EATING AMERICAN

When I got home the fog was rolling in, it promised to be a cold moist night for pointlessly trying to see fireworks in San Francisco. So I didn't even bother. Let someone else freeze. There are times when one feels old, and throws the flaming baton at the younger generation. Instead, I stayed in, listening to the booming.

It had been a good day. Even with all the walruses and hippopopotamouses majestically lumbering around Chinatown. Glowing white or pink, and pasty.
The Caucasian diet in the United States celebrates freedom from personal gustatory responsibility. Instead, hamberders!

With double bacon, cheesy goo, and buckets of freedom fries.

The younger generation cannot run to catch the flung batons.


貴妃雞
'gwai fei kai'

Anyone grilling hamberders yesterday in San Francisco yesterday was either out of their mind or indoors. Summer here after teatime is frigid and windy. I myself was nowhere near a hamberder, but I ate well. Concubine chicken! Of which there are two versions, the more common one is fairly assertively flavoured by poaching in a rice wine, spices, and soy-ish broth, the second more pallid and colourless, relying primarily on mild spicing (ginger and scallion) for flavour. In either case, it can be spoiled by veering too close to "drunken chicken" (醉雞 'jeui kai').

The correct version is made thus: trim the whole chicken as appropriate, massage with salt, steam with ginger and scallion in the cavity and surrounding the bird till barely cooked. Remove from heat, and give it an ice water bath. Take it apart (cleaver or scissors), and soak it in a warm spiced broth (whole spices, bay leaves, dash vinegar, a touch siuheng rice wine) for a few hours. The flesh should be soft and tender, pink near the bone, the skin slippery, the subcutaneous fat nicely gelled.
Serve it cold, neatly arranged.

Scrumpty!


It was written on the wall. So I ordered it with rice for lunch.


I'm fairly certain the table with Germans did not know about it, nor the middle-aged couple from perhaps Iowa. Sometimes there is no good reason to hunt up a translation, because the dish may not have much appeal outside of the group that can read the scrawled wall-specials. Nicely gelled subcutaneous fat? Yeah, there are several people of whom I am immensely fond who would pass on that.

Blanched and queasy. Much like the bird itself.


After lunch and grocery shopping I visited a bakery for milk tea and a lo po bing. Conversation with three mature gentlemen in construction company management about briar and food, then out into the now frigid street for a smoke.

Finished that bowl of tobacco on my front door step. It's less blustery and cold there than on Stockton Street after five.



One of these days I'm going to take a European to that restaurant for baked Spaghetti Bolognese with pork chops. Just for the heck of it.
I want to see the expression on their face.
Buonissimo!


You can have it with a fried egg on top.




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