Beijing bites: Hotpots and chopsticks

The first thing people ask me when they know that I am based in China is about the food. The questions usually start with “is it anything like the Chinese food you get in India?” or “have you tasted snakes yet?” The answer to the first question is Chinese food in China is poles apart from Chinese food in India. It’s far better or worse depending on how adventurous you are willing to be. The for the answer to the second question read on! Also, unlike in India, in China, there’s no such thing as Scehzwan fried rice or Chicken Manchurian! 

There is of course Sichuan cuisine. The uniqueness in their food is the Sichuan peppercorn. It’s not spicy like our chilli but it numbs your tongue and you experience a tingling sensation. It is an acquired taste and not necessarily something I enjoy.  Sichuan is also known the food capital of China.  So it’s easy to fathom why hotpots from this region are pretty popular all over China. 

Hotpot refers to different varieties of stew that is usually brought in a simmering pot and kept onto an electric hotplate or induction plate at the center which is controlled by a knob. While the hot pot is kept simmering, ingredients are placed into the pot and cooked at the table. Typical hot pot dishes include thinly sliced meat, leafy vegetables, mushrooms, dumplings and seafood.

My introduction to the hotpot was actually accidental. It happened in the second week after our move to Beijing. As we were still waiting for our gas connection to be set up, we would end up eating out quite often. So our daily dinner plans always started out with a walk to find a place to eat and our criteria was simple. The menu had to be in English!  

We had overdosed on TGIF, Subway and other such Western joints. I love my rice and curry and decided to try the Chinese version of it. We very soon realised our criteria for an English menu was quite often a tedious task. On one such outing even after an hour we were finding it difficult to find a place to eat with food we recognised. Finally, just as we were about to give up and settle for another night at TGIF, we found a menu which had chicken, mutton and momo’s (dumplings). How difficult could it have gotten from there!  Well, for one we had a Chinese waitress who exhausted us with her ranting in Mandarin while we continued to gesture that we did not understand and finally picked from the pictures on the menu. A plate of mutton and dimsums. She tried to get us to pick a broth but we hardly understood what she and half a dozen of her colleagues who had by then collected around our table tried to tell us. 

They finally gave up and brought a broth of their choosing and the girl picked up my bowl and gestured me to follow her and pick from a large assortment of ingredients. I was not very sure what I was supposed to do with it but picked some of the ones I recognised anyway. The list is quite exhaustive  and includes garlic, coriander, spring onions, chilli garlic paste,  peanut paste, red and green chillis, soy sauce etc.   

By the time I came back to the table the dimsums were already there. There was only one problem, they were frozen!! How was I supposed to eat it? I had no idea and tried looking at other tables but did not quite understand. I figured maybe it was some sort of delicacy and even tried biting into it. But it was frozen solid! And I would have definitely broken a few teeth had I continued.  While we waited the mutton also arrived and surprise, surprise it was uncooked! By then even bread seemed like a wise option and I was reaching my “mummy...bhook lagi hain” moment! Armed with chopsticks. 

The waitress finally arrived with the pot filled with broth, poured it into a hole in our table, lit a fire under it and deftly put the dimsums and the mutton into the broth. While i sheepishly looked on! And voila, in about ten minutes she served up cooked mutton and dim sums in a soup bowl.  I can’t say I liked it as it was in the middle of summer and we had steam from the pot blowing into our face. The overall experience was not exactly worth remembering.

 But under duress from our friends here we were soon taken to experience it like it is supposed to be experienced.  They taught us how to order it and and what you do with the ingredients and how you eat it. Its just what the doctor ordered for the long winter in Beijing. I have of course grown very fond of it.

The experience of China lies in its food.  Mine were not the most pleasant ones to start with, but I still love Chinese food and I mean the food you get in China, not in Majnu ka Tila. Back home, I have tried to learn eating with a chopstick, and I fancied people who could. But I never imagined one day I would have to! Initially I tried asking for a spoon and fork and for a while even carried disposable ones in my bag! But after getting stared at for eating with soup spoons and ladles (‘coz that’s the only spoon they had) I was determined to master this skill. I mean how hard could it be? I practised at home and when I thought I had mastered it, took it to the streets (literally) and have I had bad chopstick days or what. It was a constant feature to have things flying off my chopsticks and I would just sheepishly say ‘I guess I am having a bad chopstick day’ . And on a good day, all I could manage was about five grains of rice on my chopstick!! 

So imagine my surprise when visiting one of the palace museums I saw a whole bunch of spoons and forks on display and am like ‘what! They had it then why can’t they have it now’?  I can’t help but quote Bill Bryson.  

“And I find chopsticks frankly distressing.  Am I alone in thinking it odd that a people ingenious enough to invent paper, gunpowder, kites and any number of other useful objects, and who have a noble history extending back 3,000 years haven't yet worked out that a pair of knitting needles is no way to capture food.”

I have learnt how to eat with chopsticks, eaten raw crab, maybe even eaten a bird which the restaurant claimed was chicken, cartilage on skewers, some weird greens, pickled chicken feet and stinky tofu . But snakes, not yet!