Julia nous écrit à nouveau de Pékin, âmes sensibles gouvernez vos sens !
Ah, I have only just discovered this traditional Beijing dish and I only wish I had known about it back in January when the cold had settled deep into my bones… It's offal soup! Or lu zhu huo shao (卤煮火烧）in Chinese. I buy it at the restaurant at the end of my road for 14 RMB (£1.40). Apparently every restaurant has a secret recipe, so I can't go into too much detail but… This is a list of all the bits of animal that they use in general in the kitchen, and I'm pretty sure I could identify most of them (with the possible exceptions of tail and knuckle) in the soup:
pig intestines
pig liver
pig stomach
pig ear
pig tail
pig heart
pig trotter
pig lung
pig knuckle
stewed tofu
The soup is, according to my research, cooked for ages and ages, and then a kind of 饼（bing － bread/pancake) is added right at the end to soak up the juices. A grumpy man with long fingernails then serves it up through a hole in a wall in either a small bowl or a big bowl, throwing in some coriander and garlic on the way out.
It's delicious. A woman next to me at my table was complaining to her slurping husband about the smell of the restaurant (a slightly acrid, oily offal smell) and eventually left to walk around the block while he finished his meal. I pitied her and her sensitive nose, and buried my chopsticks into the murky brownness once more. Her husband didn't even look up.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire