Local living

After the great experience I had in Italy taking a cooking class between the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2006, I decided to try my luck again with a Google search of cooking classes- this time in Beijing! My colleague and friend Susie decided to accompany me on this foodie sightseeing experience. Although we couldn't spare enough time to take the full-blown cooking class, I was excited to find a market tour and seasoning lesson offered in a historic hutong in downtown Beijing.



A hutong is a narrow street (pretty much an alley really) that is lined with traditional courtyard residences. You can't really see the courtyards or residences because they are all behind stone walls with gates. Dating back centuries, these neighborhoods started disappearing in the late 1940s to make way for high rise buildings and wider boulevards. The cooking class I found was offered by a woman named Yi (http://www.hutongcuisine.com/) and was in the historic Shajing Hutong. As our tour/cultural guide, she escorted Susie and I through the hutong where we saw and heard evidence of this hutong's reputation for being "artsy." Drama schools lined the street and women on bicycles rode by singing in seemingly professional voices.



Yi turned out to be a soft spoken yet knowledgeable cook who had migrated from the southern China countryside to Beijing for a more cosmopolitan lifestyle. We walked up to a local market where she took us section by section explaining the different foods and how they are traditionally prepared. China is a huge country and each province has its own tastes and food traditions. Just as those of us in the southern region of the U.S. eat differently than our countrymen in the northeast or west coast, those living in the south of China have different food preferences than those in the city of Beijing. Of course, preferences in each province is usually dictated by availability of ingredients. The market had a variety of spices catering to tastes from all around China. Seafood such as fish and eel was fresh and still alive in tanks built on the floor. Meat was hung from the ceiling out in the open and unrefrigerated just like I've seen it being sold in markets from Morrocco to Oman. There was an impressive array of noodles, rice, fresh produce along with soy and tofu products of every imaginable form.

Once our education at the market had concluded, Yi brought us back to her home in the hutong and prepared tea and an appetizer for us since we weren't staying for a cooking lesson afterwards. Susie and I were quite fascinated with long, fat tubes of clear gelatin that we saw at the market so Yi had bought a roll for 1 yuan for us to try (about 15 cents). The tube actually was a gelatinous form of soy that had been rolled into a tube shaped object. She sliced the tube and unrolled each slice to produce long, thick noodle-like strings. She then mixed light soy, rice vinegar, fresh chopped garlic and parsley, sugar and sesame oil with it. What you see in the picture was the result of her efforts and served as our snack as she explained basic Chinese food seasoning to us.

Yi explained the difference between dark and light soy, which has nothing to do with sodium content like it does in the States. She was slightly traumatized to hear that Japanese dark soy sauce (Kikkoman) was standard on Chinese food restaurant tables around the U.S. First of all it's Japanese, and second of all, dark soy sauce would never be used alone (always mixed with light) and third, it would never be used with food with such a light flavor as seafood! Next she explained the qualities of Chinese cooking wines and vinegars. We ended the lesson with different oils used in traditional Chinese cooking.

Although she seemed well informed about nutrition (she commented that chicken eggs are considered much more nutritious and tasty than duck eggs), she could not understand how anyone would chose nutritional value of a food product over taste. Susie and I chuckled as we recognized this as a common trait of chef's worldwide!! She thought chicken breast was bland and should never be chosen above the leg or wings and that chicken feet have excellent flavor. She told us how women are often encouraged to consume chicken and pigs feet after giving birth in order to regain their strength! Chicken feet are usually fried and eaten like chicken wings are in the U.S., you just eat the crispy skin off the bone. The pigs feet I saw by the butcher's block looked similar to those that can be found pickled and in a jar with boiled eggs in any corner store in South Louisiana! Having grown up with boucheries (social events where a hog or two is slaughtered and cooked) and a grandmother who kept a bucket of lard next to her stove for cooking, there weren't too many things I saw in the market that I would consider inedible. I'll admit though that some of the seafood I've seen on menus here in China would require a strong sense of adventure to consume (e.g. sea cucumbers!) by most Westerners, including myself!

That's it for now. A couple of Track & Field competition sessions are on tap for me so I'll fill ya'll in as soon as I can!