The Feel of Food

That foods differ in flavor, aroma, and visual appeal is well known to chefs and gastronomes alike, and much has been written on the subject. I'm not very well read, but I seem never to have heard anyone mention the feel of food, its tactile sensation, an aspect which in my view is also quite significant.

Flavor is the most important, of course, since no one likes food with a bad taste. Aroma comes next, and many foods are so fragrant they make your mouth water. There are some, though, that taste good and smell bad, such as cake made of durian fruit from the islands of the South China Sea. It has a lovely flavor but it smells almost like excrement before you put it in your mouth, which is a hurdle few can pass. Beyond that, ch'ou tou-fu kan [dried stinky bean curd], fu-ju [fermented bean curd], and top-notch blue cheese all have unbearable odors, yet the people who know how to enjoy them don't seem to mind a bit. Those plucky gourmands adhere to the saying, "You can't catch a tiger cub without entering the tiger's den." Heedless of the stench, they please their palates by savoring the flavor.

As for visual appeal, the dark green of spinach, the snowy white of cabbage, the deep red of tomatoes, and the bright orange of carrots--to speak only of vegetables--make a winning combination that would attract anyone's attention. Both Chaochow and French cuisine strive for beauty of formal composition, so that a study of sculpture and painting would almost seem a necessary prerequisite for their mastery.

But foods also differ among themselves in how they feel, in texture. Even if we don't talk about the differences, we notice them. Considered from another angle, the texture of food is the resistance it gives when it's in the mouth before going down the throat. That sentence has an outlandish air that a translator would do well to avoid. What's worthy of note is that no two foods have the same composition. In other words, each food has a unique consistency. Both may be meat, but beef is chewier than pork. Both may be pork, but a cut of chine differs from a cut of haunch. Among the various kinds of fish, barbel and flounder are the most tender, yellow croaker and grouper the most succulent, and crucian carp and salmon the most loose and flaky. Chicken and duck are both fowl, but their meat differs in toughness as well as in flavor. There's even a difference between chickens raised domestically and those raised in the wild. Some vegetables are crisp, like celery, while some can't be cooked too long, like spinach.

It isn't that no one ever notices texture. Just looking at words like loose, crisp, flaky, tender, and smooth cangive you some idea. The Cantonese are renowned for their skill at cooking. Besides saying yu, or young, instead of tender (leave it to them to have come up with that!), they also use the word hua, or slippery. That seems even more expressive. All these words are concerned with texture. The skin of ts'ui-p'i ju-chu [crispy skin suckling pig] is an excellent treat, as we know. And so is the skin of roast duck. Cha shan-szu [deep-fried eel strips], yu-t'iao [twisted fritters], tiao-lu shao-ping [flat sesame seed rolls cooked inside a stove], huo-shao [baked wheat cakes], ts'ung-yu ping [round, flat onion cakes] (the best are from Hsiakuan in Nanking), and similar dishes are all summed up by the word ts'ui [chewy crisp]. If they're let stand too long, they absorb moisture from the air and become tough as leather and practically inedible. Ts'ao-ku kuo-pa [straw-mushroom rice crust] must be placed in hot soup and eaten at once, or it loses its crispness. If you have ten kuo-t'ieh [lightly fried dumplings, or pan stickers] on a plate, they'll start softening up after you get to the fifth. Pizza has a nice crisp crust as soon as it's served, but by the time you've finished the first piece, the second is never quite so good. Needless to say, no one likes damp crackers.

Close to chewy crisp is su [flaky crisp]. Although the two qualities are almost the same, there's actually a difference. Chewy crisp puts up some resistance to the teeth, but flaky crisp gives way completely. In China many dimsum [desserts or snacks] are termed flaky crisp. Chenchiang has ha-ma su [toad crisps] and t'ao su [peach crisps], which are made mainly of flour with lard or vegetable oil added to keep them light and crisp after the moisture is removed. Ch'uan-chiao chi [Szechwan pepper chicken] from Chaochow is deep fried in such a way that the chicken becomes tender while the vegetables remain crisp. It also seems there's a dish in Shantung (I've temporarily forgotten its name) made of scallops fried flaky crisp. So you can see that Chinese like to eat things that are flaky crisp as well as chewy crisp, and the chefs have picked up on it.

Opposed to crisp is sung [soft and fluffy]. Although contrary in nature, each has its own special appeal. A good cake should be light and spongy. If it's so hard you can bounce it off the wall, you might as well eat bread. Westerners have a knack for making cake, and there's a real art and science to it. The softness and fluffiness alone are hard to match, and the frosting on top is marvelously smooth.

T'ang-yuan [glutinous rice balls served in broth] are not only smooth and slippery, but so is their filling. The filling is usually made from ground sesame or peanuts, both of which are oily and blend in with the outside of the rice balls if ground fine enough. T'ang-yuan have another salient characteristic, which is that glutinous rice is sticky and many people like sticky things. Our teeth like to match themselves against a certain tenacious resistance. Try and imagine pa-pao fan [eight treasures rice] made from ordinary rice. No one would find it fully satisfying, even if it were studded with purple dates or green plums. Nien-kao [New Year's cake] is another sticky food that is fit for eating only when made from glutinous rice.

