I like the kitchen.
Everyone eats together and the cook is very friendly. His life’s mission seems to be to feed
people as much as he can in one sitting.
The food is basic but fine; breakfast is ‘zhou’ which is a very watery
kind of porridge with ‘man tou’ (steamed bread), tofu and some vegetables. Lunch is either noodle soup or baozi which
are very hearty steamed dumplings that everyone loves, and dinner is usually
more zhou, man tou, and vegetables, sometimes with tofu or meat.
However, if someone from Health and Safety came to inspect
the kitchen, it would be closed down. Immediately. Unwanted lung obstructions are routinely
hawked up and deposited on the floor, scraps of food are surreptitiously dropped
under stools, and the other evening there was a dish of fish guts and blood
right next to the basket of man tou. As
well as all the gore, there was some brown squidgy stuff, I’ll leave it to you
to visualise it as best you can! There
were also two bowls of bloody chunks of fish sitting on the freezer, heads,
tails and all. I tried to ignore these and positioned myself
so I wouldn’t have to look at anything bloody and fishy while I was
eating. I wasn’t worried about the fish
going off as the kitchen is as cold as your fridge, but I’m not a big fan of
fish and it was a safe bet that there was going to be a fishy feast in the next
couple of days.
June later told me that the bowl with the guts and blood
also contained fish eggs, this was the brown squidgy stuff that looked like
something else, and asked if I’d ever eaten them? No, I hadn’t, I said, that’s the sort of thing
my dad eats. She then told me that we
were going to eat the fish eggs (hooray!), and also a chicken that had just
been killed for lunch the next day.
Next lunchtime the
kitchen was full of activity. June had
cooked the fish eggs following a secret recipe. One of the students had cooked a chicken
stew, and the cook had made some tofu and scrambled eggs. I wasn’t overjoyed at the prospect of fish
eggs for lunch, but actually it wasn’t too bad. I wouldn’t eat it again out of choice, but it
was a lot nicer than I had anticipated.
The chicken stew I knew would be good because that student had cooked it
at New Year, so without looking I took a piece of meat and put it into my
bowl. When I looked down to wonder how
to neatly remove the meat off the bone with chopsticks, I realised that out of
all the bits of meat, mushroom and potato in that dish, I had picked up the
chicken’s head.
I wasn’t very happy about this so I looked out of the
window, then checked the bowl again. It
was definitely the head of the chicken, with its little eyes shut, and its
little beak closed. Feeling less hungry
than before, I picked at the rice around the head, trying not to look at
it. The thing that was really worrying
me was that someone might see the head in my bowl and ask why I wasn’t eating
it, don’t I like chicken heads? Or even
worse, tell me how lucky I was to have picked up the head, it being a delicacy
and all. I don’t know what I would have
done because there was no way I could have eaten it. Fortunately neither of
these things happened, and I was able to deposit the head into the waste bucket
where it floated on top of the icy, greasy sludge.
It’s quite interesting how Asians will cheerfully chomp away
at bits of animal we don’t want to see in the supermarket let alone on our
plates. There were chicken feet in the
stew as well, and on New Year’s Day we were served pig’s trotters which are
eaten for good luck. Apparently they
bring you money and are good for your skin.
Not enough of an incentive to make me want one! I can’t imagine there’s a lot of meat on a
chicken head though, or on chicken feet.
Maybe it’s just a waste-not-want-not mentality, maybe the locals of Chen
Jia Gou are less squeamish than me about what they eat. Either way, next time we get stew I’m going
to look very carefully at what I’m about to take from the pot!
