Found within a Chinese cuisine book
It was almost hours of dinner and for some reason the conversation fell on Chinese restaurants. – It is not the ones who do not catch me there. Since there was those news a few years ago, ”said one of the ladies, with an ostensible disgust of disgust.
– ASAE’s operation, wasn’t it? Asked someone.
Playing playing, there are almost 20 years that the authority of food security has entered the kitchens of Chinese restaurants and has truly found things… to leave your eyes in the beak!
I myself had serious reservations, especially since that beautiful day I was serving a Suey draft beer and I realized a piece of food in a different color in the middle of the vegetables-a vulgar bottle lid, which quickly concluded that part of my dose came from the remains of an earlier meal.
But these reserves are not extensible to literature.
The first thing that caught my attention in that cheap book stand was the slightly folk cover, representing, I came to know, the Chinese god of home and kitchen, Tsao Wang, with his wife and servants, a dog and a rooster, and a fire lit to the center.
This is a classic of cuisine, La Cuisine Chinoise, from Henri Lecourt, a French cook who around 1900 settled in Tianjin. He married a Chinese cook and became a member of the Order of the Cloud of Green Jade (now I realize the reason for being the cloud surrounding over a green, non-blue background).
If this were the original edition published in Beijing in 1925 it would be worth a small fortune, but even though it is a later phacosimilated edition of 1968, it has some value.
The book contains 243 recipes, including delicacies such as pork tendons with sauce, eight perfume meat dumplings, turtle stew and smoked pork languages. The shark fins recipe includes as an ingredient a pound (about half a kilo) of fish lips. There are also explanations about utensils and about the best way to sit downers at the table (always round).
But my copy contained yet another secret. Discounted between the cover and the guard leaf, I discovered a curious typewriter of a page titled ‘The Syndrome of the Chinese Restaurants’. It begins: « American doctors have denounced this syndrome three months ago, which, since its appearance, has raised an abundant literature that is rather than them, from Hawaii to London and from Paris to Honolulu without saving any race. »
The cast of symptoms follows. From the visas there were serious situations: « Medical newspapers report states of cerebral thrombosis that manifested themselves a few hours after the individual had a Chinese meal. » After mentioning that « a Chinese fish that may contain a neurotoxin », ends inconclusively: « The intake is still open … ».
The similarities with the report of a crime jump in sight. Who will be the culprit? The toxic fish? The soy sauce? Muscardine mushrooms?
Let’s face it that this typewriter does not constitute the ideal appetizer. And I was already released to prepare the turtle stew and the shark fins seasoned with fish lips.
