A Gift from the East
How one cookbook ruined Chinese Restuarants for Me

A monumental change in our cooking and eating habits began when one of my cousins returned from two years of teaching in Hong Kong. She brought us a cookbook by Robert A. Delfs, named The Good Food of Szechwan and things in the kitchen were never the same. While this book “ruined” most local Chinese restaurants for me, the long-term benefits far outweighed that drawback.
Although we already owned a few Chinese cookbooks, this one upped the ante. It introduced us to many new ingredients which possessed different flavors and aromas than we were accustomed to. For me the recipes in this book helped me clearly delineate the difference between Chinese home-cooking and restaurant food. On many Sunday nights my father would cook dinner from this book with myself or one of my brothers acting as “kitchen kid” (read assistant). Most of the recipes turned out really well, and were better than anything we ordered from our local restaurant Golden Star — who still, hands down, made the best chicken wings.
As we began exploring the book, there was much for us to learn. Marination and the stunning array of new ingredients proved to be eye-openers. Nope, I had never experienced fresh ginger or garlic before we started cooking from this book. Although I have a vague recollection of a small box of “fresh” garlic tucked away in a drawer of our kitchen, most often we opted for garlic powder. (You know, the powder that saves cottage cheese from being, like horrible and stuff…apologies to those who do like cottage cheese. I, as you can guess, do not.)
Also previously unseen: dried chilis, tofu (not so common at the time), wood ear, bamboo shoots, hot bean paste, sesame oil, light and dark soy sauce and interesting spice blends such as five spice powder. Szechwan Vegetable… More on that in a moment. It wasn’t just the ingredients that were new, but also utensils and techniques. This was the first wok I had ever seen, and the quick stir-frying that we used it for was novel. The unusual recipes in this book such as Sui-mi Ji (chicken and peanuts), Mao-po Dou-fou and Ma-yi Shang Shu (roughly translated to Ants Climbing Up a Tree) presented us with new roads to explore.
As a family, we took to many of these recipes immediately, although a few adjustments were necessary. At first, the hot bean paste was too strong for us. Combining that salty, hot paste with dried red chilis created five-alarm heat, which we were not ready for yet. However, after we backed off the heat by using regular bean paste, I noticed that I was sort of missing the burn. Even so, I still enjoyed most of our new discoveries.
However, there was one new ingredient that none of us, save my father, ever acquired a taste for. At the time I was not sure what it really was, but we dubbed it Szechwan vegetable. It made a few appearances in recipes we cooked from the book. Delfs refers to it as Szechwan vegetable explaining that it is a pickled radish. It was very pungent and salty; way too strong for us kids. This vegetable would become a running joke, especially after my father started to drop it in his drinks. The kicker is, I think if I tried it now, I might like it — more on that in a moment. Back then, we all made faces at the mere mention of it.
Although cooking from this book was a lot of work, the results certainly made up for it! The dishes we cooked were bold, flavorful and so much spicier than anything we had tasted before. This is where I began to really acquire a taste for hot and spicy food. But, what made these dishes so different than Golden Star or even Yee Hong Guey, our go-to restaurant in Boston’s Chinatown? We added the dried chilis without a thought; got accustomed to the bean paste which added a salty fermented flavor as well as more heat. Even if the restaurants were using these ingredients it seemed like they were blended into a more homogeneous form. Nothing at any Chinese restaurant matched the chili heat or flavors we were getting from our wok!
In college, I began to search for Szechwan dishes at other Chinese restaurants. But, at the time, even when I found one, I was usually disappointed — Kung Pao Chicken in most restaurants at the time was still no match for our Sui-mi Ji. More recently though, some newer restaurants have begun to offer Szechwan dishes that approached our efforts, but often were overly oily. Interestingly, while I quickly gravitated towards home-cooked Chinese dishes, it took me much longer to feel the same way about my curries versus a restaurant’s chicken do piaza.
If vindaloo opened my mind, this book did its part to prepare my taste buds for the rising tide of hot and spicy food. It gave me some hands-on experience with unfamiliar ingredients and recipes. It also introduced me to the supremely flavorful dishes that existed outside of the monolithic western Chinese restaurant repertoire. Sweet and sour pork had nothing on Cheng-du Ji (Chengtu Chicken)! My eyes were opening…
POSTSCRIPT Stop the presses! In the last year, my brother managed to find Szechwan vegetable in a few different places. He first brought it to our family Thanksgiving dinner, and we all went outside to sample it near his car. A few months later he found it in packaged form as well. After all this time of making faces and jokes about it, it turned out to be pretty tame. While both varieties were a bit spicy, a bit salty and possessed a distinctly Chinese pickled flavor, I kind of thought to myself: Is that it? In some ways I was disappointed. I wanted it to be intense and mind blowing. But it really wasn’t too over-the-top. Most bottled Indian pickles pack more of a punch.