PANDEMIC
NOODLES
Julietta Zhu
Hometown: Shenzhen, China
Julietta Zhu is a rising sophomore studying at Emory University. Her hometown is surrounded by water, so she is a huge fan of all types of seafood and freshwater food. She did not know how to cook at all in China, but she found herself a very adventurous cook shortly after she moved to the US 3 years ago. She never strictly follows pre-existed recipes and likes to invent her own.
Reflection on Making
Tomato Beef Alkaline Noodle Soup
America is the world’s most immigrated country and, not surprisingly, there is a space for every ethnic community in its growingly pluralistic foodscape. It would be a lie to say I can’t find authentic Chinese restaurants in the US, but dining out every day is just—both economically and nutritionally—beyond the consumption level of us average college students. Scrambling to make our own food seems to be the only alternative for those of us who refuse to settle for convenient fast-food restaurants.
The recipe I showcase here is an innovation of mine during the pandemic. In my essay, I will dissect the recipe while discussing related traditions and history of some ingredients and how I opted for alternatives for essential ingredients that are not available in the US. The end product may seem too much of an innovation to be called a traditional Cantonese noodle dish, but all my decisions adhere to the Chinese cooking traditions and philosophies we have been discussing over the past two weeks, and it is these traditions that allow me to recreate the tastes of home.
Any type of noodle can work well with this recipe, but here I use the pre-made Chinese alkaline noodle (碱水面). It is one of the most common noodles in the Cantonese area, including Hong Kong and the Guangdong province, where my hometown is located. Traditionally speaking, this noodle is only a specialty of northern China, and you could seldom find the Cantonese cooking noodles due to an unsuitable climate for growing high-quality wheat. Thanks to the growing integration of the south and the north throughout history, the southerners eventually mastered their own way of making noodles—the alkaline noodle. It is distinguishably recognized for its yellowish color and a chewy, elastic texture. It is an important ingredient for a variety of local specialties, such as wonton noodles and shrimp noodles. Despite a much greater variety of noodles in the north, I still found this Cantonese noodle the most appealing.
Most of the ingredients in this recipe are easy to obtain, such as tomato, eggs, carrots, and beef, but using a combination and permutations of these basic ingredients—a philosophy that lies at the core of the variety of Chinese food, I manage to distinguish my noodle dish from all others with similar ingredients. For example, tomatoes, as the key ingredient of the noodle soup, were used in two distinct ways in this recipe. Growing up in a Cantonese family, my taste buds were spoiled by the home-made dishes cooked by my grandmother using the freshest ingredients she handpicked from the local market every day. When I was shopping for groceries at a Trader Joes, I noticed the tomatoes there were exceptionally fresh with a good price. I immediately decided on tomatoes as the primary ingredient. In order to bring the tomato flavor into my soup, I minced one tomato and cooked it until it was soggy so the juice could come out. Fun fact: I actually learned this mincing tip from a YouTube video discussing how to make a healthy Italian tomato sauce. Later in the recipe, I cut another tomato into larger chunks as a topping for the noodle at the end of the recipe. It’s an immense pleasure to take a bite of the fresh topping tomato: it is slightly softened because of the heat with sweet juice squeezed out from in between the flesh. In short, it is a common practice for the Chinese to use one ingredient in multiple ways and create diversity on the table. Despite my tendency to innovate when I am cooking, I always refer back to this practice. It also just makes cooking more fun in general since I can experiment with more combinations of food.
There are other Chinese cooking traditions I strictly follow—especially those that are related to nutrition. To start with, all my noodle recipes, just like this one, are nutritionally well-balanced with a moderate amount of veggie, meat, and carbs all in one pot. Highlighting the original taste of ingredients and limiting the use of premade seasoning is another cooking philosophy I inherit from my Canto heritage. Rather than adding premade seasoning, for example, I used dry fish and marinated beef to create a savory soup and limit the input of artificial flavors. The dry seasoned shredded fish is a substitute for dry scallops—an essential ingredient for all Cantonese soups. In our class, reading On Medicine and Food, Lin Yutang also emphasizes the traditional Chinese practice of using dry seafood in a soup when he candidly criticizes the lack of variety of western soup. Besides using dry fish, I found the marination of beef (腌肉) another important step to increase flavor. My family has long been adopting a sweet and simple way to marinate meat that works in almost all dishes. In addition to adding salt and soy sauce, my family likes to use some Chinese cooking wine (料酒), which I replaced with beer as I didn't have the wine in stock, and tapioca flour (生粉). The former adds another layer of flavor to the beef in the soup, and the latter is a helpful hack to tenderize the beef. It is these essential cooking practices and traditions that help me achieve the authentic Chinese taste, no matter how much of an innovation I make.
During the pandemic, it has always been the best moment of the day when I enjoyed a pot of steaming hot noodles. The heat forces me to slow down my eating, so I can truly taste and feel the natural ingredients and the textures of noodles and beef. I started to recall the difficulties I encountered in almost every step of food making—from the procuring of ingredients to the final savoring of a dish. The circumstances forced me to be creative and overcome these difficulties by opting for easier alternatives in this foreign land. The cooking process may be just remotely similar to the tomato beef noodle soup my grandmother made back in China. But regardless of how many trials and errors I make during the innovation, I have achieved the single purpose—to recreate the tastes of home that reside deeply in my memory.
"What I Ate for Lunch"
By: Julietta Zhu
I hopped off a bus, along with some 10 other middle schoolmates of mine. As usual, street food by the bus stop smelled very tempting. Street peddlers understood way too well that at this time of the day, all we students and everyone else passing by wanted, after finishing their compact and hectic morning schedule, was a simple and delicious meal for lunch. They were selling sausages, kabob, Chinese pancakes, stinky tofu—-and trust me, stinky tofu can smell good when you are deadly hungry.
