[Sca-cooks] Sugar beets

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach SEBD at aol.com:
>
>Admantius writes:
>
>My  lady wife complains of the subset of Cantonese-style cooking to be
>>   found in Hong Kong: "Those people put sugar in EVERYTHING!!!" (Her
>>   family is probably from a whacking great 40 miles away to the north
>>  of  Hong Kong. ;-) )
>
>
>___________
>
>Your lady wife is correct, judging by most  of the Cantonese recipes I've
>ever read or cooked from. In twenty years, I don't  think I have 
>seen a Cantonese
>stir-fried recipe that doesn't contain sugar.

Oh, I've seen, probably, thousands of them. It's things like dim-sum 
houses purporting to employ a Hong Kong style where sugar as a 
seasoning/flavoring seems to be particularly prevalent. Toysan 
cookery (which is much of what we eat at home, and also a subset of 
"Cantonese" cookery, albeit a lesser-known subset, even though there 
was a time when most Chinese immigrants in the US were from Toysan) 
is more likely to contain a multitude of salted ingredients, such as 
chopped salt fish, salt ham, salt-preserved radish, turnips or 
mustard knobs, etc. That's in addition to the various salty fermented 
black beans, brown bean pastes, soy sauce, etc.

>   Steamed items without sauces
>don't generally have a sugar component, but  everything else seems to.
>
>It's probably OK, overall. They  don't eat the calorie laden desserts some
>Westerners consume.

True. There are probably also metabolic differences.

Adamantius
-- 




"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la 
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them 
eat cake!"
	-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau, "Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
	-- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry 
Holt, 07/29/04