Thanksgiving Top Ten - #9 - 宫保鸡丁
As a foreigner in China you can find yourself in some culinarily challenging situations. Imagine that you are hungry, real hungry, and the only places to eat in the near vicinity are hole-in-the-wall restaurants. Since you are on foot, there are no other options (drive thru’s haven’t caught on in China, and it wouldn’t matter if they did because you don’t own a car). Your schedule dictates that you will not have another opportunity to eat for a long time so you decide to roll the dice and you pick the nearest dive for lunch. If this were a swankier joint then you would have an elaborate full color picture menu which you could flip through and point to a picture to indicate to your waiter that you want to eat that, but since this restaurant doesn’t even have a name or a front door then your menu is a (long time ago) laminated piece of paper with a lot of chinese characters and some numbers. You also have to realize that at this point in your adventure you have no language skills. You can’t just ask the waitress, “So what’s good here?”. You don’t even know how to say, “Give me something with pork in it,” so forget about telling her that you don’t want bones in it and not too spicy. You take one look at the menu and can see that the good news is that your meal will cost less than 3 USD but the bad news is that were it not for the numbers you wouldn’t even know if you were holding the menu right side up. This might sound like a scary and overwhelming situation, but you have no reason to fear. Don’t worry, you will not end up with chicken feet on your plate. You need not fear the potential of having some unidentifiable meat on your plate mixed with something that looks like some sort of vegetable. You are not scared because you know how to say 4 things in Chinese. 1) ni hao = hello. 2) xiexie = thank you. 3) cesuo zai nar? = where is the toilet? 4) gongbao jiding = palace insurance chicken (it could also be translated as ‘uterus protection chicken’, I’m not sure which one is correct).
In America you would probably call it kung pao chicken, in China it is 宫保鸡丁- gongbao jiding. The literal translation is a little bit fuzzy but everyone knows what you mean, and literally every restaurant in Beijing serves gongbao jiding. The main ingredients are chicken, onions, and peanuts, but they only tell half the story. The concoction of spices and seasonings are what put the gong in gongbao jiding. There are two kinds of spicy in chinese food. The first is what we call in chinese la, which you would call spicy. It is the red peppers in the gongbao jiding which make it spicy. There is another form of spicy in chinese food which we call ma, but which you would probably call numbing. The numbing effect is caused by little black pepper like balls (the first thing you do is attempt to separate all of these peppers from the rest of the food). It is a cruel sort of duel that one plays with the gongbao jiding where the ma spice adds the perfect amount of tingle to the mouth until one of the sneaky ma peppers is smuggled into your mouth while clinging on to the underside of a peanut and letting out a sinister cackle as your teeth bite down on him sending his venom mercilessly carpet bombing every nook and cranny of your mouth. Realizing at this point that rustic chinese dentists probably use these as a crude form of Novocain you smile and congratulate your nemesis with a “touche,” or a “well played my friend.” If you have vetted your gongbao jiding properly and thoroughly then you will get just the right amount of spice, but if you are careless...well it is a risk that one has to be willing to take. But as they say on Wall Street -high risk, high reward. The spicy oily goodness has the perfect texture of chicken, followed by the slightly crisp onion, finished off with the sublimely crunchy peanut. Combine these ideal bedfellows with the spices and by the time the gongbao jiding has worked its magic your mouth feels like a cool spring breeze.
As you pay your 15 RMB for your meal and move on to your appointment which prohibited you from finding a McDonald’s you realize that the hole-in-the-wall turned out to be a great choice. The surroundings were far from appetizing, you are glad you didn’t have to brave the bathroom, the service left room for improvement, and you were too cold to take your coat off. However, in that moment your heart is grateful, and you pause to offer a brief word of thanks to the Lord for gongbao jiding.
In America you would probably call it kung pao chicken, in China it is 宫保鸡丁- gongbao jiding. The literal translation is a little bit fuzzy but everyone knows what you mean, and literally every restaurant in Beijing serves gongbao jiding. The main ingredients are chicken, onions, and peanuts, but they only tell half the story. The concoction of spices and seasonings are what put the gong in gongbao jiding. There are two kinds of spicy in chinese food. The first is what we call in chinese la, which you would call spicy. It is the red peppers in the gongbao jiding which make it spicy. There is another form of spicy in chinese food which we call ma, but which you would probably call numbing. The numbing effect is caused by little black pepper like balls (the first thing you do is attempt to separate all of these peppers from the rest of the food). It is a cruel sort of duel that one plays with the gongbao jiding where the ma spice adds the perfect amount of tingle to the mouth until one of the sneaky ma peppers is smuggled into your mouth while clinging on to the underside of a peanut and letting out a sinister cackle as your teeth bite down on him sending his venom mercilessly carpet bombing every nook and cranny of your mouth. Realizing at this point that rustic chinese dentists probably use these as a crude form of Novocain you smile and congratulate your nemesis with a “touche,” or a “well played my friend.” If you have vetted your gongbao jiding properly and thoroughly then you will get just the right amount of spice, but if you are careless...well it is a risk that one has to be willing to take. But as they say on Wall Street -high risk, high reward. The spicy oily goodness has the perfect texture of chicken, followed by the slightly crisp onion, finished off with the sublimely crunchy peanut. Combine these ideal bedfellows with the spices and by the time the gongbao jiding has worked its magic your mouth feels like a cool spring breeze.
As you pay your 15 RMB for your meal and move on to your appointment which prohibited you from finding a McDonald’s you realize that the hole-in-the-wall turned out to be a great choice. The surroundings were far from appetizing, you are glad you didn’t have to brave the bathroom, the service left room for improvement, and you were too cold to take your coat off. However, in that moment your heart is grateful, and you pause to offer a brief word of thanks to the Lord for gongbao jiding.
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