Gary Soup

Sounds like Fuschia's dish is a conventional New Year's yuanzi with the intact rice stuck to the outside. I was wondering how you could stick rice to a blob of lotus paste or bean past and keep the shape... Nothing "dainty and attractive" about what I see in the pictures of pearl balls that've been posted, but I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I don't think origins have a lot to do with the places a particular food is associated with. We tend to associate wonton soup and fried rice with Cantonese food, but neither are of Cantonese origin, for example. Wherever "pearl balls" hail from, they must be currently traveling. I have never crossed their path. By your definition of Pearl Balls, what on earth are the sweet variety in Fuschia's cook book? Are your sure she's not talking about yuanzi?

Kem Hom seems to think that Pearl Balls are Sichuanese: "In The Taste of China, Ken Hom shares his memories of enjoying regional variations in "small eats": jiaozi dumplings in Beijing, pearl balls and spicy wontons (known as huntuns) in the Szechuan province." Dim Sum Article on About.Com Any references in Fuschia Dunlop's books? She always seems to know what she's talking about. (Actually she posts here sometimes.....)

I think you are reaching, Jo-mel. My extended family (3 generations of Shanghainese) doesn't know them, and food traditions don't perish in wars. It's possible they are a variant on some Yunnan muslim food, in which case they wouldn't use pork, or they resulted from somebody's idea of gussying up shizitou (why?), which would give them a Shanghai region conection, I suppose. Maybe BT just made the recipe up.

Onion pancakes (congyou bing) definitely have a strong connection to Shanghai, and are a prominent "street food" item, but I can't be sure they originated there. I have no idea what "pearl balls" are.

Some of the dim sum houses in the San Francisco Bay area offer what invariably turn out to be wretched versions of xiaolong bao. It's usually the places that promote themselves as "Hong Kong style" (part of that HK "creativity", no doubt).

I tend to agree with you on the quality of dim sum in HK, based on the few experiences I had there (at places that the locals in my HK office swore by). You could also say the same about the other mid-range dining places too, IMHO, and the good stuff in HK seems to be pricier than on this side of the pond. Food stalls are another matter. But I wonder why you people in HK are always looking over your shoulder at Shanghai.....?

Not entirely. I didn't do it just for the refritos or the unanticipated munchies. Your level of commitment was laudable. At that time on my life I would have had to dodge both child support commitments and student loans to be down there more. By more "real" I mean the UN Plaza FM (and some of the others) are slightly closer to the original simple concept of the farmer bringing his fruits (and nuts, as it were) directly to the consumer and splitting the middleman's cost to the advantage of both. At the FPFM and some others, the "middleman" has been replaced by cachet and undefinable epithets like "natural", "organic" and the like. These latter charge a very high commission. I for one, don't value the cachet enough to pay $3/lb. for potatoes. Mind you, I'm well aware that the pricier farmers' markets carry some unusual produce that is difficult or impossible to find elsewhere, and the people who labor at producing these are entitled to charge what the market will bear (O, where are my beloved black walnuts or true Russet apples ?) but gilding mainstream produce is another matter.

Ler 'er fly! Mind you, I once spent 12 hours (round trip) in the space of 16 in an old yellow school bus just to go to Delano CA to see Cesar Chavez dedicate a retirement community for farm workers. Good music and by-donation eats in the Plaza, too. (JennotJenn, what we smoked en route wasn't Camels.) I do acknowledge that there's one vendor at FPFM who flies a UFW banner, but I don't guess that's Rancho Gordo. Radical chic!

You'll pay a mint for them at the Ferry Plaza farmers' market, too. If you have time on Sunday, check out a REAL farmers' market at UN Plaza near City Hall.

Recently at a Chinese restaurant, they had Deep-Fried Salt & Pepper Spare Ribs on the menu. I love these things, so I ordered it. Turned out not to be spare ribs, but a thin porkchop with a small bone. Not what I expected, but it was just as good as the usual ribs. Both pork -- both good. Chinese tend to loosely use the same word "paigu" for any part of the loin, just as they use the word "tipang" for any part of the leg, from the foot to the ham. "Rou" is often associated with the side, though of course it can refer generally to any kind of flesh.

I've stumbled across an on-line source of bilingual (Chinese-English) cookbooks -- almost 200 titles, including many in the Wei-Chuan series. The distributor is in Texas, so shipping costs should not be a big factor. Tsai Fong Books

I learned two things about getting coffee in Asia. First was that it was close to impossible to get unsweetened black coffee. The second thing was that if I succeeded, I usually wished I hadn't.

I think there's a regional thing to it. When I lived in New York, "regular" coffee meant milk and sugar. In San Francisco, black without sugar seemed to be the default at the time I moved here 40 years ago. I made the transition out of sheer laziness, as in "whatever."

Nuttin' but longjing tea (O.K., I'll sneak in a biluochun once in a while). My favorite on-line source is Gray & Seddon, who should be offering their 2004 pre-Qing Ming longjing any day now. I'd like nothing better than to be sitting on the front porch of the Old Film Cafe on Duolun Lu in Shanghai right now, sipping on some just-released tea straight-up in a glass tumbler, but circumstances dictate otherwise.

