Read Online Miss Chopsticks by Xinran - Free Book Online

southern climate.
    Nanjing women love eating and shopping for food just as much as they like buying clothes and jewellery, and Wang Tong was typical in this respect. She understood all the nuances of the local cooking. For example, when people from outside Nanjing eat salt-water duck, what they are interested in is the fact that it is a Nanjing speciality. Nanjingers, on the other hand, are most particular about how the brine is made and the breed of duck. There is a Nanjing saying that ‘every part of a duck or goose is a treasure’. From the down in quilts and jackets to the blood and intestines used in the delicious ‘Duck Blood Soup’, every scrap of the bird is put to good use. The stock is even used to fill the delicious steamed ‘soup’ dumplings which Nanjingers love to eat for either breakfast or lunch.
    Nanjingers also like edible wild plants, and they are very proud of their ‘Eight Dry Fresh Things’ and ‘Eight Watery Fresh Things’. The Dry Eight consist of purslane, Hen’s Head, malantou, wild celery, rocambole, Chinese wolf-berry greens, shepherd’s purse and reeds. The Watery Eight include shrimps, snails, lotus root, fish, water caltropand wild rice stems. When food-lovers go to any Nanjing restaurant, no meal is complete without a dish of fresh reeds, gathered from the banks of the river and fried with dried stinky tofu. Another favourite are the fresh buds of the Chinese toon tree, plucked before the Festival of Pure Brightness, which can be fried with egg, eaten cold with tofu, or made into soup with chysanthemum flowers and toon-tree leaves. Nanjingers adore these little dishes of wild food which give them a taste of nature and help them to feel in tune with the seasons.
    Wang Tong was courageous in her choices at the market. She didn’t only buy local produce, but piled her basket with ‘imported’ vegetables that came either from abroad or from different parts of China. Often the market-stall holder had no idea what to call these vegetables and adopted the name their peasant-growers had given them. So it was that Wang Tong came back with things called ‘Yankee Smiles’ (pale green cucumbers) or ‘George Bush’s Nose’ (a kind of melon or courgette, pointed at the base and going out to a bell at the top). Clients at the restaurant loved discussing what these vegetables should really be called and even Old Guan, Guan Buyan’s father, couldn’t resist bringing out his botanical dictionaries. Sometimes, Wang Tong put up a ‘Wanted’ poster, calling on scholars and experts for the name of a plant. She made a number of interesting new acquaintances in this way and joked to Three that, with her help, she hoped to turn the Happy Fool into the first Chinese museum of vegetables.
    Wang Tong’s other good idea was to charge just a little bit more for the dishes they served.
    â€˜We won’t get customers by undercutting prices,’ she said. ‘We’ve got to have some markup for “freshness”, but we can’t rob them blind either. We’ll add just five fen to our prices. It’s only a sixth of the price of a box of matches and people who want to eat at our restaurant won’t makea fuss. Those who don’t want to eat with us would complain about our prices even if we only charged half a yuan a dish.’
    Some of her friends worried that it would be difficult for customers to find this kind of small change. As the cost of living increased in the late nineties, the value of the fen had become so small that it had practically disappeared. With the new millennium, some people were starting to treat five-fen coins as collectable items. But Wang Tong wasn’t too concerned. She said that she would simply make sure she got in a good stock of five-fen coins from the bank each week to give as change. And since the extra five fen added to the price of each dish was hardly going to make