Fragrant Cooking Midnight
Simple Cooking ISSUE NO. 85 FIVE DOLLARS Cooking Midnight Uncooked, rice is called mai; cooked, it is fan. Once cooked, W rice was traditionally taken as food at least three times each day, first for jo chan, or early meal, either as congee or, if the weather was cool, cooked and served with a spoonful of liquid lard, soy sauce, and an egg. To eat rice is to sik fan, o and there is, in addition to those morning preparations, n’fan, or “afternoon rice,” and mon fan, or “evening rice.” There is even a custom called siu yeh, which translates K literally as “cooked midnight” and means rice eaten as a late evening snack. No time of any day in China is without its rice. —Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, THE CHINESE KITCHEN Fragrant LTHOUGH THERE’S NO EXACT EQUIVALENT, the closest we T WAS MY GRANDFATHER Who introduced me to the world come in this country to the casual everyday eat- of Chinese restaurants, at least as they were in the Aing experience of the Chinese is when we attend I1950s, beguilingly ersatz palaces spun of velvet and a country fair or something like one,where inexpensive, gold. As a teenager, I spent my summers with him, work- open-air food stalls abound and masses of people stroll ing at odd jobs at his apartment house in the daytime about, sampling from them as they go. Food courts aren’t and otherwise generally hanging around with him when really the same, because you go to these to eat, you buy I wasn’t off somewhere by myself.
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