which sounds like the Cantonese for growing fortune, making it the good luck vegetable, and I explain that the lettuces are hung over doorways during the Lunar New Year. Scallions are chung ming, which sounds like always wise; packages of dried hair seaweed are fat choy, a homonym for prosperity; and lotus seeds, because of their numbers, ensure every year will bring more sons. All of this helps to illustrate that many vegetables and other foods have homonymic and symbolic meanings, which often vary throughout China depending on regional dialect and tradition. I point out what I like to call the basic trinity of Chinese cooking—scallions, ginger, and garlic—since virtually every dish has at least one of these and often all three.

I explain that many vegetables native to China that were once little known or unknown in the United States are now, because of the demand from a growing immigrant population, farmed here. Of course, bok choy has been familiar for years, but not green-leaved, green-stalked choi sum; hollow-stemmed water spinach; deep green mustard greens; Tianjin bok choy, also known as napa cabbage; chrysanthemum leaves; eighteen-inch-long green beans; yellow and green chives, once grown in Chinatown basements by enterprising immigrants; and so-called hairy beans, small, young, green soybeans eaten as a vegetable, especially in Shanghai.

Once water chestnuts outside of China came only in cans. Now they are sold fresh, still covered with the dried mud of the mire in which they are grown, but white, crisp, and sweet when peeled. I note that Chinese gourds, such as the round bitter melon and the ridged silk squash, were once rare and are now widely available, as are fresh gingko nuts, and small, deep red beans that are the basis for sweet soups. We will stop back at our grocery to buy the vegetables we will need.

We pause in front of one of the many bakeries that have sprung up in Chinatown in recent years, repositories for the Western-style layer cakes, cupcakes, muffins, and cookies first baked by the Chinese in Shanghai, when its French Concession was dominant. These bakeries also offer glutinous rice flour cakes filled with cooked black sesame seeds and sugar that the Chinese believe will stop their hair from graying. Before you believe this, however, you should ask my husband, I say. It hasn’t worked for him. I point to another shelf. Do you see those Chinese fortune cookies? I ask rhetorically, then I answer my own question. Do not think for a moment they are Chinese. I’m not sure where they originated, I go on, but I do know it was not in China, and I suspect the manufacturers here hire needy English majors from New York University to write the fortunes that paraphrase Confucius.

We stop at the counter of a dim sum parlor to pick up the baked pork buns the Cantonese call char siu bau so we can taste them before moving on to a butcher shop, its window hung with long strips of barbecued pork, equally long racks of barbecued pork ribs, glistening roasted ducks, and rows of plump chickens, their skins taut and shiny from being braised with shallots and onions and then hung to dry.

Inside the long, brightly lighted market are rows of whole, freshly killed chickens and their many separate parts, all resting in refrigerated glass display cases. I point out that the cooked ducks and chickens in the window and their fresh refrigerated uncooked counterparts are part of the poultry continuum that has existed in China for seven thousand years. Chickens have been domesticated in China for that long and have been valued not only for their meat, but also for their eggs. In China, I tell my students, chickens are not only fried and roasted, the preparations with which they are most familiar, nor are they eaten breaded and battered in the style of U.S. fast-food restaurants, but they are smoked, boiled, braised, stir-fried, and cooked with noodles. They are minced, sliced, or diced and put into soups, dumplings, and rice or wrapped in lettuce leaves. Even old, tough roosters have value. They are simmered for hours and the resulting rich broth is drunk as a health tonic. Such adaptability is highly regarded, even venerated, I explain, and the chicken is regarded as a symbol of rebirth, an edible manifestation of the phoenix, the bird of myth that arose from its own ashes.

The skins of the refrigerated chickens vary in color from white to yellow to dark charcoal gray, the latter known as black chickens. Why the different colors? I am asked. I pose the question to the man behind the display case. Chickens are like people, he answers, grinning. Some are light. Some are dark. Some are medium. In that market stop, I also always point out that just as the Chinese have raised chickens for seven thousand years, they have raised ducks for at least three thousand or quite possibly more of those years. This includes not only the best-known breed, the Peking duck, but other breeds as well that are variously roasted, boiled, smoked, and salted.

Later we will go to a wonderful poultry-only market, where fresh chickens, quail, squabs, and ducks lie side by side on refrigerated shelves. It also carries the black chickens we have just seen, fancifully called juk suh chi, or bamboo silk chickens, by the Cantonese. They have black skin, bones, and meat and are cooked for as long as eight hours in a process known as double-boiling, which calls for steaming them over boiling water in a closed porcelain container. The liquid they produce is considered a health-giving tonic, and the meat is never eaten. Freshly killed ducks—both farm raised and wild—are for sale, sitting next to dozens of fresh duck eggs. What are the differences between a duck and a chicken egg? I am asked. Duck eggs are generally larger and rarer and more commonly salted or preserved.

Back in the long, well-lighted meat market, we move on. I point out that it is important to remember that when the word meat is used in the study of Chinese food, it refers always to pork. Historically, lamb and beef were eaten in northern China, but pork was, and is, the meat of most of the country. Pork and its uses are as unlimited as its carefully butchered cuts. I point out a grand display of pork in a refrigerated case: pieces of pork stomach, boned pork feet, loaves of coagulated pork blood, pork shoulder, sliced pig’s ears, pork intestines, pork liver, fresh and cured pork belly (the latter, Chinese bacon), pork ribs, pork loin, pork chops, pork shin meat, fresh ham, pork shanks, chunks of pork butt for stew, spare ribs, pork hocks, pig’s tails, pork tongue, pork kidneys, pig’s uterus, pork neck bones, pig mouth meat, and strips of pork fat for rendering into lard. Amid all of these items, sitting like a pile of lace, are layers of pork caul, stomach membrane that Western cooks use as casings for ground meat or for wrapping meat to keep it moist as it cooks, which the Chinese prefer to render because it makes a particularly fine, delicate cooking fat.

Whole pigs, cooked and not, hang in the butcher’s window, and inside the shop, barbecued pig’s heads are for sale, their cheeks, ears, snout, and tongue in place. In much of China, I tell my class, a roasted suckling pig—a tiny fellow, no more than twenty to twenty-five pounds that has been carefully turned over an open fire until its skin crisps into virtual parchment—is an esteemed banquet dish. It is the prized skin that is served. Although not on display, such roasted pigs are for sale as well, I explain, but they must be special ordered. The only part of the pig not for sale as food is its whiskers—hard, pliable bristles that make fine hair brushes.

I take my students through the varieties of Chinese pork sausages known as lop cheong, thin uncooked sausages that are utterly delicious when steamed with rice or vegetables. They are made of coarsely ground pork, pork studded with pork fat, or pork mixed with pork liver or duck liver and are light red when they are not laced with soy sauce and dark red when they are. I tell them that if in the future they find they like these coarsely ground sausages, they should ask for Hong Kong style, and if they prefer smoother-textured sausages, they should request Canadian style.

As we weave our way through the Chinatown streets we stop to buy such necessities as soy sauce, sesame oil, oyster sauce, white and red rice vinegars, and rice wines. We do not buy pickled ginger, pickled chile peppers, or chili sauce, though jars of all of these are for sale, because we will be making them ourselves.

We pick up some fermented black beans, fresh garlic and ginger, and some white peppercorns. I mention that when pepper is called for in Chinese cooking, white pepper should be used. Traditionally, black pepper was rarely used in China, though in recent years it has been an occasional ingredient, primarily in Hong Kong, for cooking beef and veal, the latter a meat known only in China’s large cities. Near the peppercorns and the packets of vegetable starches are boxes of monosodium glutamate, the infamous MSG. Are we going to use this? I am usually asked, a question I welcome because it gives me a chance to preach a bit. No, we will not be using MSG, I say. It is nothing but a temporary enhancer, a small jolt of sodium, a salt. It is unnecessary if you cook with good ingredients, good stocks, good oils, and patience.

Fish abound in Chinatown. They are displayed on sidewalk stands atop mounds of shaved ice; often stacked in refrigerated cases following flights from Asia, Canada, and South and Central America; and housed live and swimming about in glass holding tanks. These fresh- and saltwater tanks hold a variety of netted live and farmed fish, including such familiar types as wan yue, a Cantonese favorite similarly called wan yu in Mandarin; dah tao yue, or big head carp, another Cantonese favorite; the so-called buffalo fish or grass carp; silver carp; striped bass and cod from Atlantic waters; catfish from Southern farms, striped bass from the Midwest, and tilapia flown in live from Mediterranean farms. There are porgies; yellow croakers and yellow perch; bluefish and butterfish; yellow eel; black bass; flounder and sole; and odd, small, irregular fish that look exactly like rough stones, thus their Cantonese name, sak tao, or stone fish. Lobsters from the Atlantic are live, and so are shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico and fat Dungeness crabs from the Pacific.

