shipman@nmtvax.UUCP (10/25/85)
I am *not* an experienced cook, but I have been able to prepare about a dozen complicated Szechwan dishes with complete success and rave reviews. All credit for this goes to "Mrs. Chiang's Szechwan Cookbook" by Ellen Schrecker (Harper & Row, 1976). There are 350 pages and about 100 recipes. This is a terrific first book for novices because it doesn't assume anything. Many Chinese cookbooks have a section on "technique" that you are supposed to memorize before doing anything else. Irene Kuo's "Key to Chinese Cooking", for example, while excellent, explains "velvet chicken" once, and many other recipes include the step "velvet the chicken". The problem with this approach is that it is hard to remember something unless you use it right away. The beautiful thing about "Mrs. Chiang's" is that every trick you need is included in every recipe. Each recipe stands alone and does not require flipping around in the cookbook. In addition to lots of standard recipes (Ants-Climb-a-Tree, Ma Po Do Fu) there are some unique and amazing recipes as well. Try out the "Pork, Cucumber, and Cellophane Noodle Salad" for a cold dish. The "Eggplant with Chopped Meat" works okay with supermarket eggplant, but if you can get or grow the long oriental type, it melts in your mouth. Now, I am a confirmed eggplant hater, but this is more than I can resist. And did you know that the Chinese have cooked with potatoes for decades? Try the "Potatoes, green peppers, and pork shreds": the texture of the potatoes is unlike anything in Western cuisine, and several people asked me "what are these white vegetable shreds?" Two dishes I've made are quite unlike anything I've seen in Chinese restaurants. "Dry-fried Beef" is indescribable; if you have time you can render it as something like red-hot beef jerky. The biggest crowd pleaser so far is "Deep-fried Smelts". Serve this and get people to try to guess what it is. It is NOT fishy, and has a texture slightly on the chewy side of corn chips. I took this to the local gourmet club dinner one night and after the fish was gone the host rolled up the paper towel with the last few crumbs on it and emptied it into his mouth. CAVEATS: You will need a few ingredients not available in most markets: chili paste, Szechwan peppercorns, Szechwan dried red pepper (in the southwest, Piquin might suffice), tree ears, hoisin sauce, peanut oil, and sesame oil should handle 95% of these recipes. Any oriental store will stock all these items. Also, these recipes are *LABOR-INTENSIVE*. Ever reduce a potato to matchstick-size shreds with a cleaver? A Cuisinart 3mm x 3mm julienne disc will help here, and in general a food processor will speed things up. You are constantly being asked to chop things to the size of match-heads, rice grains, or coarse cornmeal; in the Ma Po Do Fu recipe (a real winner!), you are supposed to reduce a 2" piece of fresh ginger and 8 cloves of garlic to "the consistency of a thick paste". Some jobs cannot be done in a food processor and will require a little "board work", e.g. many recipes call for pork shreds. -- John Shipman/Zoological Data Processing/ucbvax!unmvax!nmtvax!shipman