Too Many Cooks

Today was my third (and final) cooking class in China. Part of our curriculum here includes once or twice weekly extra-curricular “culture” activities, of which our choices include several traditional Chinese instruments, calligraphy, watercolor, go, martial arts, street dance and ping pong. Another girl and I chose the cooking class, which was held in the kitchen of a hotel near the school.

I have now forced my grinning self on grudgingly acquiescent cooks in three different countries, eagerly offering to chop things for prep and ask the names of all the basic ingredients. In Thailand, my language relevant to the matter was limited to “I want to help!”, “Yes, it tastes good” and “I like spicy”. In Italy I could name several of the vegetables I was handling, check my progress with the cook (“va bene?”) and respond with an enthusiastic “si, si, capisco” to her various instructions.

In China it was much the same, though I already knew how to name most of the basic items we were dealing with (short of a few condiments and more obscure vegetables). The class structure went something like this: We would enter the kitchen (which was my favorite part of the class: I love a good large-scale kitchen, and the oversized cooking implements that come with it) and stand mute as the chef regarded us blandly and asked what we wanted to cook. By chance, I can name one of my favorite dishes (that old first year favorite, tang cu yu, sweet and sour fish) so that’s what we made last time (actually we used pork ribs, but same idea). Then he’d grunt assent, pull out the relevant materials, cut them up, and set them out at the cooking station. We’d shuffle obediently after him and watch as he pointed to each ingredient and named it, poured large amounts of oil into the wok, and start stir-frying. When he was done he would put the contents on a plate, hand us each a pair of disposable chopsticks and let us stand around for five or so minutes as we tried a few bites and commented that it was quite good. I kept trying to ask questions about the process or ingredients, but it was all very much the same: fry items, remove. Add oil, soy sauce, MSG, various. Mix together and then recombine with previously fried items. Then, depending on what day it was, he’d let one of us step up to the plate and basically hold the spoon and mix as he added ingredients, occasionally wresting the heavy wok away from us as we tried in vain to elicit some sort of encouragement or feedback on our handiwork. Then we’d repeat the bit with the plate and the nodding agreement that yes, this was in fact the same dish we’d just tasted, pack the leftovers into boxes, and head off. I’m not quite sure what I was expecting, perhaps a bit more room for technique, practice, experimentation and explanation about seasoning combinations, dish histories, variations etc. It was an interesting class maybe once, but I could see getting less rather than more excited about it as the term went on.

Today’s dish of choice was fried noodles, plus an additional plate of greens, and it was my turn to take the helm. Today I actually got to do some of the prep, too, which involved chopping up some lettuce greens and slicing thin strips of some sort of root vegetable. My knife skills are nowhere near perfect, but by the time I finished my American cooking class last year I could turn out a halfway decent chiffonade (Bill Gates thinks I spelled that wrong, but he has no better suggestions so I choose to ignore him), and chop most anything you tossed at me efficiently if not elegantly. In China, they use not the long, tapered chef’s knife I’m used to but a large rectangular cleaver, and the chopping motion comes not from the wrist but the shoulder, a sort of full-arm swinging motion, like feeding thick paper into a shredder you can’t quite reach. This is the same knife the chef used last week to hack up a rack of pork ribs. The lettuce was no problem, but I was somewhat less successful producing minutely thin and parallel slices of the root. At least my digits are still in tact.

As I was frying the lettuce earlier, in what I am mostly sure was oil and lard, the chef grabbed the giant ladle I was using from me and dipped it into the nearby seasonings. He withdrew a few teaspoons of salt and carefully tapped a few shakes off of the spoon before rinsing it off. He then drew out about a tablespoon of MSG and dumped it into the wok. I’m lost entirely.

In any case it turns out my fellow classmate, though more curious about the basic stuff, was equally unimpressed with the class as a whole, and we just went tails between our legs to drop the class. I’ll be switching into either a painting or calligraphy class later on, depending on which has space.