FT: Shanghai's culinary great leap forward

Shanghai's culinary great leap forward

By Geoff Dyer

Published: August 19 2006 03:00 | Last updated: August 19 2006 03:00

Li Yaoyun, one of only a handful of Chinese cooks awarded the title master chef, spends most of his time these days training young pretenders. One of his favourite tricks, which he demonstrated recently in a Shanghai restaurant, involves only a simple piece of tofu, the soft, cheese-like curd that crumbles in the hand.

Taking out a cleaver, he swiftly cut a 5cm slab - the size of a pinky finger - into 18 horizontal wafers. Then with a rapid-fire cutting movement he sliced vertical strips the width of a hair. "It shows them what can be done with a lot of practice," he says.

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Chinese chefs divide their skills into two broad categories - cutting and cooking. The way meat or a vegetable is sliced can make as much difference to the "mouth-feel", as the Chinese call taste, as the preparation does. Li claims to be a master of both but his real speciality is cutting. As a young man he won a knife-skills competition after he extracted the bones from inside a duck without breaking the skin in less than two minutes.

China has not always treasured such skills. Mao Zedong was quite a gourmand, taking a personal chef on his travels to make him pork mixed with hot peppers. But after the communists took over in 1949, China's cooking culture came under assault, especially during the 1966-76 cultural revolution, which elevated the bland and uniform to a political ideal. "There were many times when I nearly gave up," says Li.

As China strives to rediscover parts of its lost aesthetic sense, Shanghai has been at the forefront of a culinary renaissance. A dozen new restaurants seem to open every week, many serving classic local dishes.

Yet that dining culture had to be patiently rebuilt. Li was one of a small group of Shanghai chefs who tried to restore traditions learned as young men, digging out old recipes and reviving cooking skills. After five turbulent decades, Shanghai's restaurants have come full circle. Li and his chef colleagues have seen it all.

Little known outside China, Shanghai's style of cooking is based on freshwater seafood and braised meat, with plenty of oil and sweetish flavours. By the early 20th century the city had the most vibrant dining scene in the country, as the emerging Chinese middle class stepped out to eat eel with leeks and spare ribs in sweet and sour sauce.

Restaurants, however, were part of a hedonistic Shanghai that was also rife with prostitution and opium-smoking. When the communists took power, they pledged to transform what they viewed as a parasitic city. Over the next few years, Shanghai's restaurants were nationalised and most became pubic dining halls serving basic meals to residents or workers.

The city's chefs were culled. Some with political associations considered dubious, such as cooking for gangster bosses, were dispatched to labour camps. Many fled to Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Chefs say cooking standards really started to deteriorate with Mao's"great leap forward", a 1959 plan to accelerate industrialisation rapidly. As farmers abandoned their land to produce steel, a gigantic famine ensued that claimed 20m lives.

Restaurants had to prune their menus dramatically. Li Yaoyun began working in 1960 in a Shanghai restaurant specialising in Sichuan food. "When I started we offered around 70 different dishes," says Li. "But gradually we reduced the number and eventually had only 20."

Most evenings he cooked the same hotpot dishes with a few vegetables and meat if they had some, he says. Chicken or ham stocks were often replaced by monosodium glutamate, the artificial flavour enhancer.

A popular winter dish in Shanghai is pork dumplings wrapped in cabbage but on some nights the chefs used rabbit instead of pork, Li says. On others, they took it off the menu altogether: because of a lack of fertiliser it was hard to find cabbage leaves large enough to wrap around the meat.

The spread of backyard furnaces - in which people melted down metal to boost steel output - had a further impact: good cutting knives began to disappear. "Materials were very scarce," he says.

Matters got worse for the city's chefs in 1966 with the cultural revolution, which became an assault on the so-called "four olds" - customs, habits, culture and thinking. With schools and colleges closed, millions of young people attacked all forms of authority.

In the chaotic atmosphere, any acquired skill became suspect. Some restaurants were engulfed in the turmoil, with Red Guards - the shock-troops of the cultural revolution - burning books that contained old recipes and dragging chefs off to "struggle sessions". Shanghai's cooking schools, including the one Li studied at, were closed down.

A few chefs joined the Red Guards and some of Li Yaoyun's former colleagues recall Li flirting with joining himself to keep out of trouble. Li says he kept his head down and worked on his cutting skills. "I was not regarded as a good comrade as I was more interested in cooking than political awareness," he says.

Li says the cooking also began to mimic the political climate. During the famine, chefs were encouraged to serve the same dish under several regional names, to give an impression of plenty. But in the cultural revolution, regional dishes were downplayed in favour of a single national cuisine that suggested unity. Spicy Gong Bao chicken, one of the most popular dishes in China, was shunned because it was named after a Qing dynasty official.

Wang Huisheng, another veteran chef, was shocked at the collapse in dining standards when he returned home in the late 1960s, having spent a few years cooking at the Chinese embassy in Yemen. At Xinghualou, one of the city's famous old restaurants, the food served was bland, no one cared what they were eating and the waiters were rude and ill-dressed. "When my [cooking] teacher told me about the loss of his recipe books, he looked destroyed," he says.