This is a good point. I don't need much adornment when I seek a chocolate hit. It's a very important point. Sharffen Berger makes good chocolate, which is a rare craft these days. What a confectioner does with chocolate is another matter, and it's a matter of personal taste whether the confections are worthwhile or not. Personally, I find many of Recchiutti's confections dreadful, but then I prefer to mainline the 70%+ stuff without a hint of asofoetida or durian or whatever getting in the way. Confectioners are nothing without good chocolate. Recchiutti happens to use E. Guittard chocolate (another notable Bay Area chocolate manufacturer), but then so does See's.

I don't do much cooking these days, but of course I cooked for myself in my single days, and in my first marriage I probably cooked as much as my wife. It was a sweet deal, IMHO: If I cooked, she would do the dishes. Much better than the other way around. Now my wife won't let me do either. I always cooked something that I had had some experience eating, and a notion of how it should turn out. I viewed cookbooks as a technical manual, for ingredients, times, techniques, etc. but was always glad to put them aside and take my best shot. I do a lot of reading about the history and anthroplogy of foods, especially Chinese food and its globalization, but but see that as a separate intellectual exercise. No sense spilling sesame oil on a $40 tome that doesn't have a laminated cover. I do like to browse through cookbooks that have good illustrations, but that's just from my weakness for food porn (I COULD say that I read them for the articles).

I sure do get the idea. This was my main gripe with the Wei Chuan book I got. It is a collection of very good recipes, nothing more. Elie Isn't "very good recipes" what most people buy cookbooks for? Cookbooks are meant to be read in the kitchen, I would think, not sitting on the crapper.

Ditty Deamer's Saturday Market website has profiles of many vendors at the various Bay area farmers' markets. Not updated lately, but most of her subjects are still around and actively participating. Her profiles give a face to the vendors, and provide some interesting background info. Ditty Deamer's Saturday Market Vendor Profiles Check our her other web pages linked at the bottom, too.

I don't know of any connection to Shanghai cuisine. Certainly "red-cooked" pork (which isn't really red, anyway) doesn't use red yeast rice. My only familiarity with it is in Cantonese charcuterie, and perhaps in the fermented doufu my wife sometimes put in her pao fan or puts out as a condiment.

Red rice ("red yeast" in Chinese) is also used to color "char siu". Since it's known to have cholesterol lowering properties, it's a good match for pork shoulder, I'd guess. Here's more than you want to know from the University of Maryland: Red Rice Do you need a Doctor's prescription to order Ruby Pork?

Just in the nick of time, and definitely on-topic: A Trip to the Heart of Dim Sum by RW Apple. Odd that he came to cheung fun so late in his experience, though.

No, but there is a Jean-Georges Shanghai, if that's the kind of experience that floats your boat. I wasn't talking about Soviet influence, which is practically nil, unless you count the Pushkin statue, which for a long while served as a de facto "English corner". I was talking about the influence of White Russian refugees from the Revolution. Most of them arrived destitute, and unlike other westerners, were willing to take on any job, not matter how menial or degrading, including prostitution. The were despised by the Euros, who saw them as an embarassment and a threat to the master/servant relationship they had cutivated, but they operated at an economic scale close to that of the local Chinese, and interacted more intimately with them. The trappings of their portable culture, including cafes and cabaret entertainment, were relatively more accessible (socially as well as economically) to ordinary Shanghainese. As a result, "Russian" soup (luosang tang) and a form of potato salad became an integral part of home cooking, not an affectation, to name some more obvious examples. I'd like to see some serious research on the origins of "Hong Kong" style bakeries. Similar establishments can be found all around Shanghai, and, according to my mother-in-law, seem to have been there "forever". I'd add that the French were much less stand-offish towards the Chinese than the British and Americans in the concession era, and may also have had some influence, too. (Who would want to emulate British cuisine, anyway?)

The exodus (by the more paranoid) actually started after 1984, when Maggie Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping smilingly announced the handover schedule. But I don't necessarily credit the Hongkongese with being innovative as a result of the British yoke. It's equally likely a legacy of the Shanghai International Settlement origins of a lot of HK's culture. Ketchup and mayonnaise are two things my wife knows well ("sala" in Shanghainese argot refers to a potato salad remarkably similar to what you'll be having at your 4th of July picnic) and just tonight she made "Russian" soup (kind of a cabbage borscht) which is in the repertoire of all home cooks in Shanghai. The flaky baked pastries stuffed with ham and egg (or what you like) often associated with Hong Kong style bakeries also probably are descended from a single Russian tearoom, Maxim's, in the old French concession. Maxim's ("Mei Xin") made European-style pastries famous in Shanghai in the 30's and was the likely inspiration for the mega-chain of bakeries by the same name in Hong Kong.

Not a candidate for a sit-down or birthday meal, but have you tried Delica rf/1 in the Ferry Building? It's from a well-regarded chain found in upscale Dept. Store food courts in Japan. Not the kind of food that floats my boat, but it's pretty and they vary the offerings every week or two. Good for Kaiseki bento or you could do takeout for a DIY tasting menu.