I was like everyone else, desperate to devour some convenient, tasty street food. The only reason that kept me from taking a second look at those vendors was that my grandmother had cooked. There was a 5-minute walk to my grandmother’s home from the bus stop. My friend and neighbor Faye—-who was also waited by her grandparents—-turned left on the first block. Waving goodbye to her, I felt like the rest of my way home seemed much longer with the simmering heat in the air unique to southern China and my empty stomach.
My hometown Shenzhen is an immigration city. Young people moved here from across China for job opportunities. Lots of the young people eventually formed families in Shenzhen. They asked their parents to live with them so that their parents could help take care of their kids. There were a lot of such nanny-like grandparents in my grandmother’s neighborhood. Since they are from different regions of China, the food they made for the grandchildren was also very distinctively different. On my way home I could smell the cooking from different family “mala” (麻辣) unique to Sichuan cuisine, “Xiang la” (香辣) famous as Hunan cuisine, and so on. The short distance from the bus stop to my granny’s house was like a montage of cuisines across China. I could barely resist my hunger anymore.
Eventually, my steps carried me to the building where my grandmother lived. It was an old-style 6-story building with no elevator. The stair connected directly to the door of the apartments on each floor. She was on the 4th floor. The smell of my grandmother’s Cantonese cooking wasn’t as strong as Chuan or Xiang cuisines aforementioned. But by the time I climbed to the third floor, I could tell what was for the day purely based on what I smelled.
“Umm, she must make coconut chicken stew today. I could use some noodles to go with the stew, yumyum.” I think to myself.
I got to the door, inside was the sizzling popping sound of a frying pan, indicating that she was still cooking something. Must be some green. She insisted that I must have a certain amount of green every day for its health benefit. I smashed the door to make sure she heard it so that she could come open the door for me. Then it was the scurry of her footsteps, a loud noise of her clearing the throat. The door opened, my grandmother started to yell: “how many times do I need to remind you: you have a key. Why do you not open the door yourself?” Of course, I have a key, but I was the kind of annoying middle schooler you can’t communicate with, especially when I was hungry.
I responded as though I didn't notice her anger: “Hello.” She loosened her frown and stepped aside to let me get in.
I entered the house and immediately threw my backpack and shoes haphazardly in the middle of the hallway. She frowned again: “Can you not put your stuff in the middle of the road.” This is still a bad habit of mine. I rushed to the table, grabbed the chopsticks, reaching for the hot stew and some plain rice noodles. Suddenly, a hand-cut me off in the middle. It was my grandmother: “wash your hand!!” She got there just in time, after putting away my backpack from the hallway. I was dead hungry so I rushed to the sink and thought to myself: I am just gonna wet my hand…
“HAND SOAP!!!” she continued yelling while going back to cook the green.
“Fine.” I rolled my eyes. She was way ahead of the pandemic trend of the 20-second rule.
Eventually, I settled next to the table. I picked some noodles and dipped them directly into the big pot of the chicken stew. It was the taste I am familiar with. The chicken had soaked in the soup for hours, long enough for the flavor to come out into the soup; The sliced coconut meat was still chewy--my grandmother deliberately picked an old coconut because it has a stronger coconut flavor than those fresher ones. There was a thin layer of fat floating on the top, and the second I dipped the noodles into the soup, the thin layer dispersed.
“Yum yum so good! Thank you Ah-boo!!” I cried. Ah-bu is grandmother in Shanghainese, which is the dialect of my dad’s family. I had stayed with my dad’s family briefly when I was young and learned the word. Now my entire family is used to the fact that I am calling my Cantonese grandmother in Shanghainese.
Ah-boo finally released her frown, as though she totally forgot how annoying I was a few seconds ago.
The heat in the stew forced me to eat everything slower, I was able to pay attention to details I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise such as the aftertaste of the coconut and the fine texture of the rice noodles. Just writing about it left me mouthwatering.
She made a variety of other dishes too. As I recalled, she was such a creative chef as she never repeated a dish within a week unless I specifically asked for it. Now I am alone in America. I could no longer be spoiled in my grandmother’s rearing. I realized those days with my grandmother--along with her everyday cooking--had gone far away from me and would never go back again. I recalled my grandmother’s cooking and my admiration for her arose. I started to wonder frequently: what does it take for her to cook for me every single day for the first 16 years?
A cliche answer would be LOVE— the type of love that has become muscle memory—the type of love you can only observe looking back from the distance.
椰子乌鸡汤
Coconut and Black-bone Chicken soup
Soup is a very important part of our diet. Unlike the Chowder or vegetable beef soup that are commonly served in the western diet, Canton soups consist of much less salt, butter, and seasoning. The key to our soups is time. We put all the ingredients into water and simmered it for hours, sometimes days, until all the flavors mixed into the liquid. Coconut chicken soup is one of my family’s favorites. My grandmother usually cooks soups at night, but the leftovers on the next day are always the best. We like to make some rice noodles to accompany the broth.
150 g black bone chicken
10g Dry scallops
1-2 coconut
10 goji berry
4 cups of water
½ cups dry red dates
Optional:
A pinch of salts
Cut the black-bone chicken into small pieces and put it into a pot. Pour 2 cups of water and bring it to a boil. Add dry scallops, goji berries, and dates into the boiling water and use high heat to bring out the flavor of the ingredients. Open the coconut and pour the juice inside into the pot. Take the coconut meat put it into the pot. Continue cooking the mixture with high heat for 5 min, bring it down to small heat, and cook it for 1-2 hours. Make sure the water is boiling all the time. Add another two cups of water during cooking. When the time is up, turn off the heat and put the mixture in a Thermo pot for as long as possible.