[Sca-cooks] Semi-OT: [long] Cultural Evolution and the "traditional" banquet in NYC's Chinatown

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Hullo, the list!

Yeah, this sounds like it should be the title of a pretty 
interesting, if somewhat academic, article in The Atlantic Monthly or 
some such.

In reality, it's a couple of observations on weird stuff (as in, I 
guess, disingenuous, since weird a matter of opinion, especially in 
this setting) I encountered in an allegedly traditional southern 
Chinese wedding banquet last night.

As is usually the case with wedding receptions, the focus was not 
really on the food, but generally the food was quite good: this was 
held at the restaurant we generally go to for dim sum, when we go at 
all... I think I remember what disposable income was...

Anyway, what was served was interesting, because I suspect that many 
on this list, if they've attended a large Chinese banquet, have 
probably not attended enough of them over a period of years in the 
same restaurant to see them evolve as to menu, accompanying 
beverages, etc. Which latter point is really my main point. As I said 
earlier, some of it was weird. Not bad, just weird. Okay, enough 
talking and off with the clothes, as the saying [somewhere] goes.

We started with highly decorative platter of thinly-sliced or 
shredded, cold meats and seafoods, beautifully arranged in concentric 
circles. This would normally be (or rather, my preconceived 
expectations would have included, based on previous experience) 
things like Yunnan or Smithfield Ham, thinly-sliced breast of poached 
chicken, perhaps soy-sauce chicken, in chunks cut through skin and 
bone, similarly-cut roast pig, shredded, marinated jellyfish (this is 
not as deadly as it may sound to some, and is pretty much mandatory 
for the platter, it seems).

What we got instead was a bit different, and I can't decide if this 
had to do with the number of non-Chinese living in New York's 
Chinatown, some issue of fiscal practicality, or what. The platter 
was well within spec for Chinese cuisine, though, in that it was 
lovely to look at, and contained items that were not only flavorful, 
beautifully sliced, but of interesting and variegated textures, which 
is an absolute must for virtually all Chinese cooking, regardless of 
region.

It included the roast pig (which may have been boneless; my serving 
was, but still in its crisp skin), the jellyfish, and the shredded 
vegetables, but also on the platter were four rather unexpected 
items: those little red-tinged surf clams, which you often see in 
sushi bars around here, tiny red-cooked baby octopus about an inch 
long, and two cured meats in paper-thin slices, in lieu of the more 
standard smoked ham: we figured out that one was some kind of 
head-cheese product in a tightly-packed roll, and the other a 
garlicky, sausage-ey entity packed in another tight roll wrapped in 
pork skin/rind as a casing. Both were in two-inch rounds. Upon closer 
inspection, our crack culinary detectives figured out that the first 
one, the head-cheese-ey stuff, was Vietnamese gio thu, one of the 
essential meats for a bahn mi, the Vietnamese sub/hero sandwich which 
is becoming more common in American cities. The other one was more of 
a stumper, not because it was so bizarre, but because it was in a 
totally unexpected setting. It reminded me of cotechino, a garlicky 
Italian boiling sausage, except wrapped in pig skin. I finally 
realized it was zampone, the Northern Italian stuffed pig's-foot 
sausage, which, when made commercially, is sometimes just wrapped in 
skin instead of being stuffed into an actual boneless foot. Out of 
its normal setting and without its traditional lentil stew 
accompaniment, it simply never occurred to me that I'd find zampone 
here, so when I saw it, I didn't even recognize it. It's like seeing 
some really famous person walking down the street, and saying, "Hey, 
that guy looks an awful lot like so-and-so... I bet people tell him 
that all the time, since the resemblance is so uncanny." Also on the 
plate was a mysterious white item that may have been some seafood 
product or an organ meat: kind of a cross between squid and tripe. I 
still don't know what it was, but it could have been something like 
either. It was snow white, cut in little bite-sized, square, thin 
slices, and was shiny smooth on one side and somewhat 
rougher-textured on the other. Maybe something along the lines of, 
but not identical to, book tripe. Whatever it was, it was crunchy, 
mildly but nicely flavored, and good.

The rest of the meal, for the most part, was more or less the usual 
suspects, with one or two exceptions.

More poached chicken and jellyfish (these are symbolic and are 
stressed for weddings; cynics might assume a lot in the kitchen 
they're looking to get rid of, but the latter is quite expensive and 
the former pretty easy to adapt for other dishes, so I suspect they 
were there for symbolic reasons).

Sauteed lobster chunks with ginger and scallions.

Steamed tilefish, under a mound of more shredded ginger and scallion. 
This is a deep-sea wrasse variant akin to the tautog or blackfish 
found off the tip of Long Island, scallop-firm and scallop-sweet, 
which, considering that they spend their days crushing shellfish in 
their powerful, toothy jaws, is not surprising. My suspicion is that 
the [formerly] local standard, the black seabass, has been overfished 
(thank you, Billy Joel), and tilefish is currently the big, whole, 
steamed fish of choice these days.

Braised conch slices with scallops in an innocuous brown sauce.

A soup that we thought was shark's-fin, but turned out to be mock 
shark's-fin, made from four or five different kinds of mushrooms, 
finely shredded. Lutheran binder, step aside! This is something that 
seems eminently logical, but I'd never seen or heard of it before in 
that setting.

