For love of food
MEDIUM RARE
As the immortal love song goes, where do I begin? Elizabeth Barrett Browning would reply, “Let me count the ways.”
Flowers, a Hallmark card, a txt message? Who writes love letters anymore? Not even for Valentine’s Day (that’s tomorrow, sotto voce). Post offices have gone out of business for the most part. Have you noticed, it’s safer for friends rather than lovers to greet one another, “Happy Valentine’s Day!”
Instead, let’s talk about the romance of cuisine, specifically Chinese food, in deference to all the feasting that took place last week, what with the tikoy going around and the Kong Hei Fat Choy (in Cantonese) and Kiong Hee Huat Chai (Fookienese) greetings that marked the entry of the Dragon on Feb. 10.
Chinese dishes, possibly the most versatile in the world – “anything that creeps and crawls, walks and runs, swims or flies” – are described with allusions to poetry, symbolism, homonyms of names from legends and myths. If that’s hard to digest, there were at least four culinary events on my calendar last week (considering that I’m not a food writer).
Beginning with a birthday dinner on Feb. 8, leading to a birthday lunch on Feb. 9, which was also new year’s eve, followed by a press lunch on the 10th – each and all of them highlighted by “auspicious” dishes with fanciful names. To take just one example, China Blue at Conrad hotel offered “braised fortune money bag” for starters, followed by five main dishes, including “10 head abalone, sea cucumber and black mushroom,” leading to two desserts, one of them stylistically labeled “prosperous New Year snow bird’s nest [to go with] honey lemon jelly with sago pearl.”
If that’s not a mouthful, here’s another morsel. By sheer coincidence, both the Jasmine Chinese restaurant at New World hotel and China Blue trained the spotlight on Malaysian chefs.
According to the Chinese, their food is the most popular in the world. That could be true, based on their sheer numbers, 1.2 billion in China (second only to India’s 1.4 billion) and millions of overseas Chinese everywhere in the world.
Globally appealing or not, the Chinese influence is undoubtedly a favorite ingredient of Filipino cuisine, for example pancit Canton and lumpia Shanghai.