What makes a journey memorable? To me, a
sense of connection and discovery is most important; and that was what I found
on a recent visit to Shunde, a district in China’s Guangdong province. Because
it brought me back to my childhood: to the roots of the cuisine I love and to
the strange, enigmatic breed of women who figured so vividly in my growing up
years – the amah.
The landscape on the hour-long drive from
Guangzhou’s airport to Shunde was almost Arcadian: a quilted patchwork of ponds
and green fields and a family-run restaurant every kilometer or so, it seems.
For thousands of years, fertile soil brought prosperity to this part of China.
Silk was a major produce, and Shunde became one of the nation’s largest silk
production centers. The men of Shunde grew the mulberry leaves that fed the
worms while the women wove silk at home.
During the Depression era of the 1930s,
silk’s demand fell and many people left Shunde. Some of its women left China
altogether, and made their way to Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. They found work
mainly as domestic help, and were easily recognizable by the black-and-white
samfus they wore and their tied-back hair buns. These women were fiercely
loyalty to their employers and earned the affectionate nickname ‘amah’, or
mother in Cantonese, for their devotion. As a child I met and befriended many
amahs in Singapore, and through them came to know of Shunde and its food.
My first stop was Jun’an, a rural town in
Shunde. A spot of trivia: Bruce Lee’s father was born in Jun’an and Bruce lived
here briefly as a child. The town, quick to capitalize on its fame, had built a
theme park in Bruce’s honour, but was otherwise a laid back agricultural
community that produced fine freshwater carp. On a visit to the Lee ancestral
hall I met a 105-year-old female inhabitant of Jun’an. She was amazingly
quick-witted for her years, and reminded me so much of the wizened yet
resilient amahs I knew.
Amahs remained unmarried for life, with many
taking a formal vow of spinsterhood that was out of step with the traditions of
the time. They formed strong bonds with their fellow ‘sisters’, and because
they never returned to China it was common for a group of amahs to share a
small rented house after retirement, where they would live together for the rest
of their lives.
At Jun’an I tasted its vaunted pork for the
first time in my life. The whole pig -- de-boned and marinated with five-spice
powder, salt, and sugar – was placed spread-eagled on a pole inside a large
wooden drum and steamed for an hour over charcoal. The tender pork that was
produced was sliced thinly and served with a sprinkling of sesame seed. The
spices intensified the porcine flavors yet were so subtle as to be virtually
untraceable; this made the quality of the meat paramount.
There is a saying to epitomize Shunde cooking
– 粗料精做，妙在家常 -- meaning to be able to cook refined home
meals out of cheap ingredients. And in fact, evidence points to Shunde as being
a major progenitor of Cantonese cuisine as a whole.
The freshwater carp that Jun’an breeds in
abundance is a key ingredient of Shunde cooking. An architectural fixture of
the region is the pond in front of the house, stocked with fish. For a meal,
Shunde women would gather vegetables from the farm and catch a fish from the
pond; from these they would conjure a feast without wasting a morsel. Shunde
frugality and skill with humble ingredients in the kitchen was renowned, and
when these women became amahs in Singapore, these same qualities became
hallmarks of their cooking style.
The Shunde Raw Fish is a showpiece dish and a
must-try. The live freshwater carp is slaughtered and its most tender flesh –
lying between the belly and tail end -- is sliced thinly and placed on ice to
keep it fresh. A mix of pickles, lime leaves, peanut and soy sauce is then
tossed in with the sliced raw fish and eaten. The story goes that Masterchef
Hooi Kok Wai of the Four Heavenly Kings fame took his cue from this dish and
made of it one of Singapore’s national dishes, the Chinese New Year’s
Prosperous Yusheng.
Other parts of the fish are used for steamboat;
sliced or beaten into fish paste. Another dish is steamed carp’s head, where
the very tip of the head is cooked with black bean paste. On the tongue, the
softness of the brain and the savory sweetness of the fluids in the fish head
were amazing. Nothing goes to waste. Even the bones were boiled and made into
porridge.
