SC - Gung Hay Fat Choy

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Hullo, the Cooks!

I just thought I'd take a break from all the nonsense I've been dealing
with and wish you all a Happy Lunar New Year, which is probably being
celebrated by perhaps 1/4 of the world right around now. The New Year
arrives on the first night of the new moon of the first month in the
Lunar Calendar, most commonly used in China, but also elsewhere in and
out of Asia.

Anyway, for those of you unfamiliar with the standard traditions
generally observed for this festival, I'll give you a brief run-through.
The idea of the New Year Celebration is to set the tone for the rest of
the year. In other words, you do, if only symbolically, what you want to
be doing the rest of the year. This includes making peace with any and
all you may have issues with, paying your debts, cleaning your home from
top to bottom, and eliminating from your conversation all
unpleasantness. Simple sympathetic magic, more or less.

Now. Lest I run off-topic for the list, let's talk about food. Again,
you want to eat those foods that symbolize the qualities you wish to
propagate for the coming year. A typical menu would include a chicken,
usually cooked whole, in such a way that its skin will appear golden.
This is supposed to insure prosperity. We usually do a soy-sauce
chicken, braised in (you guessed it!) dark soy sauce, spices, and sugar.
Some people feel that the chicken represents grace, and include a dish
of clams or stuffed mushrooms, which, being vaguely coin-shaped,
represent prosperity a bit more clearly, to some people's point of view. 

Then there's the fish. This is pretty much mandatory. Usually this
consists of two fried whole fish, suitably sized for your needs. We'll
be using pompano this year. As with many other spiritual festivals, the
goal is to be well-prepared, with your foodall cooked and ready to eat
before sundown on New Year's "Eve". For most of us, that's today, things
like the International Date Line notwithstanding. The two fish are fried
to give them a chance of holding up for a while (remember in China there
aren't a lot of refrigerators), and are traditionally served on a
platter with at least two, or a multiple thereof, Chinese lop cheung
sausages. They are reddish, firm, and slightly sweet, with a cure that
often includes vodka or P.G.A. They usually get steamed on top of your
rice. The combination of fresh fish and preserved sausage apparently
represents regeneration and, therefore, good health. I'll be chowing
down on that myself, I suspect.

For laughter, and therefore happiness, we have shrimp, which in most
Southern Chinese dialects is something like "hahr". Nothing like a bad
pun to raise the spirits, eh? Har de har har! We usually dry saute ours
after marinating them in cornstarch, egg white, peanut oil (the
Cantonese generally don't appreciate sesame oil much), a dash of sherry
or ng ga pei, white pepper and a pinch of sugar. They get dry-sauteed
with ginger and either shallots, scallion whites, or garlic, and are
tossed in a glaze of equal parts soy sauce, oyster sauce, and ordinary
ketchup added to the wok. the reddish glaze also denotes happiness:
almost any food that is red is considered appropriate for New Years,
although my mother-in-law claims apples are right out, as apple trees
are traditional shade in Chinese cemeteries. 

Then there's five-spice beef, which is a sort of pot roast cooked along
the same lines as the soy-sauce chicken. In fact, I usually cook them
both in the same cooking liquid (beef, usually a whole boned shank,
complete with the Achilles tendon, which gets soft in the long cooking,
and then cook the chicken, pretty quickly at a more or less full boil)
skimming, straining, and freezing  the liquid for use next time. I have
some that's about four years old now. It does improve with repeated use,
up to a point, but the more meat gelatin that gets dissolved into it,
and the thicker it gets as it is repeatedly reduced, the more likely it
is to burn, so I advise a discreet toss if it starts to taste, well, not
good. The five spice beef is for strength. Presumably the tendon running
down the center is part of the imagery.

Vegetables seem to be rare in New Year's dishes, possibly because it is,
after all, late winter, or perhaps it has to do with somebody's idea of
opulence. The exception, which tends to support the latter explanation,
is the jai or Buddha's Delight usually eaten on New Year's Day. This is
intended not only as a system cleanser after all the rich food of the
previous day, but also is a perceived observance of austerity as we do
penance for our sins. Jai is usually a big combination of several
different fresh, dried (reconstituted) mushrooms and other vegetables,
with the odd canned element (lotus root, for example), and at least one
type of bean curd, and sometimes more. We usually include both dried
bean curd sheets, which is rather like a wrinkled pasta sheet made from
bean curd, loosely rolled and sliced, and fried bean curd chunks, which
vaguely resemble golden-brown fried marshmallows. Not too different in
texture, either, but the flavor is different, of course. All the
ingredients are simmered in an oyster sauce gravy and used to top bean
threads (cellophane noodles). Yeah, I know oyster sauce isn't strictly
vegetarian, but without being a Buddhist monk I can't address such fine
points.

Anyway, we usually cook other stuff in addition, such as real [i.e.
stuffed] butterfly shrimp, similar to the standard article you can get
in restaurants, but with a chopped shrimp dumpling filling stuffed into
the split shrimp, which is then  wrapped in bacon, dusted with
cornstarch, and fried. Dim-sum houses often serve the stuffing rolled up
in bacon and similarly fried, but without the whole shrimp. Oddy enough,
usually served with mayonnaise, at least in restaurants. Usually we go
without a sauce, which seems extraneous, but one year i made a really
light, foamy hollandaise sauce, which went surprisingly well. The best
part was in trying to get my mother-in-law to pronounce the word
"hollandaise".

Anyway, our preparations this year are, at best, perfunctory, given the
amount of time we are devoting to other issues, but I did want to wish
you all a very happy, healthy, and prosperous New Year.

Adamantius
troy at asan.com
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