Produce

Produce

The first time I went into a Chinese supermarket I was shocked at the produce they have there. Apart from onions and potatoes, there is also all kind of other root, leaf, stem, and seed for sale, most of it unlike anything in an American supermarket. All of the produce has a delightfully unwashed sort of quality to it—certainly not all of it is “local,” but most of it does have dirt flaking off of it and the occasional fauna creeping around.

When I arrived in late August, watermelons (xigua) were just coming into season. So delicious—they are spherical, the size and shape of a small medicine ball—and the good ones are running over to bursting with juice. Every night in the first month, I would get off work, buy a watermelon, chop it in half, and eat it in its own bowl for dessert.

Soon, after wandering around my neighborhood a bit, I found the greenmarket. This is a tiny entranceway, basically invisible from the street, into a huge indoor market with stalls and stands for every manner of food. About a dozen stands sell vegetables, and they are the best ones I have seen. They seem small to my American eye, accustomed as I am to oversized, tasteless apples, watermelons, eggplants, etc. The peppers are as firm as a superball, the eggplants shiny and resplendent. The mushrooms are bouncy and still have “roots.” They even sell fresh peanuts, with wet dirt on them from being pulled up out of the ground that very day. Two couples have noodle-making machines, and they sell dried noodles and fresh dough patties for dumplings (I tried this a couple of times). One woman sells tofu products.

There are a few butcher stands, each right next to the other. If you look closely at what each one is selling, there’s a little surprise: each butcher is selling exactly one pig. There’s the snout, there’s two racks of ribs, there’s three trotters (looks like someone already bought one), there’s the tail, there’s the belly, and there’s the rest of the meat, all chopped into expert units and ready for sale. My point is this: unlike the States, where we buy “shoulder” or “loin” in bulk, here the butcher buys one pig, cuts it up, and sells you what she's got. They even have a meat grinder right on site if you need ground meat. Their cutting boards are universally a four-inch-think, two-foot wide coin of a tree trunk, soaked in blood.

Other animal products include the egg salesman (also hundred-year eggs, raw duck eggs, and raw quail eggs), poultry saleswoman (the various giblets are categorized, as though someone would want gizzard today, heart tomorrow) and live seafood. Yes, everywhere there are plastic tanks with fish, eels, crabs, frogs, snails, shrimp, crawdads happily (?) swimming around. They periodically get frisky and jump out of the tank, making a big splash that perturbs no one except me. When you want one, they pull it out, stun it, chop it up (blood everywhere) and put it in a bag. The one thing I tried one time was snails. I thought I had a nice idea, to boil them and then sauté them in wine, garlic, and mushrooms, but it turns out that snails are disgusting if they have not been raised by like an artesanal old French man who only feeds them organic algae or something. I won’t go into it further, except that I’ll never eat snails in China again.

Some dry goods stores sell ginger root (fresh, fresh) out of a big burlap bag or a cardboard box, along with dried mushrooms, hot peppers, and shelled dried peanuts. There are even live chickens and ducks for sale in the back of the market. God knows what you do when the wife brings home one of those.

After watermelons went out, they got extremely expensive. I regularly paid 4.50 yuan for one; the other day I paid 28.00. Then the seasonal fruit (for me, at least) became sugarcane. Sugarcane! Eight-foot-long purple-black stalks of it are piled outside fruit stands and shops. They cost between 3 and 10 kuai. You point to one, and the shopkeeper hands you a bag. Then they take out the special sugarcane knife, which has a massively sharp peeler in the middle of it. They peel off the tough exterior, and, holding the exposed white cane over the bag, they hack off foot-long pieces. You end up with a little “lumber pile” of sweet, juicy cane. Taking it home, you bite off a hunk. Cells full of the sugar water burst in your mouth. Once you’ve chewed and sucked the juice out, you’re left with a dry, husky wad of cellulose in your mouth, which you spit out onto the ground if you’re Chinese, or into the trash if you’re me. As November wore on, the “segments” of cane got shorter and shorter, meaning that one cane had much more of the horsy, woody stuff at the joints (think bamboo) and much less of the tender, delicious stuff between them. So I moved on.

Now it’s December, and the seasonal fruit is oranges. Many times in New York I missed that fresh, stinging-sweet tang of the oranges from our yard in Arizona, but damned if they don’t have something very like that here. Again the oranges are smaller than usual and relatively inconsistent in quality, but when they are good they are good. There’s a million varieties, and I can’t tell an orange from a tangerine in English, much less Chinese, so I just choose the most standard-looking stuff. I’m rarely disappointed.

The other culinary treat I’ve experienced is the scallion pancake. There is a little stand near the greenmarket on the other street where a family makes and sells these—Daddy Pancakes, Mama Hardsell, and either an aunt or an extremely spry grandmother. They have a big machine that is essentially a George Foreman grill, except that it’s smooth, circluar, and two feet in diameter. Into this they flatten some dough with chopped scallions, sesame seeds, lots of oil, and some secret, subtle blend of herbs and spices. Out comes a giant pancake (essentially a really tasty pizza crust) which they cut into fourths and sell like pizza slices. There are two varieties: unadulterated, and one that is painted with a tasty sweet-and-spicy reddish sauce. Each has its various merits. When you point to a pile, they chop it up into crazy polygons for eat-with-your-fingers ease, put it in a bag, and weigh it. They have a little way of doing all this so that their hands never touch the food. An ample breakfast’s worth is 1.50 yuan.

Also at this stand, they make their own soymilk! I saw the process happening at a similar place in shanghai—they soak the beans overnight, do some sort of emulsion, boil it in the morning, sift out the cellulose, then pour it into plastic cups with sugar on the bottom and use a heat-sealer to put a plastic top on the whole thing. Then, with a sharpened straw, you spear the “lid” and drink. A cool way to combine the convenience of packaged liquids with the tastiness of fresh soymilk. Oh yeah, and it’s fresh—a perfect complement to the pancake, in texture, temperature and flavor.