PrintThe Potato in Authentic Chinese Cookery
I am making a hot and sour soup while thinking about potatoes.
The white (or red) potato that is in such common use in the "new world" and in Europe - it is not in common use in Chinese cookery as far as I have ever noticed.
Is this so? Is there any "authentic" regional Chinese recipe which includes the white potato (as opposed to the more common sweet potato often used)?
Or did this tuber simply never enter into the cuisine of the country?
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19 Comments:
It's definitely used in Northern cooking. Shredded potatoes with chili and vinegar (qing jiao tu dou si) is a popular dish in Beijing. Here's a recipe:
http://tastytreats.wordpress.com/2007/08/01/chinese-treats-from-the-north/
thebasilqueen at 2:12PM on 12/18/07
I grew up on curry chicken with potatoes. It was my first taste of spicy hotness that has led to a life of putting Sriracha or chili flakes on everything. As a kid, I used to take the potatoes (picky little me passed on the chicken on the bone) and try to wipe the spicy curry sauce off them with a napkin. I've come so far, now that my taste buds have probably all sizzled off..
Jenn Sit at 2:22PM on 12/18/07
That's an interesting recipe, thebasilqueen. :) I'll have to try it!
Jenn, curry chicken with potatoes did not come to mind - I'm not sure I've seen a lot of recipes for it in Chinese cookbooks printed for the US market. I'll have to start looking more closely now. :)
Two recipes already! Yaaay!
Karen Resta at 6:18PM on 12/18/07
I don't have a recipe to share, but my new favorite Sichuan restaurant (in northern NJ) serves a dish of shredded potatoes and green peppers that is TO. DIE. FOR. Looks like nothing. I mean, think of it--a pile of shredded white potatoes with shredded peppers. Not too thrilling. But the taste is incredible; smoky, wok-ish and a bit of heat. It's probably somehow related to the dish that thebasilqueen posted...but in the Sichuan version, the chile/spices aren't visible. Anyone know more?
Curlz at 9:21PM on 12/18/07
Gah...thebasilqueen...you're making my mouth water. I haven't been able to find that dish you mentioned outside of Beijing.
I don't know why potato dishes don't appear on many Chinese restaurant menus!
Here's an easy one, shredded potatoes sauteed with bacon and liberally seasoned with black pepper.
Curlz, I can't place a name on the dish you're thinking about, but if its Sichuan, the smoky heat you're talking about might be due to one, the wok, like you said, and possibly Sichuan peppercorns (not actually a kind of pepper at all, but a flower bud of a kind of prickly ash tree).
They have a distinctive pine-resiney, smokey taste with a mild but lingering heat.
fuuchan at 2:04AM on 12/19/07
Ack, I forgot to add that potatoes are DEFINITELY a part of the cuisine, particularly inland Northern and Central China (its pretty much nonexistant in cuisine of the Guangdong region, it seems. And Hong Kong cuisine, which gave us familiar items like char siu and wontons doesn't feature potatoes, either).
I don't know for how long they've been a part of the cuisine however. It might not have really been a traditional ingredient, but they're widely used, now. No doubt because they suit the growing climate of Northern and Central China and are a relatively inexpensive food.
Speaking of tubers...anyone ever get to try sweet potato fries battered with salted duck yolk? Addictive and artery clogging! McDonalds fries wither in comparison both in taste and fat content!
fuuchan at 2:12AM on 12/19/07
Karen: Your question is intriguing, especially since you're addressing the role of an American vegetable that had an early and profound role in transforming the diets of Europeans, thanks to colonial expansion and trade in the West during the early modern era, if largely in the realm of peasant food. I really don't know much about China except that as a large dominant power in the Asian world, its fingerprints are all over Japan and Korea, and ultimately vice versa. Adoptions or appropriations of foreign cultures most familiar to me center on the spread of Buddhism and the Silk Route, that is, before the 20th century.
Surely there's a lengthy bibliography on the dissemination of the potato. If you google the words "China" and "potato" without specifying your desire for recipes, the first retrieved item is the abstract of "China's Potato Industry and Potential Impacts on the Global Market" in The American Journal of Potato Research (2004) by Qingbin Wang & Wei Zhang who note that Chinese farmers increased the number of potatoes they grew around 1961 so that the enormous country dominated the international market by 1993.