Braised abalone slices with black mushrooms on top of baby mustard 
greens, in what appeared to be oyster sauce. I scored a lot of this, 
since, as often happens at an SCA feast, half our table was wandering 
around by that time... sorry, folks, some big guy came and ate all 
your abalone. I tried to stop him... look at the scars on my 
chopsticks...

Jai/Buddhist Delight wrapped and fried in spring rolls (actually 
finely-shredded ingredients,precooked, chilled, rolled into cohesive 
spring-roll shapes, batter-dipped, and fried). On the plate with them 
were bacon-wrapped shrimp rolls, which is a dim-sum item and pretty 
much totally out of place. I strongly suspect a bribe from the host 
(who has issues with vegetables) to the manager here...

Little Peking Duck sandwiches. IOW, a Peking Duck presentation which 
did not feature the elaborate tableside presentation and ritualistic 
carving theater. They just carved them, put them on the little 
pancakes (which seem to have evolved away from the same tortilla-like 
pancake that used to be served with mu-xi pork, and morphed into a 
little, ruffled-edge and clearly leavened, cake, about four inches 
across. Served as a sandwich with two cakes, the duck skin and meat, 
hoisin sauce, and shredded scallion. Very nice, but not the way I 
remember Peking Duck.

Battered, fried shrimp with fried, candied walnuts in a lemony, 
mayonnaise-like sauce, on top of broccoli florets. Pretty standard 
stuff, and we all cried over the pedestrian-ness of it all, while we 
ate it. Not.

Sauteed, marinated flank steak. Think Chinese London Broil. I'd buy 
it for a dollar... maybe more.

Two noodle dishes for long life and a lasting marriage: one being the 
highly exotic crisp-fried vermicelli-patty topped with stir-fried 
beef slices, black mushrooms, and Chinese [long-stemmed, leafy, very 
tiny florets] broccoli, known colloquially and accurately as beef 
chow mein, the other being a braised dish of thicker noodles, chicken 
and seafood in a casserole.

Yangchow fried rice almost invariably appears near the end of the 
meal, it seems. Normally it includes roast pork and/or ham, shrimp, 
and chicken. You don't normally eat a lot of white rice at a banquet, 
and you generally don't even get it unless you ask for it, which you 
don't, since you pretty much expect to see the Yanchow fried rice 
later on in the meal ;-) . The idea is for you to be too full at that 
point to even think about rice, but just in case, so the cooks aren't 
humiliated by your not being stuffed, there it is.

The meal would end with a sweet soup, usually either a hot, 
sweetened, red bean soup with lily bulbs, or some kind of chilled 
almond-and-agar-agar stuff with fruit, and oranges. We had the red 
bean soup (probably more officially festive due to its color and the 
fertile connotations of its ingredients).

Various other odds and ends like little sweet cakes and oranges 
showed up to more or less signal that it was time to get the heck out 
and let them clean the place up... which we proceeded, of course, not 
to do...

Beverages also seem to have been somewhat deviant, if, in my opinion, 
a step in the right direction. Whether this is due to the fact that 
our host and hostess aren't big drinkers, or a more sweeping change 
in community tradition, but absent were the bottles of inexpensive 
but propitious Johnny Walker Red, Canadian Club Rye, and Courvoisier. 
Yes, it's true. This kind of thing did not go out with the Vikings, 
and outside of France, you could still, until quite recently, anyway, 
have a very fine meal washed down with a big tumbler (or several) of 
medium-grade Scotch. Yum, no? Vive la diference and all, but we made 
do with Moet-Chandon '83 (see, it's a white wine, right?) and some 
kind of Shiraz for the heavier dishes. And, of course, chrysanthemum 
tea... there were also mysterious bottles labelled "Coca Cola" and 
"Sprite", which is evidently what kids were drinking. Except mine, of 
course, who made do with water, tea, and all the champagne he could 
steal from his mother when he thought no one was looking.

Personally, I like a good I.P.A. with such a meal, but this was a 
nice improvement over the water-glass of blended Scotch on the 
rocks... and I had a bottle of I.P.A. in the fridge at home, so 
everything worked out beautifully.

It was just interesting to see how things have changed, since it's 
five or six years since I've been to  one of these, discounting 
occasions when I was the host. I'm going to try and learn why some of 
the changes were made, and whether they were personal choices of our 
host and hostess (the groom's mother and stepfather), the bride and 
groom, or the restaurant, based on ongoing trend shifts...

On an unrelated side note, I see that I must get my mother-in-law 
drunk more often... not only is she quite pleasant to be around, she 
engages in a cultural de-evolution of her own, becoming once again 
the well-to-do but earthy farm wife she would have been, probably, in 
the 16th century or so. It was really cool when she was feeling the 
bride's hips to see how good she'd be at bearing her 
great-grand-children. Only a _little_ mortifying, for the sober among 
us, but I'll say that the bride definitely has the right stuff, and 
rolled with that one without batting an eye. I suspect her own 
family, who are fairly recent Russian immigrants, are quite capable 
of similar stuff. And I still have the option of reminding Mom about 
this today ;-). Life is good.

Now, if only I had another bottle of I.P.A.

Adamantius