How to eat like Chairman Mao

The Chinese believe you are what you eat, so it's no surprise the food of the revolutionary leader's home province is fiery and flavoursome, says Fuchsia Dunlop

Sunday July 23, 2006
The Observer

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Hunanese food is, as you might expect, as bold and colourful as its people. Picture a table set for a dinner with rice bowls and chopsticks, the chatter of a family gathered around. The wooden surface is laden with dishes: a cool coriander salad with a hot-and-sour dressing; a dark, treacly stew of belly pork braised to sumptuous tenderness; a wok-cooked riverfish scattered with handfuls of purple perilla; intensely smoky bacon, steamed in an earthenware bowl with dried chillies and black fermented beans; and a bamboo shoot stir-fry that dances with the fresh brightness of red peppers and Chinese leeks.

The art of combining flavours

The roots of the modern Chinese approach to flavouring date back at least to the second century BC, when Lu Buwei's astonishing gastronomic treatise, The Root of Tastes, outlined some of the principles of cookery in the form of a dialogue between a Shang dynasty king and his cook. Even then he was able to write in sophisticated terms of the alchemy of flavour: 'As for the matter of harmonious blending, one must make use of the sweet, sour, bitter, pungent and salty. But which tastes one adds first or later, and how much or how little, the balance is very subtle, for each produces its own effect. The transformation which occurs in the cauldron is wonderful and delicate...'

A few key notions of flavour are particularly useful in understanding modern Chinese and Hunanese cookery.

One is 'fishy' tastes or odours, the unpleasant aspects of the natural flavours of meat, fish, poultry and some vegetable ingredients such as soybeans. Many Chinese culinary strategies are concerned with dispelling these 'fishy tastes', by blanching, pre-frying or applying refreshing ingredients, such as ginger, spring onion, purple perilla, vinegar, rice wine or spices. Only then can the delicious flavour of the main ingredient be truly appreciated.

In contrast to these undesirable tastes, all that is best in the flavours of nature is represented by xian, the Chinese equivalent of 'the fifth taste', umami. It is used to describe the most seductive savoury tastes, the sumptuousness of dried scallops, or the soothing richness of a chicken soup. Chinese chefs traditionally use all the arts at their disposal to bring out the xian tastes of their raw ingredients, enhancing them with salt, sugar and xian-rich foods such as shiitake and chicken. Sadly, monosodium glutamate is often used as a short cut to achieving xian at the expense of more subtle flavours.

Another constant preoccupation in the Chinese kitchen is with 'sending the flavours in', or encouraging seasonings or stocks to penetrate the raw ingredients. With food that is cut into small pieces, it may be enough to marinate for a few minutes before cooking; larger chunks of food might need a lengthy salt curing or simmering in a flavoured broth.

Chairman Mao's red-braised pork

Red-braised pork is a dish that in Hunan is inseparably bound up with the memory of Chairman Mao: many restaurants call it 'The Mao Family's red-braised pork'. Mao Zedong loved it, and insisted his Hunanese chefs cook it for him in Beijing. It is a robust concoction. Best eaten with plain, steamed rice and simple stir-fried vegetables, the treacly, aromatic chunks of meat are irresistible, and it's always a favourite at my London dinner parties. In keeping with traditional Chinese gastronomy, which seeks to make a medical virtue out of every dietary predilection, the people of Mao's home village, Shaoshan, recommend red-braised pork as a health food: 'Men eat it to build their brains,' Chairman Mao's nephew Mao Anping told me when I met him a few years ago, 'and ladies to make themselves more beautiful'.

This is Mao Anping's recipe, in Shaoshan they traditionally leave the skin intact for maximum succulence, and cut the meat into rather large chunks, perhaps 4cm long: I tend to make the pieces a little smaller. The recipe below takes its colour from caramelised sugar, which gives it a lovely reddish gloss, but many people just use dark soy sauce at home. Serves 2 as a main dish, or 4 as part of a Chinese meal.

500g belly pork (skin optional)
2 tbsp groundnut oil
2 tbsp white sugar
1 tbsp Shaoxing wine (or medium dry sherry)
20g fresh ginger, skin left on and sliced
1 star anise
2 dried red chillies
a small piece cassia bark or cinnamon stick
light soy sauce, salt and sugar
a few lengths spring onion greens

Plunge the pork into a pan of boiling water and simmer for 3-4 minutes until partially cooked. Remove and, when cool enough to handle, cut into bite-sized chunks.

Heat the oil and white sugar in a wok over a gentle flame until the sugar melts, then raise the heat and stir until the melted sugar turns a rich caramel brown. Add the pork and splash in the Shaoxing wine.

Add enough water to just cover the pork, along with the ginger, star anise, chillies, cassia and salt to taste. Bring to the boil, then turn down the heat and simmer for 40-50 minutes. Towards the end of the cooking time, turn up the heat to reduce the sauce and season with soy sauce and a little sugar to taste. Add the spring onion greens just before serving.

Variations

For all the variations, begin by making the original recipe (it can be prepared in advance, and freezes well). Local chefs have told me women always prefer the water chestnut version, while men opt for pork with bean curd skin.

Red-braised pork with water chestnuts

Peel the water chestnuts and deep-fry briefly until just taking colour. Drain off the oil and return the chestnuts to the wok with some cooked braised pork, light soy sauce, sugar and ground white pepper to taste, and a little dark soy sauce to intensify the treacly colour. Turn up the heat to reduce the sauce and make everything sizzly and fragrant. Just before serving, adjust the seasoning, stir in some lengths of green spring onion and allow them barely to cook. The crisp chestnuts are a magnificent foil for the richness of the meat.

Red-braised pork with deep-fried bean curd

Add deep-fried bean curd puffs to some red-braised pork, with stock or water, if necessary, and simmer until the bean curd has absorbed the flavours of the meat. Finish as in the water chestnut recipe above.

Red-braised pork with bean curd skin

Soak the brittle yellow bean curd skin rolls in cold water overnight, or in hot water for about 30 minutes, then drain and cut at an angle into chunks. Cook with some prepared red-braised pork as in the bean curd puff recipe above.

Stir-fried water spinach leaves with garlic

Water spinach is an everyday southern Chinese vegetable with a pleasant taste and a delightful mouthfeel: its stems become juicily crisp after cooking, its leaves soft and silky like regular spinach. It is particularly good cooked with strong flavours, such as black fermented beans, fermented bean curd and, in Malaysia, dried shrimp.

Leaves from 500g water spinach
2 tbsp finely chopped garlic
salt
3tbsp groundnut oil or lard for cooking

Cut the leafy spinach sections in half. Heat the wok over a high flame until smoke rises, then add the oil or lard and swirl around. Add the garlic and sizzle until fragrant, then add the spinach leaves and stir-fry until just cooked, adding salt to taste.

· Fuchsia Dunlop's Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook is published by Ebury Press for £25

Next week: a second helping of Fuchsia Dunlop's Hunan cooking. Nigel Slater returns in a fortnight

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