It is a swimming bounty and always a source of amazement to my students, many of whom I like to say think of fish only as white rectangles on ice, no head, no tail, no fins, no skin, no bones, no taste. Conversions come easily, I have found, after they have steamed their first fish. We buy two sea bass and stop to pick up some shallots and mustard greens. Do they have shallots in China? I am asked. And mustard greens? I answer yes to both questions.

We stop in at a bean curd factory where soybeans, or wong dau in Cantonese and huang dou in Mandarin, are processed into firm, soft, or custardlike cakes and then sit in their cooking milk, waiting to be sold. I point out the round grinders where soaked, skinned soybeans are ground into a wet powder to which a gelling agent is added to create textured bean curd cakes. And what is being made in those huge steel woks behind the barrels of bean curd? Cakes, I tell the class, of fermented rice, which are being steamed into elastic, doughy offerings for dim sum parlors.

PART 1

LESSON 1

CREATING A CHINESE PANTRY

The first day of shopping is complete, though there will be others as our lessons progress. As I have led my class from shop to store to market to maker through Chinatown’s main streets and twisting alleys, I have repeatedly impressed on them the need to exercise care as they shop. I have demonstrated that food labels on Chinese products can be confounding adventures. Although it is true that more and more products from the vast Chinese table have become familiar, and that many foods once deemed exotic and unapproachable are now commonplace, there has also been a proliferation of brands and exercises in fanciful packaging. Which soy? Which sesame oil? Why? Which rice, Texas or Thai jasmine? Why? The inventories often seem endless. However, I test them all, and when I find a particular product to be superior, to be closest to the taste of tradition, I recommend it by name.

Having said that, I still strongly advise a careful reading of labels. Are these dried strands considered noodles or sticks or threads? Are these wrappers meant for spring rolls, for wontons, for American-inspired egg rolls, or for enclosing flavored raw vegetables in the Vietnamese manner? The manufacturers of prepared Chinese foodstuffs are an imaginative lot, so I cannot overstate the need to read labels with attention to every detail on them. I also suggest that when you are shopping for a particular food, you carry along a photocopy of the Chinese calligraphy for that food. I am careful in my classes, careful in my writings, to include the Chinese characters for any food products—canned, bottled, jarred, or fresh—that you will need. Show the shopkeeper the calligraphy. Point and say you want that, only that, and you will be given exactly what you need.

Almost invariably, the product names, ingredients, and brand names on food packages and tins are in English and occasionally in romanized Cantonese. This is a natural circumstance because nearly all of the Chinese who migrated to the United States and Canada, Britain and Western Europe, even to Latin America and the Caribbean in the past—and even today—were from Guangdong and other parts of southern China. They carried their foods with them, and when they settled in their new homes, they made certain their foods continued to follow them.

By necessity, we have come to identify Chinese products by the English and romanized Cantonese spellings on their packaging. Indeed, it is rare to find packages labeled with pinyin spelling, the official system of romanizing Mandarin, China’s national language. However, I have included pinyin equivalents where they appear on packaging.

I have also taken particular care to describe the provenance of products—the province, region, city, or ethnic group. Hong Kong is a good example. Since 1997, it has been a unique place in China, with its own governor and elected governing body, and it will remain so until 2047. Many foods are prepared and packaged in Hong Kong, and when I am describing a food that originated there, I note Hong Kong as the source.

Before going on, let me repeat again how important it is to secure the products I describe if you hope to meet with success in the kitchen. Proper buying will help to make proper recipes. These, then, are the foods we have shopped for so far, the first steps in creating a Chinese food pantry:

BAMBOO SHOOTS. These pale yellow spears are the young beginnings of bamboo trees. In the past, fresh bamboo shoots were unavailable outside of Asia. Nowadays they are sold in many Chinese groceries, though they are often tough and fibrous and must be boiled for use. Imported, already cooked, canned bamboo shoots are quite good, with those labeled winter bamboo shoots or bamboo shoots, tips the most tender. I prefer the ones in large chunks, so they can be cut as desired. In some shops, canned shoots are sold loose by weight. These shoots and the shoots in cans you open at home will keep in water to cover in a closed container in the refrigerator for 10 days to 2 weeks, if you change the water daily.

