Culinary Dreaming

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Clifford at 12:50 am, February 15th, 2006

Well, all you other single types out there on Valentine’s Day night, why not dream with me a bit about food? It’s rather pleasant to share my memories of more excellent food from the south of Taiwan, the city of Tainan. I’ve already told you a bit about it in previous posts, (see here, here and here) so this continues the story. Recall that - after dashing off after my seminar in Tapei, a four and a half hour bus journey - I’d just arrived in the city late at night, and was promptly taken off to an excellent restaurant, where we spent some considerable time eating into the wee hours (and a rather drunk restaurant hostess was trying to seduce me with the aid of Taiwan beer)….

That first meal was the first of several where I could really dig deep into the considerable and wonderful culinary depths of the culture. For the next 48 hours I’d not be just sampling things I could figure out how to order on my own…I’d have help (such as with that last meal) from a fellow food lover, my dear friend Huei-Shih Liao, who lives in the city. So I could discover the really advanced stuff, get things that aren’t even on the menu, and learn a lot about the food and history too. It was actually Huei-Shih I came to see in Tainan (having met her in Taipei back in 1997), and to meet her husband and young daughter. The fact that Tainan also happens to be a fantastic historic city with arguably the best food in Taiwan was just a lucky bonus. It was enough for me to see my old friend in her home country again. That was the highlight of the whole Walkabout actually.

tainan food Well, anyway, the next excellent meal was in the morning. In a specialist breakfast place somewhere in the city (there are several by the side of the road), and I got to try several of those tasty eggy-things I recall from my first random samplings in Taipei eight years ago (see here). Basically, delicious variations on spring onion omelettes and savoury pancakes of some sort.

breakfast menu A major component of the meal that I would never have been able to appreciate without Huei-Shih’s patient guidance through the menu: Soy milk drinks of various sorts. Perfect accompaniment, along with hot milky tea (which I knew about from the last visit and am addicted to)!

After that, visits to temples and old forts…. excellent, but more later… let’s stay with the food here. tainan food I’m a big fan of buns of various sorts (steady now…), and dumplings….. basically the whole range of soft, warm, yielding things you bite into to reveal some delicious filling or other. There is an infinite variety there that you can pick up for lunch or just a quick restorative snack between temples. Actually, it is quite common to find really excellent food places near temples. This is not an accident, I’m told. The visit to the temple would be followed by a stop for a good meal, going back numerous generations, so why not have them conveniently adjacent to each other, to this day?

I love the containment paraphenalia associated to the food as well. The kit. The equipment. Case in point, those woven containers that the various dumpling sorts come in….. Have a look. Lovely. I just love those. I think I’ll get some for my own dumpling experiments later. (Which reminds me… my noodle experiments have been going very well. I should report on them some time.)
tainan food

That night (after wandering around Tainan’s original street, packed with edible goodies including the previously displayed roasting squid and cuttlefish (see here), and after several hours back at Huei-Shih’s home where she held a party for friends and co-workers, we went out quite late (Tainan never sleeps) to a very special restaurant. Annoyingly, I am blanking on the name of the style of noodles they do here but they are very special to Tainan. There’s a guy sitting on one side of the room preparing the dish for you…

tainan food
… and it comes all fresh with a very delicate and distinctive type of noodle (I’m going to have to refresh my memory on this aspect….it was very interesting). There’s an accompaniment of little slices of preserved fruit and some crispy cabbage-y things of various sorts, and a great atmosphere pervades the restaurant:
tainan food
I am a bit embarrassed about that picture since I -just that one time!- did something dreadfully coarse….I left my chopsticks in the dish instead of putting them on the side. Nevertheless, I want to remember that wonderful noodle dish I had there, and that’s the only shot.

By time we were done it was well after midnight, and we were heading home talking about food. I was explaining more about the fact that I wanted to try lots of flavours that their visitors might normally want to try, when we stumbled on the fact that I’m a big fan of ginger (I cook with it a lot, eat it, drink it… the works…. I love it…. you can blame my mum for that!) . Ah ginger! “Great”, they said (Huei-Shih, husband, and six year old daughter), “have you ever had ginger duck?” Next stop, a huge open air restaurant which serves nothing else but ginger duck (almost….also chicken, I was able to deduce by a careful decoding of the helpful sign!)…..

tainan food duck chicken place

where you do a lot of the cooking of the accompaniments at the table yourself. Put them into the broth….
tainan food

…ready to serve and eat not long after:
tainan food
That was the third meal of the evening….

I told you I spent 48 hours eating my way around Tainan didn’t I?

-cvj

Food and Drink, Personal, Travel
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18 Comments on “Culinary Dreaming” rss feed

Science on Feb 15th, 2006 at 6:35 am

Yum… makes me feel hungry, I only have sandwich and apple for lunch…
chimpanzee on Feb 15th, 2006 at 7:26 am

Well, all you other single types out there on Valentineâ€™s Day night, why not dream with me a bit about food?

