"I can get quite excited in Hong Kong when I am served a dish of crisp asparagus that is tinged with sesame oil." Madhur Jaffrey
And that's about all there is to say really.
This is a first recipe post and the dish is Stir-fried asparagus flavoured with sesame oil, from Hong Kong. The recipe is not online but it's dead simple. Prepare your asparagus - cut into small lengths. Smaller than in this picture which is of a recipe from Café Liz - Asparagus with sesame oil and herbs. It was the closest I could find to Madhur's recipe which is very similar to the recipe of hers that I now use to cook asparagus. Toss the asparagus in a frying pan in a little oil, add a little water, cover and cook until tender - just a few minutes. For this particular recipe you then toss some more to get rid of the excess water and then add a little sesame oil. Nothing to it and so it's probably not surprising that the recipe is not online. Café Liz's recipe is really not that close as Liz adds garlic, sage and za'atar leaves at the end. All of the other recipes for Hong Kong - or more frequently Chinese - asparagus included other things like Hoisin, Soy and/or Oyster sauces - even fermented bean curd, as well as meat and shellfish.
I did find this Hong Kong recipe Stir-fried asparagus with chicken and bacon on a website called Christine's Recipes - Christine Ho - so presumably genuinely Chinese. And her introduction included this interesting piece of information:
"Asparagus is quite expensive in Hong Kong throughout the year. I still can remember that a plate of blanched asparagus might cost a fortune in some Chinese restaurants"
Which might explain this dish from the Hutong Restaurant which was featured in a Trip Advisor review - Green asparagus coated with white sesame. More seeds than oil perhaps but there might have been oil involved as well. But I'm guessing that it was indeed expensive.
So what I'm taking from this is that there aren't a lot of Hong Kong recipes for asparagus. Those I did see either had other ingredients, such as the chicken and bacon above, or prawns, pork ... with more complicated sauces and additions. The Chinese diaspora have lots of recipes that include asparagus, but when they stir-fried it as a separate vegetable there was often soy sauce plus something else as well.
So what to say? My first recipe book this time is pretty old - 1983 is when it was published. Eastern Vegetarian Cooking by Madhur Jaffrey it is and dates from a time when I think I was thinking about vegetarianism. Not very deeply or for long I have to say. I bought a few vegetarian based books at that time, but was not tempted into full vegetarianism, just different ways of cooking vegetables, mainly, I think, because at that time virtually all of the vegetarian dishes one saw - except for the heavily bean and lentil based ones, were side dishes. Not something one would be tempted to eat as a main dish. Not me anyway. Today there are many more options, and whilst not being vegetarian we eat a whole lot less of meat and fish than we used to. Partcularly fish, except for my beloved sardines on toast for lunch.
But I ramble. Madhur did have a couple of things to say in her introduction that might be worth mentioning. The first is a comment on how to maintain protein when going vegetarian.
"Nutritionists today are telling us that if we combine beans (such as soy or mung) with grains (such as wheat or rice) and a dairy product (such as yoghurt) at the same meal, our protein needs for that meal are pretty much taken care of."
Obvious stuff of course but dated. I mean today our choices are so much more varied. She mentions soy and mung as her beans examples. These days it's much more likely to be chickpeas, pinto, endamame, dal and lentils that would spring to mind. Grains - wheat or rice. Really? These days it's ancient grains such as quinoa, freekeh, farro and barley, plus couscous and a dozen different kinds of rice and wheat. Dairy? Where do you start? With the endless varieties of cheese - that definitely include those cheeses one cooks with - paneer, halloumi, feta, ricotta ..., or the almost endless variety of fermented dairy products. Yoghurt is just the beginning. And she doesn't even mention tofu. Our cooking world was just in the middle phase of expansion then, after the early Elizabeth David et al. days.
But then she is also very much of our time in this statement about spices:
"Spices and seasonings will do that. Perk things up, that is. They can also transform the same food so that it tastes different from day to day. Potatoes taste one way when cooked with sesame seeds, another when stewed with soy sauce, and quite different when fried with mustard and cumin seeds."
Not to mention the thousands of ways the rest of the world cooks potatoes. And today the choice of spices and seasonings is seemingly endless. Sometimes it seems to me that a new spice mix appears in a recipe every week.
And lastly - a rather more 'today' concept:
"How should meals be put together from this book? Should you 'mix and match'? Part of the fun of being a Western cook is that you may, indeed, put together anything that strikes your fancy."
And today, of course, chefs go further mix cuisines in one dish. It's interesting, however, that she implies that Western cooks are able to do this, but not Eastern ones. Possibly not true today - particularly in countries such as Japan and Korea which seem to frequently come up with some new and 'hot' dish which merges East and West.
My 'first recipe' blogs were invented to get over my increasingly frequent writer's block. And it has proven to be a good way to create an unexpected exploration of something. As I go on, however, there is a certain amount of repetition, either because of an alphabetical arrangement that always brings up artichokes or asparagus, or a traditional organisation that has the author tackling stock or sauce before venturing into possibly more interesting territory. If the book is modern there is perhaps more hope of some other kind of arrangement, but it is surprising how publishers still stick to the tried and true of tradition. Soup first, dessert last. Nevertheless, because it's a methodical journey around my bookshelves it does remind of books that I have half forgotten.
My next first recipe is still Madhur - it's one of my little Madhur sections in my cookbook library. I have lots of her books because she is fundamentally wonderful. We shall see.
YEARS GONE BY
March 7
2024 - Baps - a guilty pleasure - I had one for lunch today.
2023 - Summer's end - it's not ending yet this year. Next week is all hot, hot, hot.
2022 - Cooking with bark
2020 - Deleted
2019 - Semolina
2018 - Nothing
2017 - Capsicums
Asparagus from 1983. Hmmm. What was going on in 1933 then? A historical biew of food?