[Sca-cooks] Sugar beets
Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius.magister at verizon.net
Mon Mar 21 12:57:36 PST 2005
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
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