I also noticed a brief account of a meeting held in the state of Washington whose business leaders tried to persuade the new member of the World Trade Organization to import its potatoes.
Most relevant, perhaps is a brief economic report in Forbes (10/12/2006). Su-Ching Jean Chen implies that the McDonaldization of China is behind the courting ritual in the Pacific Northwest. "Rice and wheat are considered strategically important foodstuffs by Beijing, which can set prices and production. Potatoes are not. Increasingly, they're consumed as convenience food, allowing their growth trajectory to mirror the population's income growth, as well as the expansion of the national economy." So, while traditional cuisine favors rice and wheat, there are more and more natives intermingling with tourists at KFC or under the Golden Arches. Apparently, more and more of the Chinese are becoming potato eaters.
The tomato seems to have been embraced (ooo, messy!) more readily, though it's a wallflower compared to the popularity of chile peppers in certain regions. Nonetheless, Nina Simonds includes two potato recipes in the cookbook that evolved from her contributions to Gourmet. One's part of that vegetarian response to animal-based dishes: pseudo shrimp balls made with mashed potatoes. The other is Luo Song Tang, a vegetable beef soup that she says has become popular throughout China even though it's "not classic". Think of it as a gift from Lenin, Uncle Joe and Mao: the first two words in the name of the dish are slang for "Russian-style".
Eliz. at 2:38PM on 12/19/07
Your thoughts ran along a path similar to mine, Eliz., but your research is absolutely magnificent as usual. Very impressive, what you've found.
The tomato/potato thing seemed odd - the fact that one was embraced where the other was not as they were part of a similar parcel of time and place and movement. The only thing that came to mind in terms of answering that question (to my mind) was that perhaps there were varieties of tubers that so closely resembled the taste and texture of the potato that did exist in the culture at the time that the potato was simply not that interesting, whereas perhaps the tomato was different enough to generate more interest.
I'll have to check out the Nina Simonds recipes. Potato taking the place of tofu in pseudo-meat dishes? It makes me wonder if tofu and potato have the same "energies". But I guess that depends on the cooking method also.
The Cambridge World History of Food is staring at me from its place on my bookshelf, just as it always does. I stare back, daring it to make me really want to take it down and read some. If I find anything (if I read anything ha ha) I'll post it.
Quote:
Chinese farmers increased the number of potatoes they grew around 1961 so that the enormous country dominated the international market by 1993.
That is impressive.
Karen Resta at 10:33PM on 12/19/07
On the other hand, the McDonaldization thing is somewhat scary. The idea of French fries taking over the world is a bit science-fiction-ish.
As you wrote
Most relevant, perhaps is a brief economic report in Forbes (10/12/2006). Su-Ching Jean Chen implies that the McDonaldization of China is behind the courting ritual in the Pacific Northwest. "Rice and wheat are considered strategically important foodstuffs by Beijing, which can set prices and production. Potatoes are not. Increasingly, they're consumed as convenience food, allowing their growth trajectory to mirror the population's income growth, as well as the expansion of the national economy." So, while traditional cuisine favors rice and wheat, there are more and more natives intermingling with tourists at KFC or under the Golden Arches. Apparently, more and more of the Chinese are becoming potato eaters.
I can see it now:
Faceless corporate raiders buy and sell the goods the consumers eat in all nooks and corners of the universe, writing the menus that can not and will not be easily changed. Anything different to eat is against the law and will have to be eaten at night, hiding in the basement with the lights out. Eventually all varieties of fruits and vegetables will be grown to spec, subtly altering the balance of verdant variety that previously filled the world, and in the end existence came down to dependence on four growing things. Then one of their seed stocks gets sick. What will we do? How will we survive?
And more importantly, how does the steak taste?
...............................................
I read somewhere that McDonald's actually did become the top buyer of apples (in the world? I don't remember exactly the scope but it was huge) after they started serving "Apple Dippers" as a healthy alternative to french fries. Now there's some irony to start the day with. :)
Karen Resta at 9:00AM on 12/20/07
And I meant to add - Curlz and fuuchan - I went to my local (best) Chinese restaurant last night and asked about that potato recipe.
Whereupon he pulled out a menu written in Chinese for the customers (unlike me) who can read Chinese and showed me the dish, listed.