It is usual for an amah to work her entire
life with a single employer, becoming a trusted family member, and in some
cases, a surrogate ‘mum’ and even de facto matriarch. They would send the bulk
of their salary back home to their families in China, most particularly during
the difficult period of the Cultural Revolution. With what money that remained,
they would indulge in cookouts with their ‘sisters’ on off days. During the once-a-year
Hungry Ghosts Festival, when Cantonese opera troupes from Hong Kong would often
arrive in Singapore to perform, a surprising side of the amah emerges. They
would dedicate huge celebratory placards to their favorite opera artistes,
adorned with borders of folded ‘flowers’ made from hundreds of their
hard-earned dollar bills.
Forty-five minutes from Jun’an is another
small town called Leliu and its award-winning roast goose. At the street stall,
the cook explained the details to me: each bird is carefully selected and bred
to its ideal weight of about 2.5 kilograms where it is slaughtered. The
marinade used is specific to each chef and is jealously guarded, but the basic
ingredients appear to be Sichuan pepper, five-spice powder, aged tangerine peel,
galangal and soy sauce.
The Leliu roast goose is not crispy skinned
like its counterpart in Singapore. Its skin is loose and wrinkled like a
Shar-pei’s, and that apparently accounts for its fuller flavor. After the goose
is removed from the oven, it is usual to ‘rest’ it in the open; but in Leliu
the resting is done in an enclosed space away from the wind. This triggers a
sort of ‘braising’ process that causes the skin to wrinkle, while drawing the
juices from the flesh. And when chewed, the skin releases the intense flavors
it has absorbed as well as those of the marinade.
Another must-eat while in Shunde is the famed
rice noodle unique to the town of Chencun. It is said a man named Huang Dan
developed the technique of making the noodle some 80 years ago. First, newly
harvested rice is stored for six months, then rubbed under water for at least
20 minutes to remove excess starch before being ground with a stone grinder.
The resulting flour is then used to make an extra-thin, extra-smooth flat
noodle derived from the traditional sha
hor fun. In Hong Kong, where the
noodle quickly gained popularity, it is called Chencun Fen after its place of origin. Chencun Fen is eaten in a variety of ways: steamed with meats or
used like bread to soak up the gravy at the end of the meal, or even as a
dessert with red bean paste and coconut cream.
The Shunde dishes that served the amahs so
well in their employers’ kitchens also saw them through retirement. I remember
seeing, in the 1960s, ex-amahs selling Shunde fare such as dried sole porridge,
fried noodles, and steamed glutinous rice. In the morning, they would prepare
the food and set up their makeshift ‘stalls’ of stacked wooden crates along the
five-foot way. The meager takings probably helped stretch whatever savings
these old women managed to accumulate from earlier times of service.
My final stop, the sub-district of Daliang,
was a manufacturing boomtown, home to the production facilities of major
Chinese brands like Kelon and Midea. The skyline was typically mainland urban:
with gleaming high-rise towers and hulking shopping malls gradually elbowing
out the traditional buildings – and foods – of the streets and side lanes.
Happily, some traditional foods still
abounded -- meat porridge, chee cheong fun and deep-fried rice dumpling. The
Shunde district produces some of the finest rice in southern China, so the
variety of rice-based dishes on its streets should come as no surprise. Rice is
used in subtle, complex ways here. There are rice of various strains – pearl,
jasmine, glutinous – and different ‘ages’, such as ‘new’ or recently harvested
rice, or ‘old’ rice that has been stored for a period of time. It’s known that
a ‘simple’ bowl of porridge uses three to four types of rice to achieve
balances of texture, consistency, and fragrance. Learning to distinguish and
appreciate the gradations and differences in flavor present in plain rice was
an education in itself.
The sight of the deep-fried rice dumpling was
a different matter for me: it was like bumping into an old friend again after
40 years. I remembered buying deep-fried rice dumpling from a retired amah in
Chinatown, Singapore. Amahs were most commonly seen in Chinatown in the 1960s.
It was where they lived in retirement, sharing tiny shophouse cubicles. It was
where they congregated on their rest days; and it was where they died: in the
so-called ‘death houses’ along Sago Lane, where the terminally ill were housed
and cared for until the last.
Eating that dumpling on the street in Shunde,
I recalled watching the amahs in Chinatown sitting at the professional letter-writers, having their mail read to
them or written. I recalled watching them chat and gossip among themselves, and
cooking and sharing food from their homeland of Shunde; and I think -- isn’t it
wonderful how homesickness can be assuaged, and memories ignited, with a bite?
All photos by Mark Ong
