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Thursday, September 21

Chairman Mao's Little Red Cookbook

by Mike on Thu 21 Sep 2006 06:22 PM EDT

Several years ago, I was facing a decent commute to and from work and I went through quite a few books on tape during that period. One of the larger (and more interesting) audiobooks that I "read" during this time was The Private Life of Chairman Mao by Dr. Li Zhisui. Over the course of the few weeks that it took for me to get through all of the tapes (there must have been 30 or more cassettes), I became quite immersed in Dr. Li's scandalous memoir. Sometimes I would continue listening to the text after arriving home, listening to segments while I was mowing the lawn and working outside (I still think about the "mango worship" part of the book when I am mowing my front yard.) But most of the time that I spent listening to the book was during my evening commute, which was usually pretty close to dinner time. The fact that I listened to so much of this book on an empty stomach left a lasting impression on me because in a few parts of the book, Li chronicles his dinnertime meetings with Mao, describing Mao’s meals in some detail. The one part that always stood out in my mind was this exchange between Mao and Li:

Dinner was served. Again, the food was swimming in oil. Mao was sixty-two years old and weighed over 190 pounds-a bit heavy even for his five-foot-ten-inch frame. Later, I would often criticize his diet and caution him against eating so much fat, but he never listened. He had been in the habit of eating fatty pork since boyhood, and he would do so until the end of his life.

He offered me a dish of bitter melon cooked with hot peppers. "How does it taste?" he wondered.

I had never eaten such a dish. "It's hot and bitter," I replied.

Mao roared with laughter. "Everyone should taste some bitterness in his life," he said, "especially a person like you. You studied medicine and became a doctor. You have probably never eaten bitterness."

Chi ku, "to eat bitterness," can mean, literally, to eat something bitter or to suffer hardship, and I was not certain whether Mao was referring to the food we were eating or playing on words to let me know he regarded me as soft, a product of an easy upper-class life. "I have never eaten this kind of bitter melon before," I replied, sticking to the question of food, "but it's tasty."

"Well, good," he replied. "You must be prepared to taste some bitterness ."

— from The Private Life of Chairman Mao, pages 81-82.

Now, most folks probably wouldn’t find this description of spicy, bitter food "swimming in oil" to be terribly appetizing but during those long drives home, my empty stomach and love of spicy Chinese food helped to convince me that this was a winning combination. I’m not really a fan of pork dishes when it comes to Chinese food (although I did have a good rendition of spicy pork in black bean sauce earlier this week) and melon doesn’t really sound that good to me in a hot dish. So I tried some substitutions and made my own stir-fry mix that I ended up eating at least twice a week for a decent stretch back in 2000 or 2001. Basically, I would cook about a pound of stir-fry beef in a generous amount of oil (I used oil liberally so that it wouldn’t reduce completely and I would still have some left in the dish when it was ready to be served) with mixed vegetables. I would usually use things that would stay crunchy like onions, celery, carrots and bell peppers. I would then add lots of hot chili peppers and sliced lemons—peel and all. Once this is all cooked up, the lemon pulp is pretty soft, so it separates pretty easily from the peel. But the bitterness of the pulp, peel and juices mixes well with the spicy peppers. When you’re eating the dish, it’s best to get a fork full that includes some lemon peel, pepper and beef. If you can kind of crush the lemon over the pepper and beef, it’s especially tasty, even if you choose not to eat the peel. The other day, I got a taste for this dish and I made it for the first time in well over a year. It was just as tasty as I remembered. Now, I had been under the impression that I was the only person at our house that was really crazy about this dish, but then Thomai made a fresh batch for dinner just last night. I am not sure how fattening or unhealthy this stuff is, but at least I’m eating my share of bitterness!