It's not on the menu written in English, however. :)
Next time I'll try it. He says it is "hot, hot, very hot!"
Karen Resta at 9:06AM on 12/20/07
While the differences in how Chinese cuisine have adopted potatoes and tomatoes is interesting, both pale in comparison to how quickly capsicum peppers were adopted. Within 100 years of the European discovery of the new world, capsicums worked their way into a prominent position in almost every cuisine in the world.
Imagine Szechuan cooking without hot peppers.
MedievalCookery at 3:58PM on 12/20/07
Good point, Medieval...corn is also something that seems to be like potatoes and tomatoes in Chinese cuisine.
Its a favorite, now (and Chinese McDonalds offers a cup of corn kernals as one of its menu items alongside the french fries), but it feels like one of those adopted foods.
fuuchan at 11:42PM on 12/20/07
Thanks for linking to my recipe, Karen... people really should try it more :)
I only came across it (as written in the post) from my old flatmate who came from northern China. She and my other flatmate, from Tsingdao, together taught me a lot about mainland Chinese cooking (as I'm from Hong Kong) - tomatoes do feature a lot, as they were quite into making tomato + scrambled eggs, or a tomato and egg drop soup. Both spectacular but I stupidly didn't get the recipe off them... however it should be quite self-explanatory ;)
But again, I really can't recommend that potato dish more!
supercharz at 5:13PM on 12/21/07
I think it's really interesting how many traditional Middle Eastern/ European/ Asian dishes use New World Ingredients, like potatoes, tomatoes, and corn. For instance, I always heard about kabocha squash in Asian cookery - and it originated in the Americas.
KarynMC at 9:02PM on 12/21/07
It's interesting also that right now, at the present time in the New World there is a similar discovery of Asian or Far Eastern ingredients although those foods have existed in their own cultures or geographies for a very very long time.
The general exposure to these foods in the average household in the US has expanded in leaps and bounds in the past twenty or so years and many ingredients we did not have widely available or even had never seen at all are now in any average grocery store. It's absolutely fantastic, really.
supercharz, we both can thank thebasilqueen for the link to your recipe. I'm very glad she found and posted it. :)
Karen Resta at 9:25PM on 12/21/07
Karen Resta - I really wish I had ethnic markets by me. I can barely buy soy sauce, much less fermented black beans, or African spices like sumac. I should order these things online, but then I couldn't use my tip money (i.e. cash).
It's wonderful that we're able to rediscover old ingredients. Potatoes don't seem so humble in aloo gobi . . . .
KarynMC at 9:53PM on 12/21/07
I know how you feel, Karyn. I lived in a place once where actually there wasn't even soy sauce on the grocery store shelves, but there were other things that I hadn't really gotten into yet that were more germane to the culture (ha ha listen to me - I mean there were things the people there used on a daily basis like country ham etc.).
When I moved from there into an area where the grocery stores (though still far from the TJ's or WFM (which I tend to think of not as WFM but WTF) did have different fruits, vegetables, basic ingredients from "afar" I felt really as if I had moved back to America after a stay somewhere else - an odd discombobulating feeling but a very happy one.
Karen Resta at 10:06AM on 12/22/07
My wife is native Chinese and has been in the US for three years. She only cooks Chinese - Chinese food. She uses potatoes a lot. If we cook American it is me that cooks that. I lived in Mainland China for 4 years. Potatoes are a big part of the Northern diet. You can not grow rice in the snow, so northern China uses potatoes just like in the good old US. South - rice, North - potatoes.
A nice simple true Chinese dish to cook is tomato and shredded potato. You hand cut a potato Long ways into thin slivers and cook in a very little bit peanut oil until tender then add diced tomatoes and cook a little while longer...finished. Can't get healther than that. Oh, by the way. If you see beef in a Chinese dish it is either Americanized or a recent addition. They just plain don't eat beef. It takes too much land to raise either with grazing or growing grain to feed the cows. The closest they get to beef is donkey, again in the north. By the way it is good. Chinese as a rule don't eat a lot of meat.
Gary G at 7:28PM on 01/10/08
Thanks for posting this info, Gary - about your own direct and real experience with the potato in authentic Chinese cookery.
Two potato recipes listed now. That is good. :)
Karen Resta at 1:45PM on 01/12/08