and now from Beijing....DUCK!!!

Hello again from the Far East.

We went up to Beijing last weekend, and I took the opportunity to learn about Imperial cuisine, and to do a quick survey of Peking Duck.

Imperial cuisine doesn't have the same unifying characteristics as the other cuisines, because its core values seem to be variety and exoticism. A typical meal for the Emperor consisted of around 100 different dishes, which all had to be different. The Emperor and his wife would each take a single bite, and then move on; one imperial recipe is very famous because the emperor actually ate the whole dish one time. At any rate, the kitchen couldn't keep repeating the same dishes from night to night, so the cuisine necessarily features all sorts of wacky and unusual combinations of obscure or exotic ingredients. It also appropriates highlights from all the other various cuisines across China. We had "8 treasure tea", for instance, 3 of whose treasures are walnuts, dates, and wolfberries, and an eggplant dish with about 3 times more kinds of seeds and nuts thrown in than I could possibly identify. The "Mongolian Lamb" was essentially an upscale version of the Xinjiang meat sticks I mentioned earlier, but carefully prepared with high-quality ingredients and with some sesame seeds added for good measure. We also had some venison strips fried in a sesame seed crust, which I really liked, and a crab-and-pork "Lion's Head" meatball, a Shanghainese specialty that some Emperor liked enough to claim for Imperial cuisine.

The highlight of Imperial cuisine, as far as I'm concerned, is Peking Duck. We were in Beijing for 3 days, and sampled 3 fairly similar ducks in 3 wildly different settings. The first duck, which we ate just after checking into the hotel, came from Quanjude, a huge, bustling duck palace filled with Chinese families. The place we ate was actually an expansion of the old Quanjude restaurant, which has been serving duck since 1864, but which is closed right now for pre-Olympic renovation (this may have been a good thing, because Dev and Summer agree that the duck we ate was better than the ones they've gotten from the old place). The duck we were served was the 400,118th duck they've ever served. I know, because they gave us a certificate of authenticity. It was pretty much perfect: crispy, golden skin; thin, fresh, un-sticky, flavorful pancakes; good scallions and hoisin sauce (you wouldn't think this would be an issue, but it was); a thin but noticeable layer of rich duck fat; and, most importantly, tender, moist, extremely flavorful meat. We were also served boiling-hot cups of opaque, watery duck broth, of which I took a single sip and which Dev and Summer, more experienced than I in such things, avoided altogether.

The second duck we had was at Made In China, a very modern, upscale Imperial restaurant with a distributed open-kitchen design, so that we walked by the duck-kiln on our way to the table, which was wedged between the woks on my left (spectacular flame-ups punctuated the evening), the noodle-chef in front of me, and a full-wall window with a beautiful view of an underlit willow and an old tile roof to my immediate right. The place was incredibly pleasant, and all the food was quite good, cooked with a modern sensibility. But the duck, though good, was probably the worst of the three ducks I had. The main problem was that the meat was neither as flavorful nor as tender and succulent as at the other places, but it didn't help that the pancakes were doughy and that the duck had been cooked until there was very little fat left between the (very) crispy skin and the meat. They served the duck in what I believe is the more traditional Imperial style, which allows a single dish to be eaten in many different ways (presumably, this way the Emperor could eat more than one bite of a given duck). There was one plate of duck slices with skin, one plate of duck slices without skin, and one plate of slices of just skin. Our waitress recommended dipping the skin in a bowl of sugar provided for that purpose; it tasted kind of like eating a slice of butter dusted with sugar, only with an unnerving ducky taste, which is to say way worse. Really, while the skin might be "the best part", eating it without meat just wasn't very good. And, of course, the skinless duck wasn't as good, so I ended up combining the skin and the skinless duck in a number of my pancakes. The Imperial tradition did have a huge upside, though. Apparently, there were traditionally 2 sauces served with Peking duck: hoisin sauce for the women, and a pureed garlic sauce for the men. Hoisin sauce with duck is very good, but the garlic sauce (which I think really was just pureed garlic) fits perfectly together with the fattiness of the duck, combining to form a flavor very reminiscent of the garlic sauce at Zankou Chicken (which I think is pureed garlic with a little butter). In fact, the garlic sauce was so good that it made up for the inferiority of the duck, and the final wrapped pancakes that I had at Made In China may have been the best I had in Beijing.

The third place we went, LiQun, was located in a maze of grey, dusty, run-down shacks, on a street inaccessible to cars. We would have had an impossible time finding it, but Summer fooled a crooked rickshaw driver into thinking that Dev (who was giving me the a lightning tour of the Forbidden City) was an important Chinese factory owner who would call the Beijing police and have him arrested unless he took her there. It was 2PM, and we were the only ones eating there, in an un-airconditioned room next to an open refrigerator full of ducks, while a sullen Chinese girl alternately mopped the floor and swatted at flies. The duck meat itself was very good - moist, tender, and flavorful, not at all chewy. The pancakes reminded me of the thin, flexible rice paper that you sometimes see surrounding vietnamese spring rolls - they weren't quite as good as the ones at Quanjude, but I liked the little bit of stretch and chew that they had, and they certainly weren't doughy like the ones at Made In China. Unfortunately, the duck skin wasn't as crispy as I would have liked, and the thick layer of fat between the skin and the meat overwhelmed the meat and skin. And, shockingly, the hoisin sauce (which I would have assumed would be constant across the board) was kind of grainy and acrid, noticeably inferior to the hoisin sauces at the other two places. We tried to order garlic sauce and ended up with a paste of garlic and sugar, but it was only about 25 cents down the drain.

Now, I'm not one to be put off by a little fat, so for me the duck at LiQun was #2 because the meat was so much better than at Made In China; Dev agreed. Summer, who is one to be put off by a little fat, found the duck at LiQun downright difficult to eat, and far preferred Made in China. But we all agreed that the duck at Quanjude was #1.

In other news, the Hey Song Sarsaparilla was undrinkably foul. The Bundaberg products (root beer, ginger beer, and bitter lemon-lime) were all very good. The root beer has sarsaparilla root and licorice root, as well as actual vanilla and cane sugar, and ranks right up near the top of the root beer list (though I wouldn't really classify it with the traditional sarsaparillas). Today I found Bundaberg sarsaparilla at a different store, and I'm looking forward to trying it and comparing the two. The ginger beer was excellent, with a serious bite to it, but not as strong as, say, Blenheim. The lemon-lime was OK, and combined very nicely with ice-cold gin. Tonight we ate at Bubba's, a BBQ restaurant owned and operated by an expatriate Texan. The brisket was as good as Dickey's on a good day, which makes the place a damn sight better than any BBQ restaurant I've been to in NYC.

This is probably my last post from China; I'll get back to you about the Bundaberg Sarsaparilla when I get back to the States. I know you'll be dying with the suspense.