Chop Suey : A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States by Andrew Coe Page A

mind and heart. The ordinary hard-drinking revelers at a fashionable dinner-party would be equally happy to gulp down any stinking mess. They say what a wonderful cook I am, but in the service of such people my art can only decline. . . . You, on the contrary, continually criticize me, fly into a rage with me, but on every such occasion make me aware of some real defect; so that I would a thousand times rather listen to your bitter admonitions than to the sweetest praise. 2
     
    Wang brought to the poet’s kitchen his ability to cook the simplest ingredients in a way that preserved and enhancedtheir natural characteristics. “If one has art,” he said, “then a piece of celery or salted cabbage can be made into a marvelous delicacy.” 3 Yuan also expanded his kitchen’s repertoire by eating widely, both at the houses of friends and on his extensive travels throughout China. When he encountered a dish he liked, he took notes, barged into the kitchen to interrogate the chefs, even brought them home to demonstrate its preparation. His tastes ran to simple meals, due both to his stomach problems and because he thought a cook could only make four or five successful dishes at a time. After a banquet where more than forty different kinds of food had been served, he wrote, “when I got home I was so hungry that I ordered a bowl of plain rice-gruel [congee].” 4
     
    At age eighty, when the choicest morsels had lost their savor, Yuan Mei decided to sum up a lifetime of eating in his book
Suiyan Shidan
, “Recipes from the Sui Gardens.” It contains more than three hundred recipes for fish, shellfish, meat, poultry, vegetables, bean curd, noodles, breads, and rice dishes. More important, he prefaces the book with a dozen pages of culinary rules and taboos that give readers a grounding in the general principles of how food should be cooked and served. Like Chef Wang, Yuan holds that foods should exhibit their own characteristics when cooked, and each dish should have one dominant flavor. “Then the palate of the gourmand will respond without fail, and the flowers of the soul blossom forth.” 5 Comparing cookery to matrimony, he writes that ingredients should complement one another and criticizes cooks who pile too many incompatible meats into one pot. In the kitchen, the chef should keep his workspace and knives clean to avoid contamination of flavors. Guests at the table should not “eat with their eyes” or be overwhelmed by a profusion of elaborate, poorly prepared dishes. And they should not “eat with their ears” or be impressed by hearing of the cost of rare dishes like birds’nests and sea cucumbers. Yuan preferred well-prepared bean curd and bamboo shoots and declared chicken, pork, fish, and duck “the four heroes of table.” 6 Above all, the host should never allow the standards of his kitchen to slip: “into no department of life should indifference be allowed to creep; into none less than into the domain of cookery.” 7
    Yuan’s recipes embody the food preferences of a cultivated scholar-gourmet. They are neither street food nor the pricey, pretentious dishes the wealthiest merchants favored but fall somewhere in between. These recipes also represent the apogee of the regional cuisine of eastern China during the late eighteenth century, particularly of the cities along the lower Yangzi River. Yuan’s cookbook has been so influential that dishes like drunken prawns (live shrimp that are flash-cooked at the table in flaming rice wine) are staples of Chinese restaurants today. That Yuan Mei, a highly educated member of China’s elite, a poet and a government official, would have thought it worth his time to write a cookbook is not surprising. (Of American statesmen, only Thomas Jefferson displayed a similar interest in cuisine.) Since nearly the dawn of Chinese culture over three millennia ago, the Chinese have considered cookery an essential art, one of the defining elements of their culture.
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