“I will.” She felt a little better, talking to him. The way he was, the way he thought, left her feeling lifted. He reminded her of the world beyond herself. What was more, he had the makings of a great cook. She felt he deserved this prize with every inch of his soul. “Do you know what I want more than anything?” she said. “I want you to win. I want you to have this.”
She could hear a smile in his voice. “Then for you I will try to get it.”
“Not for me! For your family.”
“Okay,” he said. “For them.”
11
The most important thing is to preserve civilization. As men we are the sum of our forebears, the great thinkers, great masters, great chefs. We who know the secrets of food must pass them on, for our attainment in food is no less than our attainment in philosophy, or art; in deed, the three things cannot be separated. These are the things that make us Chinese. In the West, it is different. There, Plato is one of their favorite sages. He teaches them that food is the opposite of art, a routine undertaken to satisfy human need, no more – worse, a form of flattery. We Chinese look instead to the Analects of Confucius, where it is written that there is “no objection to the finest food, nor the finest shredding.”
– LIAN G WEI, The Last Chinese Chef
I was born to my father late. He may have been one of the great chefs of his time and written a book that made him gastronome to a generation, yet he did not have a son – not at least until his wife died in 1934 and he at last – for he had long ignored the urgings of his friends – took a second. He could have done it sooner. Many men in those days did. They chose a concubine. Liang Wei could have done it without raising an eyebrow, for his wife had proved barren, but he never did. He wanted to be modern. He was a traditional chef, a product of the Forbidden City, of feudalism, but he would not take a second.
And then she died. He put on a grand funeral, more than he could afford. The sutras were chanted for forty-nine days. When Qingming came in the spring, the day of Pure Brightness on which the dead are honored, he offered his prayers at her grave. Then he sent for the matchmaker.
He wanted someone young, he told the older woman, but not too young. He wanted wide hips for bearing. And he wanted a girl who could cook. Someone had to oversee his kitchen at home while he ran his restaurant. His own hired cook was not enough. For my father, even the food at home had to scale the heights. He was one for whom every mouthful, even the most insignificant snack with tea, was worthy of talent and attention.
Wang Ma the matchmaker brought him my mother, age twenty-four. Her name was Chao Jing, Surpassing Crystal. She didn’t look anything like her name. She was a plain jug of a girl with a flat, freckled nose. Yet her eyes sparkled with intelligence and humor. She was strong in the kitchen and superlative at the market, the latter a skill for which my father had not dared to hope. No one could outdo her, not even Ah Heng, the hired cook. It was Ah Heng’s right to do the shopping. He gained a critical slice of his income through the small commission he took on each purchase and, like so many cooks in Peking then, he had used that little cash stream to build up a gambling operation that he ran in his family home nearby. Despite all that, he would step aside sometimes and let my mother shop. She cared about food; the vendors knew it and they loved her. They all wanted to please her. She always brought home superior ingredients at a lower price.
And she ran a great kitchen. I think often of the banquets my father served at home almost every night, taking a few hours’ leave from the restaurant to come home and dine – great meals that he could never have staged without Ah Heng and above all my mother. Even if the meal was a simple one, even if the guests were few, he always expended as much care and love on each dish as if he were entertaining Yi Yin himself, the greatest chef in history, who like him started as a slave. He would think many days ahead and call together friends whom he loved. He would send out a poem of invitation. All the recipients would fall into a passion of expectation. There would be a thematic reason to gather: the Osmanthus Festival, the anniversary of the birth of a poet, the first crabs of the season. Guests might present a painting or a work of calligraphy to accompany the meal. Remarks on cuisine would lead naturally to remarks on poetry, the two subjects sharing to a surprising degree both vocabulary and a style of critical expression. Eventually poems themselves would be invented, inspired by food, lubricated by wine.
People think of the history of cuisine as being a story that is told in restaurants, but in China it is very much told in the kitchens of the great houses. It was true of my father. His reputation had three legs, like the bronze vessels of yore. There was his famous book, there was the restaurant, and there was the cuisine of his home and family. Sometimes I felt that his home kitchen on Houhai was where he really created his food, with his wife shopping and helping. This was his real child in life, his bequest: Liang Jia Cai. Liang Family Cuisine.
Preparations for the evening meal started early in the day. I learned there was no better place to be than behind my mother on the way to market, weaving under the crystal autumn light through the crowd on Hata Men, soaked in the gay chatter and the golden laughter and the calls and whistles of the sweets vendors with their bright, fluttering flags. The world was a festival to me, one that could not be dampened even by the Japanese occupation with its columns of soldiers and its strange kimonoed women. Once we got to the market we were back in our own world, the Chinese world, and we chose with unfettered joy from the capons and bamboo shoots, water shields and fresh duck eggs, prawns, succulent live river eels, wild herbs from the marshy estuaries of the south, and three colors of amaranth. Walking home we would sing songs.
As I grew, my father and Ah Heng let me watch them cook. They loved having me there, even if they usually grumbled and shouted me out of the way. Then one or the other would hiss me over to his side, pull out a secret ingredient – some crumbled herb or paper-wrapped bit of paste – from his pocket, send out an exaggerated, theatrical pretense of a glance to make sure the other wasn’t looking, and then add it to the dish. As if they had anything hidden from each other. But each loved the special surge of face that came from imparting a rare secret, and so they played the game. And I learned.
Some evenings, when the meal was over and the guests had gone home, my father would sit a while in the kitchen. He would smoke a little tobacco in Ah Heng’s water pipe and tell stories of the Forbidden City while the kitchen was cleaned.
At those times, depleted from yet another elegantly conceived and crafted meal, he often spoke most yearningly of the rustic. To hear him then, nothing was better than plain, everyday foods. He would insist that true cuisine was the perfect preparation of the simplest food, though we all knew he did not cook that way.
He also told us how the Empress Dowager Ci Xi would make periodic demands for the rustic road food she was forced to eat when they fled from the Boxer Rebellion. This was part of the lore of the palace and taught to Liang Wei in the most meticulous fashion by his own master, the renowned imperial chef and antiquities connoisseur Tan Zhuanqing. Master Tan taught my father to make xiao wo tou, the rough little thimble-shaped corn cakes that the Empress remembered her bearers buying from vendors along the road, stopping their bumpy caravan in the flapping wind of a mountain pass to eat them, tiny and hot. Years later she would call for them when she wanted to feel alive again. She had been ordinary for a moment, almost poor, outside in the open air like any lowly person. Strangely, of all her memories, it was one of the most thrilling.