Thanksgivings in China always try their best but usually fall a bit short of the American version. Not so this year. The actually day, Thursday, was still a working day so a few friends of mine and I went out for a large extravagant meal, Chinese style. We opted for Hunan cuisine, a big favorite of mine and my friend, who is terribly homesick for her hometown of Changsha. The restaurant was high in a building overlooking Nanjing road, the busiest most touristy street in Shanghai, a place I try to steer clear from usually. We got a late start and the restaurant was a patchwork of tables finishing their meals. Since it was Thanksgiving we opted to order a Thanksgiving amount for the table. Our meal consisted of:
Cold steamed pumpkin with jujube
Cold cucumber with hoisin sauce
Stir fried celery with lotus bulb
Hot and spicy deep fried potato slivers
Red braised pork belly
“Dry” hot pot of chicken with wild mountain mushrooms
Numbing and hot shrimp
It was a good meal. A friend of mine had ordered the red braised pork belly (红烧肉) due to some genetic issue he has with eating protein, he kept saying that since the dish is mostly fat he would be okay. I wasn’t sure about that line of reasoning or whether or not the dinner needed a dish so completely and utterly rich and over the top. Good Chinese food, as usual, proved me wrong. This was by far the best red braised pork belly I’ve ever had. It would have been welcome by both the American barbecuing elite and Mao Zedong, conversly it would have made any cardiologist pale with fear. This dish, the last one to come after we had already plowed through the rest, was in a pot stuck in the top of a large cermaic flower vase and looked utterly impressive at the table. The dish was about a half dozen massive hunks of pig fat streaked with the most amazing tender meat at the bottom all covered in a dark red sauce more confouding than even the most elaboprate Oaxacan mole. Each hunk was about the size of your average paper cup, i.e. unnervingly large. They had been cooked for so long that with the smallest amount of pressure from your chopsticks the whole thing gushed molten fat like a sponge sitting in a bucket, the meat flaked off at the slightest movement and held flavors that left you at first ooohing and then in silent appreciation. It was the definition of luscious. My small bowl was literally covered in half an inch of fat after eating two hunks. A perfect dish for Thanksgiving.
The Friday after Thanksgiving I had been invited by a friend to an American Thanksgiving. The friend in question was not someone I knew liked to cook so I was expecting something more like an open bar with some cheese and crackers. In fact it turned out to be the best Thanksgiving I’ve ever had outside of my mother’s dining room. The meal was held at another friend’s new apartment. He had just moved into a grand place over looking Xujiahui (徐家汇), which can easily be compared to Times Square in New York and is the city’s premier shopping destination with about a dozen different China-sized malls in the neighborhood. At night it is a flashy capitalistic orgy and from my friends living room we looked over it all. Without a doubt the best apartment view in Shanghai I’ve seen yet.
When I arrived I found three of my friends, all dudes, working feverishly in the kitchen. It became clear that this meal would be much much more than just an open bar. I of course tried to lend a hand, but the kitchen was small and men’s kitchen egos are large (especially when cooking prized family recipes), so I stayed in the dining room with the women uncorking wine bottles and talking about why Thanksgiving is so important to Americans. Around eight or nine o’clock the dinner was ready and the guests, buzzed on wine, sat to eat. And oh what a dinner it was!
One 13 pound turkey, perfectly roasted and served with homemade gravy (I made the gravy)
Roasted cauliflower and roasted broccoli
Roasted garlic mashed potatoes
Creamed spinach with buttery crumb topping
Vegetarian stuffing
Crusty French baguette and eight bottles of fine red wine (mostly from Argentina and Spain)
Pumpkin pie
Every single dish came out beautifully and in appropriately American sized portions (they’re were only 8 of us, though we could have fed many more). The only tragedy of the night was a magnum of champagne put in the freezer to cool that had exploded while we ate, not that we needed more wine on top of all that red. The turkey was juicy and had crispy skin (this was achieved without a meat thermometer) and everything else was done well and done with lots of butter (two interchangeable comments). It was the first Thanksgiving for two Chinese women and one Catalonian woman at the table and they all loved it immensely, which made us Americans proud. We each said what we were thankful for, per tradition, and repeatedly clinked our wine glasses together in good cheer. It was all in all a perfect Thanksgiving meal among friends.
One of the most interesting table discussions was about the fruit vender who had supplied the turkey and other hard-to-find American food items. Apparently there is a fruit stand in the neighborhood that, while looking no different from the fruit stands one is used to in China, is actually a foreign gourmet’s treasure trove. The middle aged Chinese women who runs it knows which way the wind blows and keeps the stand stocked in items that the foreigners in the neighborhood seek out, and if she doesn’t have it she knows a guy who knows a guy who can deliver it. I have not been, but from what I heard that night you can not only buy 13 pound turkeys, but also mozzarella di bufala, fresh thyme and rosemary, capers, sundried tomatoes, and much more. The hilarious thing is that she doesn’t speak any English yet still has an encyclopedic knowledge of Western foods. She has a bulging heavily bookmarked book on American cuisine that serves as her bible and textbook and from which she studiously reads daily. So while she can’t talk about the weather she knows exactly what arugula and gouda cheese are and how you can serve them. I look forward to having the pleasure of meeting this woman.
