Chinese cuisine: anyone for sweet and sour puppy?
On a tour of China, Nigel Richardson wrestles with his conscience on the question of eating dog.
By Nigel Richardson
6:33PM BST 31 May 2011
Wherever you go in China, "Chinglish" – the transliteration of the Chinese languages into English – is a reliable if cheap source of amusement. And it's on restaurant menus that it tends to reach the apogee of absurdity. "Radish sauce secret system", anyone? "Crispy kingbee"? ....
But in Cloud 9 restaurant, in the tourist town of Yangshuo, the menus were written in English that was not open to misunderstanding. Dishes included "local style braised bamboo rat" and "garlic flavour braised dog meat in clay pot".
"Right, that's it," I said.
My partner thought I was about to make a scene, but she was wrong. I had decided to sign up for a cookery class, of which there were several on offer in Yangshuo. We had been travelling around China for three weeks by this point and had scarcely had a decent meal. I was sick of mocking from the sidelines. It was time to inform myself about a cuisine that can seem incomprehensible and downright revolting to ignorant Western palates.
[....]
Faced with non-English-speaking restaurants and incomprehensible menus, we tried to play it safe, but it almost always went wrong. I began to feel grumpy and xenophobic, questioning a collective palate that relishes preserved eggs, pickled vegetables and lamb's viscera for breakfast. And what was the deep-fried chicken gristle all about?
This "delicacy", served in an expensive, pretentious restaurant in Luoyang, was like chewing one's way through suppositories. But I'll admit it. The thing that turned my stomach – and quite possibly pre-biased me against every eating experience – was the dog question.
I had been relaxed about this before leaving home. I'm not a vegetarian and I didn't want to be a hypocrite. If it came up on a menu, I didn't have to order it, did I?
In the so-called Great Leap Forward of the late Fifties, food was so scarce that many Chinese people were reduced to eating earth and even each other. Jung Chang, in her biography Mao: The Unknown Story, calculates that in four years 38 million people died of starvation and overwork. With such a history, a nation is hardly likely to be choosy about what it eats.
So the idea of people eating dog meat did not faze me. Then I saw some dogs in a cage. We were on the sacred Buddhist mountain of Wutai Shan and my first thought, when we passed the cage containing three saucer-eyed puppies, was that, of course, a site of Buddhist pilgrimage was exactly the sort of place that would attract animal lovers eager to buy a pet.
Doh! They weren't for sale as pets. I looked back. The cage was out in the blazing sunlight and the puppies had no water to drink. That image stayed with me, turning meals to ashes on my tongue.
For the final week of the trip we headed south to the tourist town of Yangshuo amid its famous landscape of limestone karst peaks. Seeing dog on the menu in that restaurant triggered something. I wanted an entry point to the promised world of art, play and obsession from which I had so far been shut out. Maybe at the same time I would scrape my pathetic squeamishness and hypocrisy into the moral pedal bin once and for all.
The next morning I met my teacher, Xie Jing Ju (Jenny to tourists), outside Yangshuo's huge covered market. The idea was that she would give me a tour of the local produce before we bought the ingredients for our cookery lesson.
[...]
We started in the fruit-and-veg section ("This one we call leg melon. Because it looks like a leg. This one we call smelly vegetable. Because…").
Then she asked an apparently innocent question: "Is this your first time in China?"
"No."
"Ah. I thought you had been before." I was just flattering myself on evidently appearing well travelled when she added: "So you are OK with the dog area?"
Here it was, my chance finally to stand up to my own feebleness.
I swallowed. Seconds ticked by. Then I said: "No. I'm not OK with the dog area."
"So you're a vegetarian?"
"Yes," I lied. "I'm a vegetarian." 8)
Ingredients bought, we drove out to Chaolong village, tucked among those conical peaks. Jenny told me that Chinese cooking aims to marry the spiciness of yang with the cooling of yin. Then, in a state-of-the-art kitchen located in an outhouse, she taught me to cook three dishes: tofu, dried mushroom, spring onion, goji berry, dates and ginseng, steamed in a bamboo steamer; dumplings like mini omelettes stuffed with potato, carrot, mint and oyster sauce; and aubergine with garlic, ginger, spring onion, oyster sauce and soy sauce.
Afterwards I ate them, feeling a mixture of relief and shame at my cowardice. They were delicious, though, the best food I had eaten in China. I finally understood what the fuss was all about, even if I'd done the cooking myself.
"Yummy!" said Jenny.
Then she asked about my job and I said it wasn't always as great as people assumed.
"Miss home?" she asked.
"Miss my dog," I said.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/desti ... puppy.html
