mastering-the-art-of-chinese-cooking

My teaching, my cooking lessons always begin in the Chinese market. Heaps of vegetables, familiar and exotic; the pork butchers; the herbalists and their shops comprise my classroom, my laboratory. In them I find recurring veins of discovery. In them I teach and simultaneously I learn. Sometimes when I am at home in my kitchen, my mind focused on the foods I am preparing, my thoughts will suddenly shift to a particular shop, along a particular street, in my Chinatown. I know that the next time I visit that shop I will find the greenest, smallest, most crisp bok choy, the liveliest striped bass swimming in tanks, and mounds of freshly picked lily bulbs and garlic flown in from China. My mind is ever filled with the memories of a lifetime of cooking, learned and tested, gifts to me from the cooks and chefs, the dim sum artists and the da shi fu (kitchen masters), the farmers and fishermen in the many parts of China in which I have lived and cooked. They have given me the permanent legacy of a love and respect for food, its cultivation, and its preparation. It has been my life’s work to try to transmit to my students the appreciation I have for the traditions of my native foods.

All of this begins in the market, and my markets are many. Few markets in the world can match the freshness, breadth, and variety of those found in China, and few markets in China can compare to the Qing Ping market in Guangzhou. This unstructured retail space, which snakes its way through a zigzag of tiny alleys, began as an underground free market decades ago when vegetable and fruit growers, fishermen and poultrymen, and the driers and blenders of spices and herbs rebelled against the rigid communes of the Mao Zedong era, which they believed cared more for numbers than for freshness and quality. I have shopped in the Qing Ping market often, and on any morning I have found live chickens and ducks and their eggs; whole pigs, live and roasted; fish swimming in shallow zinc pools; crawling crabs and piles of fresh mussels and clams; and small mountains of vegetables, the dirt of the fields still clinging to their roots