This recipe is excerpted from Voraciously’s Essential Cookbooks newsletter series, Charlotte Druckman’s curated list of 10 desert-island cookbooks that she believes are essential to a modern home cook’s repertoire. For more recipes like this one, sign up for the 10-week series here.
I owe my minimal ability to prepare Chinese food (I still have a long way to go) to Fuchsia Dunlop’s “Every Grain of Rice.” Familiarizing myself with the foundational techniques (wok cooking, with or without a wok, most of all) and flavor profiles has helped me become a better cook, and a better-informed one.
While sharing the food traditionally made in Chinese homes (instead of restaurant kitchens or street vendor stalls), Dunlop considers the realities of home cooks in general. She selects for ease, safeguarding us against recipes with long ingredient lists or numerous specialty ingredients, showing us how to prepare things efficiently — and correctly, so we’re able to pick up a beginner’s knowledge of Chinese food and culture as we go. Just having the formula for suan ni wei, the Sichuanese combo of garlic, sugar, soy sauce, vinegar and chile oil that acts like a spark plug for smacked cucumbers or anything else you toss in it, will give you something close to SHAZAM status in the kitchen.
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Coincidentally, Dunlop shows us how much this style of cooking dovetails with many of our present-day priorities as eaters; it’s economical, sustainable and — even if I think it’s a turgid phrase — vegetable-forward. It is interesting to see how modern dietary advice often echoes the age-old precepts of the Chinese table: “Eat plenty of grains and vegetables and not much meat, reduce consumption of animal fats and eat very little sugar,” she states in the early pages.
And while I’m sharing a dish that features chicken here, the theme holds up: The fermented black beans carry this Black Bean Chicken, and I’m amazed by what they can do and how easy they are to find. The dish comes from the Hunanese city Liuyang, which, Dunlop tells us, is known for its production of fireworks. If you ate it there, the chicken would be deep-fried. She has adapted it to a stir-fry to make it easier for home cooks. If you don’t like fireworks going off in your mouth, skip the chiles. If it’s a pyrotechnic spectacle you’re after, increase the amount.
This recipe is reflective of all of “Every Grain of Rice” — it doesn’t feature a laundry list of ingredients, it’s tied to a regional cultural history, and it’s keenly aware of the wants and needs of today’s home cook. And these days, that’s precisely what I’m looking for.
This recipe is from Week 5 of Voraciously’s Essential Cookbooks newsletter series. For more recipes like this one, sign up here. It appears as published in Fuchsia Dunlop’s “Every Grain of Rice,” with minor edits for clarity.
NOTE: To reduce the sodium in the marinade, use low-sodium soy sauce as a substitute for the light soy sauce.
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