Floyd’s China. Keith Floyd
of oysters, clams, snails, winkles, sea slugs, sea urchins. It was hot, the floor was awash in water, trampled leaves and crushed entrails. The pervading smell was slightly stomach turning, a long way from the clinical aisles of a Western supermarket. But I loved it. And I managed to buy my tinned, coppered steamboat, a sort of a charcoal-fired fondue set in which you heat stock and cook shrimps and vermicelli noodles, prawns and thin slivers of beef or chicken, greens and mushrooms.
It went on like this relentlessly for days as I left Beijing and toured the surrounding countryside. I cooked in kitchens and made stir-frys over the blasting fire of their cookers, which could propel a 747 into the stratosphere. These cookers are, of course, the secret of Chinese cookery. They are so powerful that everything cooks extremely quickly, literally in seconds, and you have to be sharp, you have to be swift and stay completely calm in this volcanic, gastronomic atmosphere. Whoever said the Americans invented fast food? Their version may be fast but it ain’t what I call food.
Of course, in some of the kitchens that they smilingly, and laughingly, let me into, I just couldn’t cope. I couldn’t roll out a four-foot rectangle of noodle dough then throw it up into the air, rather like a man clapping hands, and turn it within seconds into millimetre-thin lengths of noodle. That is an art, but an art that is taken for granted.
Back in Beijing I had to go to Tiananmen Square, I had to go to the Forbidden City, but I’m sorry, I am a cook, not a tourist, and Tiananmen Square may be the biggest in the world, but I am afraid I was very disappointed to discover it is just a square. No jugglers, no dragons, no clowns and no street food hawkers, just a man in sandals, jeans and a T-shirt who tried to arrest me as I attempted to have my picture taken with one of the guards. Despite its outrageous opulence and the massive building project and the obsessive preparations for the Olympics in 2008 and despite the utterly charming nature of the Chinese people, you cannot help feeling the sinister undertones of an authoritarian regime. Yeah, I looked at a few temples and went to the weird night food market – hundreds of stalls, all of them red and white, all of them staffed by proprietors all dressed in red and white as if they worked for Kentucky Fried Chicken. The array of food was a little different, however. Grilled snakes, crispy snakeskin, deep-fried locusts or some other large insect, all kinds of intestines alongside nice kebabs and vegetables, but I bailed out of that and went to Steamboat Street. Well, I called it Steamboat Street because all the restaurants there have steamboats. Not like the handmade steamboat I bought to impress my friends back in Europe, but here the steamboat, which is a metal bowl, is set into the table that you sit at, with a gas burner underneath it. They bring you a menu with a list of probably a thousand vegetables, meats, mushrooms, insects, fish, frogs, everything you can possibly imagine, or not imagine. All kinds of vermicelli, egg noodles, rice noodles. They pour some either mild or hot, depending on your taste, stock into the bowl, set fire to the gas and you just drop a few bits of food at a time into the stock, fish them out with a little wire basket and have an outstanding feast. The beef they bring you is sliced as thin as the thinnest Parma ham, so, of course, all these things cook in seconds, but you can take hours to eat it. Take good friends with you. My assistant from Cumbria, may God long preserve him, was again really thinking about a nice lasagne and chips and somehow failed to share my enthusiasm.
