Introducing Northern and Southern Chinese Food to Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
My sister worked as a waitress at the Ho-Ho Inn, a Chinese restaurant on Cass Street in Detroit. She sat a plate of Egg Foo Yung in front of five-year-old me.
I had a way with words and
quickly renamed this Egg Foo “Yuck.”
Tears ran down my cheeks as I thought about eating this worm-like mess
of food.
The Chinese waiter called
George came in and looked at me. He took
the Egg Foo “Yuck” and threw it in the garbage.
Then, he went to the freezer and brought me one of those ice cream
treats that Chinese restaurants serve; a coconut-flavored outer shell of ice
cream surrounding a mango core.
My sister came in and glared
at me. George said, “She ate everything,
so I gave her an ice cream.” I smiled
sweetly at George. My love for the
Chinese, if not their food, began at that instant.
When I was fifteen, I raised
$42,000 with 21 other young people to visit the People’s Republic of China in
1979. We wanted to see how a
“developing” country was able to provide a stellar education to its students in
addition to visiting the Great Wall and the Forbidden City.
I dreaded the culinary side
of our trip and packed 100 antacid tablets in my suitcase.
I did not like pork, China’s
staple meat. I was suspicious of all
seafood except shrimp. I impolitely took
half of the serving plate full of sweet and sour shrimp when that appeared on
the table.
My tour mates curbed this
piggy behavior by telling me the shrimp were cat, rat, or dog meat. I subsisted on rice and soup broth for two
weeks. I left unknown soup ingredients
in my bowl. I cringe now when I think of
wasting food in a country that still had a collective memory of famine.
At lunch on a commune outside
Shanghai, our grandmotherly-looking tour guide with a round face, gray hair,
and a body made rotund by swaddling in layers of clothing topped off by a blue
Mao jacket asked me if I would like some pork.
“No, thank you, Ms.
Woo-Ching,” I politely responded.
Ms. Woo-Ching placed a large serving
of pork on my plate.
“Would you like some soup?”
she asked.
I politely refused again.
She smiled and ladled out
some wonton soup into a bowl, which she placed in front of me.
I, “the foreign devil,”
recognized a lost battle.
“I’ll try a little of
everything,” I said and watched in horror as something hot, white, and topped
off with pork was placed in front of me.
The white stuff was bean
curd. I tried it and loved it.
“Ms. Woo-Ching, please tell
the farmworkers that Chinese food is delicious,” I said.
In college, my friends and I
went to hole-in-the-wall restaurants in Chicago’s China Town where daily
specials were written in Chinese characters on chalkboards.
I was in third-year Japanese
at the University of Chicago and could read characters. I was able to order the daily specials,
because I could read characters. For 1/3
the price, we ate the food served in restaurants with red vinyl seat cushions
and lanterns with tassels.
During senior year, I worked
for a translation company that was also the U.S. advertising representative for
several Chinese newspapers including the People’s
Daily. I was a salesman and sold
sponsorships and handled all the public relations for the first Super Bowl
broadcast in China the year the Chicago Bears won the Super Bowl.
Every time we signed a contract, we would go to a banquet, sometimes two, at the House of Hunan or Szechuan House in downtown Chicago to celebrate. Years later when I read the Time-Life Foods of the World book on China, I realized that I had consumed a lot of shark fin soup, which is a traditional celebratory dish.
By the time I finished
college, I thought to myself, “How could I have disliked Chinese food?”
When I was 31 and living in
Wisconsin, I bought a wok and Kenneth Lo’s Encyclopedia
of Chinese Cooking at a garage sale.
I cleaned and re-seasoned the wok into working condition. The cookbook listed 40 different cooking
techniques and said that this was “just an abbreviated list.”
I had to relearn how to chop
vegetables for these different cooking techniques. One chopping pattern resembles a
trapezoid. I never thought I would see
one of those again after taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test to get into
college.
To cook Chinese food you have
to supply your pantry with things like dry mushrooms, oyster sauce, soy sauce,
glass noodles, rice wine, ginger root, garlic, and dehydrated shrimp.
I tried several dishes, but
my family had its favorites: Cantonese rice (fried rice with eggs, chopped
pork, shrimp, carrots, peas, and scallions – a kind of Chinese hash), egg drop
soup, and stir-fried beef in oyster sauce.
I taught Florence how to use
Chinese chopsticks, which are square-bottomed at the end and long versus
Japanese chopsticks, which are pointy at the end and shorter than Chinese
chopsticks.
When Florence was a little
older, I showed her China on the map and said, “Rice grows in the south of
China where it’s hot and rainy in summer.”
I pointed to the north of
China and said, “The Chinese grow wheat for noodles and dumplings here.”
I showed Florence how to
stir-fry bok choy and hope she’ll visit China one day without antacid in her
suitcase.
Later when I worked as a
restaurant critic for the Monterey County Weekly newspaper (Circulation
200,000). I reviewed Chef Lee’s, which
has been in Monterey for two decades.
I was in charge of a banquet
now and had to do the ordering and seating arrangements. The menu follows:
-San San Soup – egg drop soup
with scallops and shrimp
-Walnut shrimp
-Chef Lee’s Special Lamb
-Mongolian Beef
-Mandarin Fried Chicken
-Tsing Tao Beers
I was surprised to see lamb
on Chef Lee’s menu, but after reading Nina Simonds Classic Chinese Cuisine, I learned that China’s northern regions
have a large Muslim population. Muslims
do not eat pork and prefer lamb.
After our meal, we drank
jasmine tea just like you are supposed to do.
By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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