“The way to a Man’s Heart..is thru His Stomach”

Valentines Day is about chocolate:

Energy = Milk Chocolate Squared
[ I read somewhere Lisa Randall is a chocolate & ice-cream fan. The Randall Sundrum collaboration was initiated at an ice-cream store in Cambridge/MA. Food for Thought? ]

See here for other physics jokes

There has to be some Correlation/Causality between Food (”you are what you eat”) & Thought (Scientific Discovery).
Science on Feb 15th, 2006 at 8:16 am

Lisa Randall’s brain must burn up those calories fast…
Alex on Feb 15th, 2006 at 8:37 am

“The way to a man’s heart… is thru his chest” (according to my wife, a surgeon)
Amara on Feb 15th, 2006 at 11:52 am

Cliff: I am a fan of ginger too, but it is not a typical part of the Italian cuisine. Until last week I could only find fresh ginger in Rome at a particular food shop (2 hours of traveling for me) that specializes in international foods. Last weekend, I found to my delight, fresh ginger tucked innocently in a corner of the vegetables, in my castelli romani town’s supermarket. Since I like fresh ginger especially in tea, I bought a bunch. A quick search on the web for ginger recipes turned up this page at epicurious.com: Ginger Recipes, and looking further, this soft ginger cookie recipe appeared… yum.

P.S. Did you know that ginger has a use for helping air-sickness, sea-sickness? It is also supposed (someone told me) to remove poisons that might come with the sushi fish… (that is the reason that I heard that ginger is served on the side with sushi)
Clifford on Feb 15th, 2006 at 1:17 pm

Yes, I can give you chapter and verse about ginger…. but I probably shouldn’t here. It is one of my main things I reach for when I’m not feeling well in the stomach area…. And I cook with it a lot, as I said….

Surprising that you can’t easily get it in Rome in this day and age….having said that, even in LA where you can find it everywhere, I still get people sometimes asking me at the checkout what I’m going to do with it…. So I end up giving cooking instructions to the people at the checkout.

-cvj
Amara on Feb 15th, 2006 at 1:37 pm

I think if one looks hard enough, one can probably find in America practically any food one wants, maybe only lacking freshness or some details. The trick is that one must know enough (i.e. be exposed to from somewhere) of what one wants.

Cibo in Italian means ‘food’; every country has their food specialties. I miss German dark bread and Mexican burritos, but I think that my kitchen is gradually showing its influences from all over the world. I’ve succeeded to find the very-difficult-to-find items: oatmeal (fiocchi d’avena), healthy peanut butter (crema di arachidi), and dill (aneto), which can be found in health-food stores (there is one in my castelli romani town), or in the large international food store in Rome. I’ve _not_ succeeded to find sour cream (how do the Italians survive without it?), mango pulp (for my treasured mango lassi), canned pumpkin (for holiday season foods) or chai tea (I still buy from my Indian friend at his tea shop when I visit my old town Heidelberg).

Lacking these favorites, my refrigerator and cupboard are full with the fresh vegetables, fruit, and pasta that seems to be the heart and soul of Italian cuisine. My favorite food-learning experience takes place on Saturday mornings, when I buy my fresh fruit and vegetables from Roberto, the vegetable man (10 euros for a week of fruit and vegetables). Every time he teaches me a few new Italian words for vegetables (some of which I don’t recognize), I try to teach him the equivalent English words, then he says a few sentences for how to prepare it. Since he parks his vegetable truck right outside of my apartment, when we become stuck on a word, I can run inside my flat in a minute and grab a dictionary. The “Saturday morning Vegetable Language Lesson with Amara and Roberto.” I think it belongs on Italian TV. Better than the velina (*) !

One reason that Italian cuisine is so good is that most Italians think of food frequently throughout the day. Planning, thinking, preparing, so that by mealtime, they have put far more thought into their meal than any other culture I know.

One afternoon when I visited the National Etruscan Museum at Villa Giulia (Rome) with a good friend, we discovered the reason behind the Italians’ food thought-processes. They have had 2000 years to develop it from the Etruscans! At the museum we saw an exhibit titled ‘Etruscans and Food’, where we saw descriptions of the contents of their food, how they prepared their food, and how they ate their food (dinnerware). So you see you can do it too, but you might need 2000 years for your brain develop the skill…

(*) veline are the leggy, full-cleavage, minimal-speaking, dancing girls on most of the TV channels, who appeared concurrently with Berlusconi’s ownership / control of 95% of Italian TV. You think I’m joking, perhaps? The definition in the Zingarelli dictionary is the following: A velina (plural veline) is “a young television assistant who exhibits herself in succinct clothes during a transmission”. Those women who don’t qualify as veline can content themselves with less glamorous roles, such as letterine (women who hold the letters up), numerine (women who hold the numbers up) or microfonine (women who hold the microphones).
Anon on Feb 15th, 2006 at 2:42 pm

What did you think of Ding Tai Fung?
Clifford on Feb 15th, 2006 at 2:57 pm

Hi Anon,

Are you referring to the chain store selling the delicacies, or is that the name of a specific delicacy that I have forgotten. If the former then you are probably referring to the place pictured above with the large baskets with the steamed dumplings….. My host got a lot of things there for the party. Very tasty, if I recall.

