Another Kind of Mouth-Sex
(composed in response to an ongoing post in which 13empress and I sing the praises of real Chinese food)
Food from shacks is the best-best. In Beijing I was with a caucasian friend who was pretty fluent -- she'd studied Mandarin for 10 years. We skipped breakfast at our overpriced western-style hotel and went around the corner to the man selling soup and fried bread on the street. It was heaven! The soup was absolutely littered with fresh cilantro and other goodies. It had just enough oil mixed in to make it flavorful but not greasy. I'm about to have a food orgasm, now, just thinking about it.
We ate crouching on those low, plastic stools they use in bathhouses, or that people use to wash on at home. They were as cracked and dirty as the cobblestoned sidewalk, but they were the best seats in the house. We even had a tilty, sawed-off plastic table on which to (precariously) rest our bowls. The vendor and the other customers were so charmed by the novelty of gwailo sitting on the street like locals that they didn't want to ask us for the chairs, even though we were clearly loitering around. Most people just slurped their soup and dashed.
And the bao! Fresh pork bao with leeks or green onions, piled in pyramids on steaming trays from wheeled carts with long handles that you knew from the rate at which the bao were disappearing were just trotted through the streets moments ago.
And the open markets! Any kind of food to just consume right there and then. Any kind of live animal just waiting for you to take home and prepare any way you like.
Food from shacks is the best-best. In Beijing I was with a caucasian friend who was pretty fluent -- she'd studied Mandarin for 10 years. We skipped breakfast at our overpriced western-style hotel and went around the corner to the man selling soup and fried bread on the street. It was heaven! The soup was absolutely littered with fresh cilantro and other goodies. It had just enough oil mixed in to make it flavorful but not greasy. I'm about to have a food orgasm, now, just thinking about it.
We ate crouching on those low, plastic stools they use in bathhouses, or that people use to wash on at home. They were as cracked and dirty as the cobblestoned sidewalk, but they were the best seats in the house. We even had a tilty, sawed-off plastic table on which to (precariously) rest our bowls. The vendor and the other customers were so charmed by the novelty of gwailo sitting on the street like locals that they didn't want to ask us for the chairs, even though we were clearly loitering around. Most people just slurped their soup and dashed.
And the bao! Fresh pork bao with leeks or green onions, piled in pyramids on steaming trays from wheeled carts with long handles that you knew from the rate at which the bao were disappearing were just trotted through the streets moments ago.
And the open markets! Any kind of food to just consume right there and then. Any kind of live animal just waiting for you to take home and prepare any way you like.