[Sca-cooks] So, here's an odd question...
Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius1 at verizon.net
Fri Dec 22 22:21:53 PST 2006
On Dec 23, 2006, at 12:49 AM, Sue Clemenger wrote:
> I can't imagine Santa passing up a good beer, though.
Assuming he's not flying under the influence, of course.
> Or tasty nibbles of
> any sort--what makes a spring roll a "Shanghai" spring roll?
Hmmm. Kind of like how there's a difference between New England and
Southern cornbread? It's a regional thing; The Shanghainese version
is made with a cooked pancake-type wrapper made by spreading a big
ball of somewhat sticky dough on a hot griddle -- what sticks to the
griddle is the wrapper, and you pull off the rest of the raw dough,
leaving the residue to cook and pull away from the griddle -- this is
your wrapper. They make commercial ones that are sort of phyllo-ish,
but you can still occasionally find real ones in a good market.
[On an unrelated note, using the phyllo-ish commercial wrappers for
mu xi pork should be punishable by converting the cooks -- if male --
to the eunuchs the dish was created to honor. But I digress...]
The filling in a Shanghai spring roll is usually a moistish, light
combination of shredded pork or chicken, shrimp, black mushrooms,
Tientsin Cabbage (a.k.a. Napa Cabbage, which a lot of Americans think
is Bok Tsoy but isn't), and maybe either shredded leek or the white
part of scallions, with just a tiny bit of a light sauce.
Cantonese spring rolls tend to be somewhat heavier, usually filled
with barbecued pork and/or shrimp, green cabbage, maybe some mung
bean sprouts and scallions. Unless you make them at home there's
generally no sauce for the filling. The wrapper is usually a large
square of egg pasta. These are known in American restaurants as "egg
rolls", but if you go to China and find an English-speaker anywhere
in that enormous land, and ask for an egg roll, you'll get something
entirely different, made by wrapping a meat filling in a paper-thin
omelette and deep-frying it.
> The ones I've
> been eating and enjoying lately are a cold variety sold by a local
> Vietnamese deli...mmmm....shredded, raw veggies, cilantro, and steamed
> shrimp, wrapped in rice paper....mmmmm
Yes, I like to keep a supply of those wrappers on hand. Those are
sometimes referred to by English-speakers as "Summer rolls".
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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