Cheers,

-cvj
Clifford on Feb 15th, 2006 at 3:00 pm

Amara… thanks for that! Very interesting indeed and I had no idea that there was official terminology for the leggy (etc) italian tv “girls” (a phenomenon I’m aware of from watching italian tv)….. with regards freshness in the USa, see my earlier posts about the farmer’s markets. At least in the big cities, freshness of many types of produce is not an issue any more….. For more exotic imported stuff that is not produced here, ok…there is to be some compromise.

Cheers,

-cvj
Kea on Feb 15th, 2006 at 5:02 pm

I’m always dreaming of good food - hardly needs to be Valentine’s day. Mmmm - a simple jungle curry at an upmarket Thai restaurant (I’m very poor so I haven’t done this for years) made with fresh green peppercorns and served with al dente rice (this is quite an art, I think) - or maybe (one of my favourites) a big rare steak, or a home-cooked kangaroo stew, or … sigh.
Kaleberg on Feb 15th, 2006 at 6:09 pm

I’m loving this series of reports. It sounds like Tainan is food heaven. It sounds great, and I love the stores with the punchline, “Oh yes, the xxx is great here, but there is this little place in Tainin …”

As for ginger. I’ll stand by candied ginger for fighting seasickness. It even works in dinky little helicopters in choppy air, and it doesn’t knock me out like Dramamine or Bonine.

As for dumplings, I did a History of the Dumplings site a while back (actually in the early 80s) that should be familiar to many physicists:

http://www.kaleberg.com/dumplings/dumplings.html

As for the illuminating neon sign. Yes ducks, and yes chickens. It’s always nice when a sign says what it means.
Kea on Feb 15th, 2006 at 6:16 pm

Mmmm - salted whole crabs, Chinese chicken-and-jellyfish, fresh dates, steak tartare the French way, Pacific rock oysters (yuuummmm) - or, I know! - a Kaiseki meal with custard and fish soup with golden balls in it and melt-in-your-mouth tempura. Sigh. This isn’t fair, Clifford. I think your posts should be banned.
Huei-Shih Liao on Feb 18th, 2006 at 10:51 am

Dear Clifford,

So happy to be notified of your more posts about food in Tainan.

The name of the noodle is “Danzih Noodles”. “Danzih” is the stall which can be carried on shoulders and then people could sale the noodle anywhere. The name of the original and then most famous/delicious stall saling “Danzih Noodles” is “Du-Hsiao-Yue”, which means to overcome the slack season (of fishing).

As for the chopsticks in the dish……it’s Ok. We all know you were not really coarse, just really excited/eager to take the picture then forgot the details. We were there and felt the excitement so we understood.

Finally, I am looking forward to your noodle experiments very much.

Best wishes,
Huei-Shih
Clifford on Feb 18th, 2006 at 3:09 pm

Dear Huei-Shih,

Welcome to the blog!!! I’m so happy to see a comment from you, especially since my memory of a number of the names and history of various things I learned is fading. Thanks for the reminder!

Feel free to add to (or subtract from) anything I say as a result of further memory failures….

Thanks for being charitable about the chopsticks. It was only that one time, really. And I happened to take a picture of it, embarrassingly enough…..In my defence, it was very late at night and I’d not had that much sleep the night before!

Cheers,

-cvj
Huei-Shih Liao on Feb 18th, 2006 at 6:26 pm

Let me supplement a little bit:

Ding Tai Fung has no branch in Tainan, actually in any place other than Taipei in Taiwan.

Considering the place pictured above with the large baskets with the steamed dumplingsâ€¦ is “Wan-Chuan-Hao”, a snack store aged more than 100 years.

I have tried various steamed dumplings in Ding Tai Fung. They taste good but not good enough for the extravagant price. At a fair price, we can easily find ones with (almost) equal quality. As for other delicacies served in Ding Tai Fung, I have not tried yet and no comment on them.
Clifford on Feb 18th, 2006 at 6:30 pm

Ah…yes I agree totally. I looked up the chain and saw form their website that there was no Tainan branch, but conjectured tht maybe the commenter called Anon knew better than I and perhaps the site was out of date…. so your clarification was very helpful.

Thanks!

-cvj
Pingback from Cookin’ | Cosmic Variance on Mar 2nd, 2006 at 6:21 pm

[...] So here is the ultimate “what I had for dinner last night” post. (Except it was not last night, but some nights ago.) People asked for this, and so here it is….. It is the promised report on my noodle dish experiments, inspired by my wonderful Walkabout culinary experiences in Taiwan, described in several posts earlier (see e.g. here, here, here……) [...]

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