[Sca-cooks] Okay, it's that time again...

Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius adamantius1 at verizon.net
Sun Feb 11 20:42:55 PST 2007


On Feb 11, 2007, at 11:10 PM, April Page wrote:

> "Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius" <adamantius1 at verizon.net>  
> wrote:    ...Pei-Dan Dowfu (a.k.a. Chinese Egg Salad, wrapped in  
> lettuce leaves)
>
>   Oooh, do tell.  I'm intrigued.

This is something my lady wife put me onto after we found a dish of  
cold bean curd with preserved duck eggs, sliced and nicely arranged  
with a brown sauce that may have been oyster sauce, dark soy and  
chili oil, and topped with chopped scallion, in a local restaurant  
that did food from Shanghai. Like most Chinese, being a regional  
chauvinist at heart, my wife announced that these people didn't know  
how to make pai-dan (which is the duck eggs) dowfu, a.k.a. tofu.

So, the alleged "real" manner of doing this, if your culinary  
traditions are from Toysan in Kwangtung province, instead of  
Shanghai, is to cut the bean curd and preserved duck eggs (these are  
the black "thousand-year" eggs, not the salted duck eggs) into small  
dice, mix with minced ginger, chopped scallion, dark soy, a dab of  
oyster sauce, a sprinkle of white pepper, and either chili-infused or  
plain sesame oil. This is then mixed/tossed together to get a  
substance with a texture not unlike standard American egg salad,  
which you then roll up in a lettuce leaf and eat like a taco. There's  
actually a whole family of Chinese dishes that are traditionally  
wrapped in a lettuce leaf, but this is the only one I know that's  
served chilled instead of hot.

It's presumably not going to be our biggest seller, so to speak, but  
it's cold, can be prepared in advance, and we like it and know it's  
something that won't be scarfed up before we can get some ;-).

I'm sure you could do something similar with regular boiled hen's  
eggs. It wouldn't be the same, but it would be good, I suspect, if  
you're an egg salad fan.

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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