225BatonRouge.com - Blogs

“It was a brave man that first ate an oyster.” -Jonathan Swift

Readers of my personal blog, family members, friends, and people within ear-shot the last time I was dragged to an Olive Garden can all attest to my commitment to food.

And in spite of many respectable food critics that swear the world’s two great cuisines are Italian and Chinese, I have never been a fan of the latter.

That is not to say that I am against strapping on the feedbag for an all-you-can eat buffet of unidentifiable kibbles drowning in shiny brown sauce. But, once the sensitivities of the American palate have been accounted for and the distance traveled from the home country considered, I have, heretofore, not detected an underlying cuisine that excited me.

I have always clung to the assumption that if a nation of people were gulping down huge quantities of something then that food probably had some redeeming characteristics. (many an otherwise sturdy visitor to Louisiana has broken before the shimmering, pale meat of our beloved oyster). Here lies the difference between American Chinese food and well… Chinese Chinese food. While the great expanse of steam trays may be serving something identified as Chinese food, I am pleased to report that the Chinese have never heard of it.

Chinese food, in China, can be a challenge to the novice. Chopped up bone shards in chicken and pork can make eating more of an adventure than most would like. And then there are the heads, but let us not venture into that. Chinese food presents an amazing array of unfamiliar flavors to be experienced and enjoyed. Their preparations are artful and considered. Little side dishes abound. Textures and flavors complement each other and offer counterpoint in the great Confucian dance of the dining table. And the dumplings, the dumplings. Steamed dumplings, pot stickers, deep fried rice-flour dumplings, boiled pork and shrimp dumplings, red bean buns in wicker baskets, venting steam like little sweet-smelling ship’s boilers. And, stay with me, the crab ovary and digestive track croquets (you have sucked them down, and worse, at a crab boil but no one wanted to ruin the mood by pointing it out). All hand made fresh, within minutes of cooking. The Chinese excel at making dumplings. And do not get me started on the hand pulled noodles flying through the air like edible croche; shrouded in a dust of flour as they stretch out no thicker than pencil leads.

So, I submit myself as a changed man. A nation of 1.3 billion people were not wrong and the general good sense of popular food, refined over generations and lovingly prepared, wins out again. The taste of lotus leaf wrapped sticky rice pressed tight around the smallest slice of pork may still seem alien, and the numbness from Sichuan Peppercorns unfamiliar, but think of me slurping on a warm bowl of Shan Xi noodles, pausing to yank a pork rib shard from my cheek, and smiling.