HOW DO YOU COOK THAT?

When eating in Chinatown, everyone knows about stir-frying, pan-frying, red-stewing, and soup. As well as whatever that method is that yields the most popular category of Chinese food in the red states, namely first battering and deep-frying till crispy, then throwing whatever it is into a wok and saucing it with cornstarch, sugar, and various proportions of vinegar, soy sauce, red food colouring, and calling the result General Tzo's or kung pao. Which is not something most Chinese would touch with a ten-foot pole except to serve to folks who are incorrigibly Caucasian. It's also very popular in New York, I've been told.

Sweet and sour pork is a variation on that.


For a family of standard issue Protestants (mom, pop, two kids of alternate genders, a cat, a dog, a goldfish, and a new stationwagon), a well-balanced Chinese restaurant meal would be kung pao beef, sweet 'n sour pork, General Tzo's chicken, soup, egg rolls, and shrimp-fried rice. Don't forget the fortune cookies.

In fact, with the addition of burgers, pizza, a Brazilian steakhouse, and cream of mushroom soup, you will have the basis of International Cuisine as is available absolutely everywhere. Add bratwurst and Wiener schnitzel and the Europeans are happy too. Sorry, Netherlanders, but frikandel is hard to find. Apparently nobody else likes that. Perhaps have a burger?

Pineapple chunks are available upon request, I'm sure that there is a bottle of peanut sauce somewhere, as well as ketchup for the Yanks, and just wash everything down with beer.

[English people lament the absence of beans in a can outside of Britain. Sorry.]


Not having a goldfish or a stationwagon, I have avoided everything kung pao for years. It is tragic. And sadly, none of the places I go to ever give me fortune cookies. I haven't been to New York either. Yes, I know! I am so culturally deprived!

Most of the time I eat alone. This is not by design, but being not fully social, on the spectrum, and a middle-aged pipe smoking bachelor to boot, it was probably inevitable.

I suspect that later this afternoon I will probably end up at a chachanteng which I like, where what's on the wall board promises some fun eaties. In Chinese. Not because they are trying to keep the good stuff from the standard issue protestants, but because sometimes there are no good translations for that stuff, and they know their audience. Which is both Hong Kong and Toishanese, hometown folks. The character for which I gave a reconstruction of what it might look like in archaic script (篆書 zhuan shu), if it had existed then, is purely Cantonese, though Northerners would be able to pronounce it and based on context could guess that it had something to do with food preparation.

炆 ('man'): to simmer on a low heat briefly, incorporating flavours from the main ingredient(s) with some additions into a scant quantity of sauce. Basically stewed together so that it's sort of wet-juicy but not soupy. Sort of twixt braising and sautéeing.
The word isn't in most dictionaries.


I'll be there after the lunch rush has died down. It's calmer then, and I can observe other customers from two or three tables away, perhaps listening into their conversations, or speculating about passersby on the street. Afterwards I'll light up my pipe and wander through the neighborhood.


Seeing as I don't have either a goldfish or a stationwagon (new or used), I am invisible and quite unremarkable. So I hardly ever get noticed, and I am by myself.
Just a pipe smoking middle aged Dutch American.
A normal man.



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