“Are you kidding? Like I’d miss that one.” Maggie was famous for her holiday columns, which were petulant triumphs of grinch humor. She hated the holidays. Holidays were about home, which, as a societal concept, she had never really understood. Each year she took her column in exactly the opposite direction, writing about having Christmas dinners at lunch counters, or waking up in cheap hotels in winter beach towns, or cruising convenience stores to see who else, like her, slipped out that day to buy a six-pack and some chips. “Don’t worry,” she said to Sarah. “I’ll be back for the holiday piece.”
Now it was time to start on Sam Liang. She moved to the couch with a blank pad, a pen, and her notebooks. She had always worked this way. Before she moved to the computer she began by hand, making a web of all her best thoughts and images and ideas and memories. She read through her notebooks and picked out everything that she loved. That was her first cut; she had to love it. If she didn’t love it, why would anybody else?
Then she traced through her jottings to find lines of meaning and pick out moments. When these were repatterned on a fresh page she could usually begin to sense her centerline. Then she would start to write.
Thoughts tumbled easily through her now, and she quickly filled the page with memories of the Xie family. The truth was she had been happy with them, happy for long stretches, hours. She had managed to forget the darkness and feel like she used to feel – like a friend to her life, engaged. It was Sam, yes, and China, but she had to admit that it was the family, too. They had such a net of connectedness between them. Even though it was not hers, rightly, she felt blessed to have been near it and been bathed in it for a while.
She took a fresh sheet of paper, wrote Guanxi in the center, and drew a circle around it.
That was it. Guanxi.
Then right away she questioned it. Could a column on food really be about the Chinese concept of relationships? But the more she looked at it the more she knew this was the way to write it. Because this was the heart of the cuisine, at least the part Sam had managed to show her. From the family on out, food was at the heart of China’s human relationships. It was the basic fulcrum of interaction. All meals were shared. Nothing was ever plated for the individual. She realized this was exactly the opposite from the direction in which Eurocentric cuisine seemed to be moving – toward the small, the stacked, the precious, above all the individual presentation. The very concept of individual presentation was alien here. And that made everything about eating different.
Food was the code of etiquette and the definer of hierarchy too. Sam had made her see that a meal was food but also a presentation of symbols, suggestions, and references, connecting people not only to one another but to their culture, art, and history.
She paused. She wasn’t sure – did guanxi apply only to the connections between people or to ideas as well? She took a separate sheet of paper and wrote this, her first question for Sam, at the top. Then she set this page aside. They had said goodbye for now; she wasn’t going to call him. She wanted to. She found it difficult to get used to being without him. But he needed to work. She would wait.
The next morning when he woke up Sam thought briefly about how much money he had spent on his cell phone this month, then decided that it didn’t matter, because this was Uncle Xie. He punched in his father’s number. “Please,” he said when Liang Yeh answered. “Won’t you come? He’s asking for you. You still have time.”
“Do you think I do not want to?” Liang Yeh lashed back. “It is not easy, this thing you say.”
“It’s not. I know. It’s hard for you.”
“You say you know, but you do not.”
“Well, if you want me to know, write it down. You’ve always said you would.”
“I already have,” said his father.
“What?”
“You heard me. You will see! I will send it to you by e-mail.”
“When?” said Sam, thinking, He may have started, but this could take months.
“Right now,” said Liang Yeh. “My computer is on. Is yours?”
“You already wrote it? You finished it?”
“Yes,” said the old man, and a minute later it appeared in Sam’s in-box. He could hardly believe it. He had pushed his father for years to write down what had happened. Sam noticed the size of the file. A long document.
He saved it and backed it up, and then put it aside to read later. He had to focus on his menu right now.
It was not just the perfect dishes – and getting those right alone would take all of the next few days – it was the play of the menu itself, its rhythm and its meaning and its layers of reference. On the surface it was a banquet of at least twelve courses, to be staged for the panel on a specific night. It sounded simple, for those were the rules in their entirety. Sam knew, though, that the meal would be judged on so many other levels.
He needed help. He needed sustenance. So he opened The Last Chinese Chef, to the section on menu.
The menu provides the structure and carries the theme and atmosphere of the dinner. The theme can be witty or nostalgic, literary or rustic. It is developed in the meal like a line of music.
Before beginning, give consideration to opulence. Too much of it is perverse. Yuan Mei said, don’t eat with your eyes. But extravagance of some kind or another, whether in ingredients, effort, or talent, belongs in any great meal.
There is no one structure to a feast. Many forms can be used. Yet there is a classical structure, and this can serve as the chef ’s foundation: four hors d’oeuvres, and four main courses plus soups; or for larger and more extravagant circumstances, eight and eight.
The hors d’oeuvres should amuse while they set the theme of the meal and fix its style. Then the main courses. Start with something fried, light, gossamer thin; something to dazzle. Then a soup, rich and thick with seafood. After that an unexpected poultry. Then a light, healthful vegetable, to clarify, then a second soup, different from the first.
After this you reach the place where the menu goes beyond food to become a dance of the mind. This is where you play with the diner. Here we have dishes of artifice, dishes that come to the table as one thing and turn out to be something else. We might have dishes that flatter the diner’s knowledge of painting, poetry, or opera. Or dishes that prompt the creation of poetry at the table. Many things can provoke the intellect, but only if they are fully imagined and boldly carried out.
To begin the final stage the chef serves a roast duck. Then a third soup, again different. The last course is usually a whole fish. The fish must be so good that even though the diners are sated they fall upon it with delight. And then, almost with an air of modest apology because the dishes have been so many, a dessert course is served, something contrived of fruits or beans or pureed chestnuts or even rice, which would only now be making its first appearance at the table as a pudding or a mold, or as a thickener in a sweet bean soup. If the chef ’s skill is great, no matter how grand the meal has been, this too will quickly be eaten. & &
Sam put down the book. Clearly, he was going to need an underlayer. There had to be a unifying principle. The more he thought, the more he wanted it to be something literary.
What better place to start than with Su Dongpo, the poet? That was what Third Uncle would recommend. He could almost hear the old voice saying it. The pork dish that still carried his name was probably the dish Sam found himself most frequently served when in Hangzhou. When it was right it was perfect in its way, the pork flavor deep and mellow, the fat sweet and soufflé-soft. Simple. The recipe left behind by the poet himself could not have been plainer: a clean pan, the pork, a little water, a low fire, and the willingness to wait. Patience above all. Chefs over the centuries had added the enhancements of soy sauce, wine, spring onions, and ginger in the initial two hours of simmering, then removed the aromatics and bathed the pork in only its juices for four hours of steaming. Correctly prepared, the dish was a triumph of you er bu ni, to taste of fat without being oily, paired with nong, the dense, meaty, concentrated flavor.