Henry Kissinger put on 5lb during a three-day trip in 1971 to negotiate with Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, but even the few good restaurants suffered from shortages. Many visitors returned with tales of dreary meals of rice and cabbage. Lu Bo Lang, the most famous restaurant in the old city, was turned into an office. When King Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia visited Shanghai in 1973 and decided to visit the restaurant, officials had to borrow a table for the dinner and could find only disposable chopsticks.

Historian Lynn Pan returned to Shanghai in the early 1980s for the first time since her childhood - shortly after the death of Mao and the end of the cultural revolution. "Pretty much everywhere you went the food was ghastly," she says. The one meal that took her back was at the house of a former servant who had spent 24 years in a labour camp because of his association with her construction magnate father. "And he had to use guanxi [connections] to buy the shrimps and yellow fish," she says.

But she also noticed that even in those early days of economic reform, 24-hour food markets were popping up. "That was when I realised that it was going to be a great city again."

Private restaurants were among the first businesses to take off when the economy started to open up. Enterprising individuals began to serve meals at a few tables in their front room: sometimes the food was memorable, at others inedible.

The best Chinese chefs were still in Hong Kong and Taiwan but in Shanghai a small group of cooks began trying to restore the old dining culture.

In the early 1980s, Li Yaoyun worked in a restaurant specialising in the cuisine of Yangzhou (a city near Shanghai), which is celebrated for its subtle flavours. "I spent most of my spare time in old bookshops and libraries or chatting with older colleagues, trying to remember recipes," he says.

At the Guji bookshop in the old city centre, he came across a book called Tiao Ding Ji (Ancient Collection of Ingredients), which was about the cuisine of eastern China. From there, he found a lost dish called three-in-one duck - a wild duck, a free-range duck and a baby pigeon wrapped inside each other like a Russian doll. "From that book I learned again the spirit of Chinese cuisine," he says.

He also introduced new recipes with ideas from his research. From a traditional starter of pine nuts and corn he created Fuel Delivered in Snow, a mixture of pine nuts and smoked fish.

Traditional Chinese medicine was another source of inspiration. Hedgehog fungus, a form of mushroom, was widely used in northern China to treat ulcers: he sliced it and then lightly fried the mushroom with pine nuts.

"We have to nourish our traditional cuisine and, using it as a base, be creative," he says.

Just as it was in the 1930s, Shanghai is again a city where plenty of people have plenty of money. But it is also a city that is still not quite sure of its new personality. Opening to the world brings exciting influences, yet the full force of modern consumer culture can also overwhelm countries, especially those that have lost a strong sense of identity.

With that in mind, a new generation of chefs is trying to cook food that blends the traditional and the modern, picking up where Li Yaoyun and his colleagues left off. Mention the world "fusion" and the corner of Jereme Leung's lips turn down in a scowl. "It is everything I want to avoid," he says.

Leung is probably the most prominent Chinese chef in Shanghai. His Whampoa Club restaurant is in one of the old colonial buildings that line the riverfront Bund. As we talked at one of the window tables, a boat carrying an enormous construction crane drifted past outside.

Leung wants to create a "New Shanghai Cuisine", by which he means authentic but creative food elegantly served in individual portions. "I want Chinese cooking to look and taste as good as French food, without sacrificing on technique or flavour," says Leung.

A 35-year-old Hong Kong native with a string of international awards, he initially thought about Cantonese cuisine but decided that a showcase restaurant on the Bund had to be Shanghainese. There was only one problem: he did not know much about Shanghai food.

Leung set up his own personal culinary institute, enlisting the services of five old chefs (the youngest was 60, the oldest 72). Twice a week for six months one of the chefs would prepare him his signature recipes. Leung put on 20lb.

From there, he developed his New Shanghai recipes, such as a new version of the classic "drunken chicken", poached chicken marinaded in shao-xing wine, which is a starter in almost all Shanghaiese restaurants. The dish should be served chilled but, according to Leung, most restaurants leave the cooked chicken in the fridge for a few days, so that by the time it arrives on the table the flavour is lost. To achieve the right taste and temperature he puts slivers of iced wine over the boneless chicken pieces, with some salad at the bottom to soak up extra liquid. The dish is served in a martini glass.

"I want to try to preserve the tradition of classic dishes but make them look better and taste better," he says.

So has Shanghai toppled Hong Kong as the place to find the finest Chinese cooking? Not yet, seems to be the verdict. Li Yaoyun has spent the past two years advising a chain of Shanghai restaurants that has opened in Hong Kong. "The dining standard in Hong Kong is higher than in Shanghai," he says.

Jereme Leung agrees but recalls that a few months ago an old Shanghainese gentleman, who once ran one of the city's main banks, came to his restaurant. Leung saw this as a test of his cooking and asked the man to taste some dishes with his eyes closed, so he could compare the flavours with his memory.

The old man did not comment on the meal at the time but returned a week later with some poster-size calligraphy in Chinese characters that he had written to articulate his thoughts. The last line read: "Chinese expression of modern and correct."

Leung admits the story is a little self-serving. "But that is what I am trying to achieve," he says.

Geoff Dyer is the FT's Shanghai correspondent

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006

Comments

[D.D's Club]

It's a great article. Shanghai food has gotten better over the years. The amount of oil in the food has decreased so much. Finding a good chef in Shanghai is so hard. They all just have basic skills and they think they are so good already.