book report by m-c

authors:	Jeffrey Alford & Naomi Duguid
title:	Beyond the Great Wall:
	Recipes and Travel in the Other China
publisher:	Artisan, 2008
illustrations:	location photographs by Jeffrey Alford & Naomi Duguid
	studio photographs by Richard Jung
length:	376 pages
page size:	big (11" wide, 9.75" high)

When is a book about Chinese cooking not about Chinese cooking?

When it's about the other China.

Mark and I first became aware that another China exists when we stayed in a Chinese suburb in southern California. Mark was there for the Reedy Race, I was there for LACMA and MOCA, and we both were there for the food.

In a crowded shopping center with signs containing only Chinese characters but bilingual menus, we found a strange Chinese restaurant with no pork on the menu. No pork? Could this be possible? Pork is the best meat in the world, and what the Chinese do with it is divine. Why does this Chinese menu have only ... lamb?

Aha. The back of the menu kindly explained that there are Muslims in China, and this restaurant served food from Muslim Chinese, therefore no pork. There may have been much more information, but that's all I took in. Then the food arrived. Adorable little lamb dumplings with ... yogurt on the side? Greens flavored with ordinary Chinese flavors, soy sauce and sesame oil but also ... cumin?

We went back to that restaurant again and again, and then a few years ago, when I started going to China regularly, I found restaurants in Beijing with food like the one in California, but the publication of Alford & Duguid's Beyond the Great Wall has been my first time to study this cuisine -- or more accurately, these cuisines.

I've learned that "the other China" means non-Han, people of different ethnic groups from the Han majority, the people we think of as Chinese. The other China is Dai, Dong, Hui, Miao, Mongol, Tibetan, Uighur (pronounced WEE-gur), Yi, and many others. Alford & Duguid give us short, informal, but solid essays on these diverse peoples.

Reading about the Hui, for instance, I find that they are the main (but not only) Chinese Muslims. They live throughout China and have a lingo of their own, whatever the local Chinese dialect is plus some Persian and Arabic vocabulary. Their cooking is long on flatbreads, grilled lamb, and noodle soups. It's likely that the California restaurant was Hui. Alford & Duguid recommend a book for further reading. They wear their scholarship lightly.

They wear their experience lightly as well, but it takes my breath away. Separately and together, they have gone to remote parts of the world, in this case China, equipped with sleeping bags, cameras, and open minds and hearts. "I reached Lhasa for the first time in March 1985. I had flown from Chengdu, in Sichuan, on a very early flight. I remember arriving at the airport hours before dawn, nervous that somehow the flight wouldn't happen." That's Jeffrey. Naomi: "The rain was coming in sheets straight at us, blown by a fierce north wind. We were in the grasslands sound of Labrang, in Gansu, riding sure‑footed Tibetan ponies, with miles still to go before we got back to town." If you have any taste for armchair travel, these two will bowl you over. It's easy to picture oneself as a bus driver in Qinghai or a street-seller in Hailar being completely charmed by such curious, low-key, hungry visitors. In the world of journeys, there are tourists and travelers; A+D are travelers.

A small problem with Beyond the Great Wall is that it looks like a coffee-table book. A+D used to have a stock photo company called Asia Access (I think it's gone out of business now), and the book is filled with their brilliant, fascinating photographs, along with Richard Jung's mouth-watering close-ups of the food. And the book is big. It weighs almost five pounds, and the page size is hefty. (I couldn't fit the whole cover into the scan at the top.)

It would be easy to conclude that the point of the book is really the gorgeous pictures -- the sort of cookbook an ordinary home cook would look at but never cook from.

Big mistake.

A+D have since their first cookbook been interested in the ordinary, everyday cooking of the countries they travel through, the kind of cooking done in truckstands, huts, and shacks. Some people who write cookbooks about exotic lands are drawn to festival recipes and elaborate productions by the one woman in the village who still -- rolls her couscous by hand, grinds her own oatmeal, blows out her own eggs -- you fill in the blank. Those can be wonderful cookbooks, but the recipes are likely to be less than compelling for those of us with books to write, jobs to do, children to raise. Well, guess what? The people who interest A+D also have other things to do than cook, sheep to tend, rows to hoe, children to raise. They can't spend hours in the kitchen putting together ambitious concoctions. They're like us, they want to eat well but without putting massive amounts of time and effort into cooking. A+D are drawn to recipes that fit into ordinary lives, like ours.

Another factor that makes the book easy to cook from is the unfamiliarity of the food. I've written a little bit about this idea before. Of course it's maddening to try to cook from a recipe that produces a completely mysterious result -- how do you know whether you want to eat it, or what else to serve? But cooking from a recipe that you hope will produce a precise result can be difficult too. How many hours have you slaved over brownie recipes, trying to get that one perfect ideal of a brownie you have in your mind? How many times have I tried to reproduce Margaret's banana bread with fresh cranberries -- I haven't given up yet, but I also haven't come even close.

On the other hand, you probably don't have an idealized taste image of Lhasa Yellow Achar in your mind, nor Cheese Momos, nor Lamb Samsas -- at least I don't. I'm confident that if I use good ingredients and don't burn anything, whatever I make is likely to taste good. I have no way of knowing whether my dish matches the original -- nor does it matter.

I've already been cooking one or two recipes a day from Beyond the Great Wall and enjoying them no end. If you're interested, you might want to buy yourself a copy and cook along with us.

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