BEAN CURD, FRESH. This is the most common form of bean curd and is typically sold in 2¹/2- to 3-inch square cakes, in packages and sometimes loose. The slightly firm, custardlike cakes, known as doufu, are made from ground soybeans cooked in the liquid, or milk, they exude. Buying individual cakes is preferred over purchasing packages that contain several cakes or a single large block. Bean curd has little taste of its own. Its versatility lies in its ability to absorb the tastes of the foods with which it is cooked. Store it in water to cover in a tightly closed container in the refrigerator for up to 10 days, changing the water daily. Japanese brands, sold as tofu, are packaged in large sizes, up to 16-ounce cakes, and are sold in three distinct textures: soft or silken, firm or medium-firm, and extra-firm. Medium-firm is closest to the Chinese variety, and I favor it. Chinese bean curd is occasionally labeled tofu as well, or as daufu, the romanized Cantonese. Bean curd factories also sell a bean curd custard. It has the texture of a classic egg custard and must be eaten fresh. The Chinese eat it with sugar syrup as a snack or atop a mound of rice with a drizzle of soy sauce.

BEAN CURD, RED WET PRESERVED. These are cubes of reddish bean curd, fermented with salt, wine, and red rice. They are packed in jars or crocks and are labeled either wet bean curd or red wet bean curd. The cakes, which are not spicy despite their fiery color, are used as an ingredient in braising and barbecuing recipes for their taste—which is intense and assertive with salt and wine—and for their color. Once a container is opened, any unused cakes must be refrigerated. They will keep in their closed crock or jar for at least 6 months.

BEAN CURD JUICE. A relatively new ingredient, this bottled juice is a boon to Chinese cooking. It is a mixture of fermented red wet bean curd liquid, rice wine, red rice, salt, and sugar—ingredients traditionally used separately to flavor and color foods—and is from the same fertile part of east-central China below Shanghai that produces Shaoxing wines (see Serving Wines). Once opened, it should be refrigerated, where it will keep indefinitely.

BEAN SAUCE. A Cantonese staple, this thick puree is made from the soybeans that remain after soy sauce is made. The fermented beans are mixed with wheat flour, salt, and sugar, resulting in sauce that also contains bits of beans. The sauce comes in jars, labeled either bean sauce or ground bean sauce, which means the beans have been mashed. This latter sauce also tends to be saltier. I prefer the former. Jars labeled yellow bean sauce or brown bean sauce hold the same beans made into the same sauce. Once opened, the sauce will keep for up to 6 months in the refrigerator.

BEAN SPROUTS. There are two varieties. The more common, mung bean sprouts, are white and plump and have a decided crunch. The second, soy bean sprouts, are also white, but they are longer and have a yellow soy bean at the tip. Both types are sold fresh by weight in Chinese markets and are widely available. They are stored the same, too, in the refrigerator in plastic bags punched with holes. They will keep for no more than 2 days, after which they will begin to turn brown and to soften.

BEAN THREAD NOODLES. These needle-like threads, also called vermicelli bean threads, cellophane noodles, or simply bean threads, are made by moistening, mashing, and draining mung beans and then forming them into thin, white strands. They come dried, in 1-pound packages, divided into bundles usually weighing 2 ounces each. Avoid other large packages of irregularly shaped sheets and long, thin, rough sticks made from soybean, both of them beige and mistakenly labeled bean thread (see Bean Curd Sticks).

BLACK BEANS, FERMENTED. These fragrant black beans, preserved in salt, usually come packed in cardboard containers or plastic sacks. Although typically labeled fermented, some cardboard packages are labeled preserved beans, or, inexplicably, dried black beans, which they are not. Look for beans lightly flavored with ginger and orange peel, which I prefer. Always rinse off the salt from the beans before using. They will keep in a tightly sealed container in a cool cupboard for up to 3 months.

BOK CHOY. The best-known Chinese vegetable, bok choy, literally white vegetable because of its white bulbous stalk, is grown throughout China and other parts of Asia. Its crispness and inherent sweetness make it particularly versatile. Although often referred to as Chinese cabbage, the vegetable’s deep green leaves above a white stalk bear no resemblance to a cabbage. Bok choy comes in various sizes, from as long as 15 to 18 inches to as small as 2 to 3 inches. There are even bok choy sprouts. They are all the same vegetable, and the size of the head dictates how it is used, whether as a primary ingredient or as a garnish. Bok choy will keep for 2 days in the vegetable drawer of a