Oriental odyssey of China: The Cookbook

It’s a reminder of the depth, diversity and often plain weirdness of China’s food.

Don’t you just love a bizarrely impractical food book? You want simple, family, fast … Google it. Me? I like a book with a recipe for soft shell turtle. Or something you cook in the trunk of a tree. Or leave to ferment in the ground for an Arctic winter inside another animal’s body cavity. Much more entertaining and culturally enriching. Much more the bull in an ecological china shop. Or China shop. China is, after all, the world headquarters of exotic foods.

I almost certainly gleaned little sense of that at The Green Jade in Bairnsdale, the first restaurant I ever went to at an age when bright red sauces on battered pork seemed appealing. Sweet and sour memories. But that dark night in 1982 in a dimly lit outdoor eatery on Hong Kong’s Lantau Island? Reaching into a bowl with my chopsticks and picking up a chook’s head, beak, eyes, cockscomb and all, looking right at me? That was a Not in Kansas Anymore moment, an inkling they did things a little differently in the East.

Having never been beyond the New Territories, other than to Macau when it was still Portuguese (and you could buy oporto blanco for practically nothing), I’ve never really harvested my own anecdotes about blood tofu in Jiangsu or stir-fried pig’s udder in Hakka. China: The Cookbook comes as a timely reminder of the extraordinary depth, diversity and often plain weirdness of that vast nation’s food. And also that it’s probably time to risk an asthmatic event just to stroll through the streets of Shanghai and look inside its woks and markets. One day. Until then this book, with its beautiful celadon glaze cover and serious intentions, will do nicely.

Not that there aren’t all sorts of fine books on China out there already, particularly from Australian authors including Leanne Kitchen, Kylie Kwong and Neil Perry, but CTC has “one-stop reference” stamped all over it. And a vast collection of recipes from every region. All 33 of them. Most seem very practical and, as a lover of Oriental food, potentially delicious. Most. But not all.

Once I’ve caught my soft shell turtle, I’ve Post-It Noted a stack of recipes to follow up with. Pork shank and hairy fig soup; pork lungs and apricot kernel soup; carp belly over tofu; deep fried chicken cartilage; goose intestines in soy sauce; pigs heart with scallions; pork liver with cured meat and chives; chitterlings with soybean sprouts; pig’s tail with white-back wood ears; mushrooms with peach kernels. Easy stuff.

In China, “the tradition of eating specific creatures [for specific health purposes] continues today,” say authors Kei Lum and Diora Fong Chan, citing dog meat for warmth “although consumption is regulated, with the aim of being sustainable and humane”.

All that’s pretty tame stuff on the weirdness scale. Publishers like Phaidon don’t do books with recipes for scorpion, hairy spiders, seahorse, flying lizard and whole duck heads. I once had snake bile in Hong Kong and lived, but my days of weirdness for weirdness’ sake may be behind me. So while I don’t have any deepest, darkest Chinese food stories, I’m betting plenty of readers do. Send them to me by close of business next Friday at [e-mail]. The best gets a copy of China: The Cookbook (Phaidon, $59.95). A marvellously impractical book with some rather practical recipes, too.