Lydia Chang: preference

Transcript context

…[laughs] You’re quoting Yuan Mei, the great 18th-century Chinese gourmet. Well, that’s another thing that’s really interesting, because I think Chinese food in the West is not associated with premium ingredients. If you go to a fancy Spanish restaurant, they’ll be trumpeting their Iberico ham, so on and so on. If you go to a new Californian restaurant, they’ll be talking about which farm they got the produce from. But Chinese restaurants generally don’t say much about the ingredients, and that’s just because they’ve been stuck in this bracket where people don’t go to Chinese restaurants for fine ingredients, which is completely mad. In this book, there’s a whole chapter about this, really, that the Chinese practically invented the concept of terroir, the obsession with seasons, with provenance, exactly which land your vegetables are produced on, and so on. In traditional Chinese cookery, certainly, a vitally important part of it is sourcing seasonal, fresh, quality ingredients, so it would be nice to recognize this, and this is clearly happening here. We’ve got all these Amish farm ingredients, right? Yes. I would say it comes maybe in both ways. We appreciate and we use a lot of local ingredients, from the Maryland crab that paired with our tofu skin. We also go out of our way trying to look for seasonal, really good-quality white beans. We are about to have some Amish pork dumplings. We try to source the best ingredients, whatever we can find, and use them to make quality dishes. My feeling is that if Chinese cuisine in the future, in contemporary times, manages to unite the exceptional culinary skills of Chinese chefs with the old obsession with ingredients, they’re just going to blow everyone else away.…

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