Crossing the (texture) line

The other night I was sweet-talking E, baby-babying him, massaging his shoulders. How on earth was I going to persuade him?

"Sweetheart..." (maybe not such a smart starting point).

"Yeeesss?"

"I want to...ask you for something."

Raised eyebrows.

"I was wondering if you'd be willing to...um...expand your palate?"

He gives me a you-gotta-be-kidding-me kind of look. To start out with, he *will* eat some weird things, like preserved beancurd, which is sharp, gooey, intense, and totally amazing. But in general when it comes to lung or windpipe or intestine -- or just snake -- he digs in his heels. I'll bet you're digging in your heels right now too!

This is an impediment to my aspirations to become a Chinese gourmet, since he and I eat the majority of our meals together. Vast swaths of menu go untouched.

I think most Westerners feel confused about Chinese food. On the one hand, they've usually eaten some delicious dishes -- like Kung Pao Chicken. But they've also come into contact with Chinese dishes that totally freak them out. For example, one of my family members recalls a meal with what they describe as "Assassinated Chicken" and "Duck and What Duck Eats."

I think most Westerners understand that China is a serious food culture, but they wonder whether they've really had good Chinese food. Because, well, is it supposed to be rubbery and pokey and gristly like this?

Right now I'm reading Fuchsia Dunlop's memoir Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China. She's a smarty-pants English girl who got a scholarship to study in China, dropped out of her classes and fell head-over-heals in love with Sichuan food. She even trained as a Chinese professional chef at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine.

In her memoir, Fuchsia directly addresses this gastronomic line in the sand that few Westerners cross. She nails it so completely, I'm going to quote essential passages and hope you enjoy:

"Texture is the last frontier for Westerners learning to appreciate Chinese food. Cross it, and you're really inside."

"Most Westerners are only willing to grapple with something if it is particularly delicious. Anyone in their right mind, surely, would agree that lobsters are worth a bit of grapple, but shell-on prawns? It's a matter of opinion."

"Fiddling around with a bony fowl's neck for the sake of a few wisps of silky meat, as the Chinese do, or working your way through a pile of small husky melon seeds, seems like a crazy waste of time and effort."

"[Foodies] have no difficulties with the middle ground of Chinese eating, and may enjoy, as the Chinese do, the struggles to extract and separate. Yet it takes several years of quite dedicated Chinese eating, in my experience to begin to appreciate texture for itself. And that is what you must do if you wish to become a Chinese gourmet, because many of the grandest Chinese delicacies, not to mention many of the most exquisite pleasures of everyday Chinese eating, are essentially about texture."

"Certain textures are especially prized. Cui, for example, denotes a particular quality of crispness that is found in fresh crunchy vegetables, blanched pig's kidneys, and goose intestines, not to mention sea cucumbers that have been properly cooked. Cui crispness offers resistance to the teeth, but finally yields, cleanly, with a pleasant snappy feeling. It is distinct from su, which is the dry, fragile, fall-apart crispness of deep-fried duck skin or taro dumplings. Some foods, like the skin of a barbecued suckling pig, can be described as su cui because they offer both types of crispness, simultaneously."

(Quotes from p. 136-138 of Fuchsia's book.)

I am so inspired by this, I can't tell you! I aspire to develop this kind of gastronomic awareness and discernment. If I can develop this awareness in the Chinese gastronomic realm, will it change how I experience Spanish, Italian, French cuisine? Will I be able to bring more nuance and deliciousness to all of my cooking?

I absolutely want to find out. So this blog post is a plea to my sweetie to please-oh-please come chew goose intestines with me... I promise it will be worth it.