If Beijing has an equivalent of Langan’s Brasserie, Simpson’s in the Strand, The Ivy or the Rib Room at the Carlton Towers, then it has to be a restaurant called Old Beijing Zhajiang Noodle King at 29 Chong Wai Street, Chong Wen District, Beijing. There is one difference, however, and it is a big one. This stylish, long-established, noisy, clattering, garrulous rendezvous of the Guccishoed, Rolex-wearing, mobile phone-chattering, finely dressed Chinese ladies and gentlemen, serves only noodles. They bring you a bowl of noodles and you choose one of about 400 things to put on top of it. It is sensational. It is friendly and it is professional and it won’t f*** up your credit card! Also, if like me you love a roasted, free-range, Gressingham duck with giblet gravy and apple sauce, or, if like me you are nostalgic enough and romantic enough to think that the Tour d’Argent in Paris serves the best duck, then you must visit the Imperial Duck Trading Corporation – actually, that is not its name, it is, in fact, called Quanjaid. It’s on the second or third floor of one of these imposing skyscrapers, it has been in operation since about 1850 and it specialises, of course, in Peking Duck. These specially reared and fattened ducks are air-dried for two days before they are roasted vertically in front of a wood-fired oven so that the skin is crisp and almost opaque, like golden glass. The duck is served to you with its head on, the skin is deftly carved off and given to you separately, and then comes the unctuous meat, the little pancakes, the plum sauce, the strips of spring onions and cucumber, which you roll and munch, meanwhile sipping a creamy duck broth, and finally the waiter comes back and carves the long duck tongue into fine slivers for you. But he too looked like someone from Mars because he was wearing a white suit, white boots, white gloves and a mask. As you leave you notice all the signed photographs on the wall from Nixon to Chairman Mao and beyond.
Thank you, China. I will be back.
Keith Floyd
Uzes
South East France
June 2005
Kissing don’t last, cooking do
Confucious said, ‘Give a man a fish and he will live for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will live forever.’ He also said, although he, of course, said a lot of things, ‘Eating is the utmost important part of life.’ I don’t have to hand any of his quotations on the art of lovemaking.
The celebrated food writer and gastronaught, although I fear she would disapprove of that term, Jane Grigson, who, along with Elizabeth David, was one of the best food writers in the English language, said that cooking is a very simple art, you apply heat to raw food and keep it as simple as possible.
In Britain we are blessed with a multicultural, culinary society and can enjoy the world’s food cooked by Thais, Italians, French, Spanish, Indians and, of course, the likes of home-grown British talent such as Gary Rhodes, Gordon Ramsay, Antony Worrall Thompson, et al. There is not a town in the land that does not have a Chinese takeaway. It is popular food and invariably it is often not very good. It is so Westernized – that is to say it does not have the ‘umph’ of real Eastern cooking and it has actually become a bit of a joke. Stir-fried bean sprouts with a bit of chicken and no real seasoning, no real spice, no real passion behind it is quite frankly a disaster. However, there are good restaurants around in places like Manchester, Soho and, indeed, in Brighton, where the excellent China Garden serves unctuous, sticky rice in lotus leaves and curried whelks, which are as good as anything you can find anywhere in the world, although I do acknowledge that Hong Kong and Taiwan are pretty good too! In Hong Kong there is a restaurant that serves dim sum – it seats 1,000 people and the waiters and waitresses endlessly push trollies to your table with delectable compositions, be it prawns, pork, chicken, frog’s legs, sea snakes, sea cucumbers, or whatever. Brilliant dumplings, excellent concoctions of noodles.
So what then is Chinese food? It is not a little box of quickly fried red and green peppers, a bit of beef and black bean sauce purchased after 10 pints of lager at 11.00 at night. Chinese food is the result of thousands of years of civilization. The vast country of China has suffered from poor harvests and during those lean years, to stay alive, the Chinese would explore anything edible. As a consequence, many wonderful and slightly incredible ingredients, such as lily buds, wood ears, vegetable peels and shark’s fins, were incorporated into the exquisite richness and variety of Chinese food. You may not want to eat sea cucumbers (a kind of a slug), you may not want a piece of grilled snakeskin or a brochette of strange insects. I think I don’t either, but the sheer volume and variety of food is gastronomically mind boggling – particularly, for me, the noodles. There are so many – egg noodles, wheat noodles, rice flour noodles. Wheat noodles are common in Shanghai. These are thick and when cooked and stir-fried with a savoury sauce of chicken, pork or shrimp are delicious. Rice flour noodles, often known as Singapore style, use thin, vermicelli noodles seasoned with curry powder and mixed with shrimp or barbequed pork