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The New Year spread by Chopsticks Food Catering Joanna Lobo | DNA
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On the eve of the Chinese New Year, Cindy Chan and her two partners, the people behind Chopsticks Food Catering Pvt Ltd, prepared a traditional Chinese meal for a handful of expatriates in the city. This was the Poon choi (Big Bowl Feast); a traditional banquet featuring a huge wooden bowl in which cooked food is arranged layer after layer. Radish and other vegetables at the bottom, then pork, pork skin, chicken, goose, fish, prawn, crab and oyster — arranged in ascending order of their prices. The three of them had spent the previous day roaming around the city, in an attempt to get the freshest fish, crab, vegetables and sauces for the meal. “It had to be a proper home-cooked meal,” says Chan.
The significance of the meal was two-fold: giving homesick expats a chance to celebrate the festival, as well as ensuring that they don’t miss out on any of the traditions associated with it. Like most of the food eaten during this time, the Poon Choi is loaded with symbolism — the highly piled food carried the implication of prosperity.
Calling on prosperity
“It’s a tradition to prepare various foods signifying different symbolisms, based on the belief that the coming year will bring more blessings if we eat these lucky foods on the Chinese New Year,” says Siu Kim Chung, 26, a PR executive based in Mumbai.
The food items that usually find their way to her family table are chicken (head and all) steamed with soy sauce, ginger and herbs to represent family and good health, and steamed fish (eyeballs and all). One family staple that’s repeated every year are the sesame balls — deep fried dough rolled in sesame seeds. “It is supposed to be a difficult recipe, because the balls need to puff up. If the balls have expanded well, it can be taken to mean that you have lots of good luck coming your way,” says Chung.
Across Chinese homes, one item that finds pride of place — its crescent shape resembling the ancient Chinese gold ingots — is the dumpling. At the home of Chef Liang Xiaq Qing, executive Chinese chef at Pan Asian, ITC Maratha, a few coins (thoroughly washed) are added in, among the hundred or so odd dumplings made. These are then boiled and eaten on the eve of Chinese New Year. “If you get the coin, it means you will have good luck the entire year,” he says.
The dumplings served as a part of Pan Asian’s New Year menu are stuffed with boiled chicken, pork or spinach and served with soy sauce. These are called jiaozi in Chinese; a different spelling (same pronunciation), means a smart person.
Chinese New Year food, however, isn’t only about the meat and the fish. Chan’s menu includes fried iceberg lettuce with dried Chinese mushrooms. “In the olden days, mushrooms represented the male, hence every festival has to have mushrooms served,” says Chan.
At the two-month old restaurant Yauatcha, the team of chefs has come up with a new menu that includes “elements of the New Year”, namely spring rolls, dumplings and fish. Their asparagus endamme dumpling is crunchy and light. The crispy vegetable cheung-fun has carrots, chilli, and mushroom, finely-chopped, coated in crunchy rice flour batter and finally rolled on a cheung-fun (rice noodle). Chef Liang has two stand-out vegetarian dishes on his menu. The french beans are pan-fried till crunchy, and topped with chilly hoisin sauce; called long beans in Chinese, they denote longevity. The sweet corn and vegetable mix served with steamed corn bread, “resembles a bowl of gold and silver coins,” says Chef Liang.
Go fish
Chopsticks began their home catering this April and a large part of their client base is expats, the ones who can “understand their food”. In a bid to help explain the food served at a Chinese home, Chan and her team took over my kitchen, coming up with a six-course meal. The steamed fish was the pride of the meal, swimming in a bed of soy sauce; lightly smoking, it crumbled at touch.
No banquet in a Chinese home can be complete without fish — sea bass, pomfret, scallops, squid and so on. “Steamed uncut fish represents abundance,” says Chung. Chan’s team also prepares fried king prawns with sweet and sour sauce, fried tofu with shrimp and lightly steamed crabmeat with broccoli. “It is important to get the quality of the fish right, because most Chinese can look at the fish and figure it’s freshness,” says Chan.
Yauatcha’s new menu pays tribute to this aspect of celebrations with their spinach seafood soup with roe from flying fish, crispy salt and pepper squid and stir fry sea bass in XO sauce. The sea bass is well-cooked, served with lightly sauteed onions, mushrooms and an XO sauce made of dry scallops, dry shrimp and soya sauce. The prawn and banana roll is held together by a crunchy spring roll skin, the textures of the prawn and banana blending well.
Chef Liang has a better explanation for the Chinese fascination with symbolic food. “Earlier China was very poor and people were scared of becoming poor so they started eating certain food which they believed would help them gain prosperity,” he says.
The more you eat, fortunately, the higher your chances are of gaining wealth and prosperity.
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