Tenderness is something everyone stresses. The most sought-after quality in chan-jou (what mainlanders call lion's-head meatballs) is that they be tender. In most restaurants they're too tough, simply not worthy of the name. The secret is to use wu-hua jou [pork rib meat] as they do in Chenchiang. It's a little fat, but they stew it over low heat for several hours to remove the lard so it doesn't feel greasy when you eat it. Cooking it along with Chinese cabbage soaks up a lot of the grease too. First-rate lion's-head meatballs shouldn't be picked up with chopsticks; they should be ladled out with a spoon. Vegetables are naturally better when tender. The English essayist Charles Lamb said that eating asparagus gives one tender thoughts. I think he was talking about its texture. Asparagus offers two different sensations: the tops are tender and the bottoms are tough. You find out as soon as you bite in.

But being too tender is sometimes not good. Chinese restaurants make their beef too tender with baking soda. When chewing it your teeth miss the resistance they're accustomed to and mistake the meat for sham. Beef isn't tough provided it's cooked the right way. It has flavor only when it's chewy. Unless their teeth are bad, normal people want a little chewiness. Dogs gnaw bones to strengthen their teeth, and rodents nibble wood. People need to exercise their teeth too. Westerners eat a lot of steak, which makes them fat and is bad for their hearts and their blood pressure, but their teeth are in good shape. Teenagers eat apples to strengthen their teeth, but old people with bad teeth have to wait for apples to become soft before they can eat them, a real disappointment.

There's another kind of tactile sensation, that from sha [granulated paste]. The reason we like to eat tou-sha [granulated bean paste], tou-ni [sweetened bean paste], ma-ling-shu ni [sweetened potato paste], and tsao-ni [sweetened jujube paste], besides their flavor, is also their feel. There's often a paste of jujubes, green soybeans, and ormosia at the bottom of a bowl of eight-treasures rice, which makes an interesting contrast with the sticky glutinous rice that has gone before. Cantonese lien-jung [lotus seed paste] is another excellent treat of this kind. (Unscrupulous businessmen mix in fan-shu ni [granulated yam paste], which is loathed by their customers but is also a type of sweet paste.)

Another tactile sensation is that of gelatin. Both fish-meat gelatin and fruit gelatin can be served warm and drunk as soup, but people take the trouble to freeze them and eat them a bite at time as though that improved the flavor. In fact the flavor's the same; only the feel is different. Gelatin is soft and a little chewy too. It's not hard to chew and it doesn't work the teeth a lot, but the feeling it gives the tongue and palate is something special, something different. (Note: It might be described by the Soochow saying "soft, hard, firm.") There's a kind of lamb that's chilled, chopped into thin slices, and eaten with gelatin. The two sensations make an interesting combination.

With that we come to the grand art of matching textures. When chefs prepare a dish, they strive for variety not only in coloring, aroma, and flavor but also in feel. If you serve only crisp dishes, if the suckling pig is followed by roast duck, followed by flat onion cakes, followed by crispy-skin chicken, followed by deep-fried eel strips . . . who could get around it all? They might be able to put up with the roast duck, but when the onion cakes appeared, some wouldn't be able to repress their indignation any longer. The crispy-skin chicken would be the gunpowder that would ignite the whole table. Certainly no chef could ever be so harebrained, unless he intentionally wanted to toy with people.

A Chinese banquet has to have both hot and cold dishes--usually four cold plates first, then four stir-fried dishes, then the main serving, and finally some sweets. Among the cold plates. sung-hua t'ang-hsin p'i-tan [sugar-coated preserved eggs] has a soft and slippery texture that can be matched with crispy smoked fish, with tough and chewy beef tendon or pig's knuckle, and with liquor-saturated chicken, shrimp, or the like, which are chewy but not too tough. No two items have the same consistency. If there's a suckling pig on the table, there usually isn't roast duck, and if there's roast duck, there had better not be crispy-skin chicken. If there are other deep-fried dishes, then the eel should be stir fried instead. Pork bellies and chicken gizzards, one white and the other red, are both crisp when stir fried, so the people of Shantung call them shuang-ts'ui [double crisp], which is a name derived straight from the food's tactile sensation. If that dish is served, there should be no other crispy dishes, no matter what the type. In Shantung there's a sweet dish called pa-szu hsiang-chiao [hot candied banana]. There's no reason for all the mystification, because bananas are sweet already without adding sugar. But the people of Shantung are clever. They fry the bananas in cane syrup and chill them in cold water to make the syrup crisp. The person eating one gets a nice crisp feeling before biting into the soft inside, and the combination of textures makes for a peculiar but exquisite treat. When my wife, Mei-li, makes cake, she adds walnuts and chopped pineapple so it won't be monotonously soft. People like change and variety, and there's change and variety in everything, so don't worry, just go with the flow, and your life won't be dull or boring.

In Cantonese cuisine it's important that foods have huo-ch'i [air of the pot/be piping hot], which means they ought to be eaten as soon as they've been cooked. The idea is probably related to tactile sensation, just as I mentioned before for pizza and pan stickers. Note: Pizza shops here allow people to carry out. I demur. If you take them home they lose all their huo-ch'i, and the crispiness goes from the edges. Cafeterias should be avoided for the same reason; they fail to attend to huo-ch'i.

I've written this essay for no other purpose than to praise the feel of food, without trying to make any new discoveries. I leave it to the scientists to invent an instrument for measuring tenacity, crispness, or the like, with three-place precision, for the use of culinary specialists. Or perhaps an expert will step forward and study from a philosophical or psychological perspec-tive what kinds of tactile sensations people re quire to achieve satisfaction in eating, supplying a topic for sociological research. If that indeed happens, I'll take pride in the fact that my humble essay has served as a modest inducement for others to achieve greater things.

[Picture Caption]

Malaya cake

Spring rolls

Steamed grouper

Meatballs simmered in soy sauce

Spring rolls.

Steamed grouper.

Meatballs simmered in soy sauce.