拉面－La Mian or pulled noodles. It's undeniably one of my favorite raw simple carbohydrate dish in China especially when hand made to fresh perfection then filled with the best tasting broth possible. I'm not so finicky about the broth itself. Old hen chicken soup, roasted beef soup or slow stewed pork soup all serve as background, the support using low aperture to bring sharpness and focus to the noodle themselves. As for the noodles, it's a magician's hands at work to turn a tubular piece of dough roughly slimmer than a soda can to long strings of noodles/spaghetti dangling free. Granted this is about the ratio of flour to egg to water to starch. But it's also about the skills of the cook (perhaps chef is an exaggeration of technical skill set) to perform the task at hand precisely and consistently bowl to bowl.
Growing up I was never a rice person. Grains and grains of minuscule white rice really isn't for a tall girl who loves food, variety but also quantity. Rice was always for the younger cousins, forever patiently picking at the grains in their bowls. Noodles allowed for faster sustenance and not to be the last person sitting @ the dining table. On the sunday evenings in Shanghai, after a 2 hour bus muggy bus ride out of the center of the city to the darkness of Sinopec community, my mom would give up cooking the last meal of the week. We would have curry beef noodles, by twilight or under a kerosene street lamp, in the food market, right next to cages of rooster and doves. The cook would fashion the noodles as I continuously watched and wondered why the noodles didn't tangle. No one had explained that starch increases elasticity.
We had a 5 hour layover in KunMing today on the way to LiJiang. Stumbling our way through one of the 20+ second tier cities in China, I felt sad to see another city's culture, distinct from the north, eradicated and replaced by modern shopping malls full of western brands. Elegant thousand year old terracotta roofs with their own courtyards and passage systems was replaced by faux concrete bricks meant to simulate the old and cultured. I took a picture of the concrete and glass encroaching on one of the last old neighborhoods, shrinking its membrane's perimeter like an invading virus. All of this we see only by standing on the roof of the shiny new shopping center next door.
And then my heart warms up to the food, the food and art that does survive, although evolving to modern kitchens. On the next corner of the roof garden we find a noodle shop. It's a small space of 400 square feet, much of it lined by a big bar surrounding the open kitchen. One chef and 2 servers man the 40 seat space. The blackboard indicates all 5 menu choices, beef noodle soup, beef/tendon noodle soup, beef clear noodle soup, peanut soup, or three treasure noodle soup. The chef works the soda can, fat or skinny noodles. The broth gets topped by scallion and/or chili. At 28 Yuan (4 usd) per bowl, it's almost robbery for China. It's too simple of a food but this cook and his skill is not a show for us, just genuine business. I'm simply grateful that a cart in the passage way of time and food moved up into this new shiny mall.
I grilled a few too many veggies, so I'll have to come up with some creative ideas for the leftovers.
Posted by: Cheap Louis Vuitton | 2011.06.30 at 10:11