The modern kitchen is equipped with appliances of all shapes and sizes. One might hold up up a gadget and have no idea what it’s used for even after a long guess.
Dishwashers, dryers, ovens, microwaves, refrigerators… These necessities are designed to certain specifications. With condo units and residences handed over at the same time, house interiors generally look the same and kitchen layouts are pretty standard as well.
I love the sight of pretty pots lining up on a clean, stainless steel wall. They look bright and shiny, like works of art.
“This is how a kitchen should look!” I would exclaim.
Recently, I visited my friend’s new home. Being obsessed with Italian and Tuscan architecture, she naturally traded modular prefabricated kitchen units for a set of classic state-of-the-art Officine Gullo kitchenware from Florence.
After hearing her boast about her new home several times in the year that she has lived there, I was finally invited over.
“Wow, this looks spectacular,” I said.
Her top-of-the-range cooker hob and tops were from Officine Gullo’s pastel blue series and of a shade resembling the gently bobbing Mediterranean Sea in Italian artist Sandro Botticelli’s masterpiece, The Birth of Venus. Hanging from the rack on the silver-grey backsplash were a dozen brass pots of different sizes.
“This is so beautiful!” I sincerely thanked her for the chance to marvel at such exquisite objects.
“These brass pots can be used to make pumpkin soup…”
“This shallow pan is perfect for making pancakes…”
I said a lot, but my friend did not seem to want to cook.
“Let’s go out to eat!”
“Ah, but you have such an awesome array of pots and pans, I would really like it if we cooked a meal ourselves…”
She did not respond, but furiously scrubbed the stove’s protective plastic film with a cloth.
... home is where there’s a fire burning in the kitchen and people in the house.
“You’ve not cooked in this kitchen yet?” I asked.
“No, I can’t bear to do so.”
“Hmm…” I looked around at the kitchen which could have fitted in at the Palace of Versailles and understood her reluctance to tear open a beautifully wrapped present.
“Don’t think about it and just start cooking today,” I said. “Otherwise, your kitchen will be left like this.”
I removed the protective plastic film before she could reply, and heard a gut-wrenching scream.
Looking at the plastic film in my hands, she said helplessly, “I only have frozen dumplings in the refrigerator.”
I gritted my teeth and said, “Okay, let’s cook them.”
Home is where the hearth is
I thought about what Mother used to say: home is where there’s a fire burning in the kitchen and people in the house.
The Chinese character for “home” (家 jia) is a pictogram of “pigs” (猪 zhu) reared under one roof. We lived at Dalongdong when I was little and every household had pigs. Of course, there wouldn’t have been pigsties at the Palace of Versailles.
There was once a queen of Versailles who decided not to stay in the palace as she was tired of all the court etiquette she had to abide by. Instead she lived in a chateau on the estate, The Petit Trianon, which was still pretty grand. I think there were some vegetable gardens, but I’m not sure if they reared pigs.
The frozen dumplings swirled around the pot, bobbing up and down like the flowers floating in the air in The Birth of Venus. It was a pretty sight. I thought of The Petit Trianon. In the end, the queen who sought solace in the woods could not escape her fate and was beheaded at the guillotine during the Revolution.
I told my friend where to get better frozen dumplings, pointing out that meat filling wrapped in freshly kneaded dumpling wrappers were less salty, and it was better to use “warm-body pork”. I explained, “Although it is still a corpse, it doesn’t taste that much like a corpse when you chew it.”
I suddenly thought of Mother’s kitchen.
“Mother’s kitchen was so simple…” I said to myself.
It was as if from the Palace of Versailles, I was suddenly transported to the kitchen of an ordinary home in Taiwan in the 1960s. There was a large earthen stove, a cast iron cauldron, and a ladle fashioned from a halved bottle gourd.
Later as times advanced, there came strainers woven from mesh wire or bamboo, or simply improvised from chiselling holes through an iron ladle. These came in handy for dishing noodles and dumplings, boiling vermicelli rice noodles or blanching vegetables.
Each knife blade was as beautiful and smooth as Sleeping Beauty’s neck before she was awakened.
“What's on your mind?” My friend interrupted my thoughts.
“I’m thinking about my mother’s kitchen.”
“Ah, you’re so outdated.”
“I’m thinking about the cleaver in Mother’s hand…”
“Really? Take a look at this…”
My friend suddenly opened a pastel blue drawer in her Palace of Versailles kitchen. Out came a drawer of nearly 20 kitchen knives of different shapes and sizes. Each knife blade was as beautiful and smooth as Sleeping Beauty’s neck before she was awakened.
“Wow,” I exclaimed. I picked them up one by one, eager to test them on a neck or some fingers.
In martial arts or wuxia novels, there is the description of the yuchang jian (鱼肠剑, a sword famously hidden in a fish belly used to assassinate Liao, the King of Wu) or that of the pliable, lightweight and nimble Burmese knife. Resembling a sci-fi weapon, it could be wrapped around one's waist. Once unsheathed, its gleaming blade revealed itself but not a drop of blood would be spilled. The target, seemingly unscathed, would drop to the ground moments later, split in half.
Whenever he raised his knife to split the sugarcane, the woman’s half-a-breast would jiggle along with his chest muscles as the sugarcane fell to the ground.
When I was little, I used to watch sugarcane-cutting competitions outside the temple. The stalk of sugarcane was held upright and supported by the dull side of the knife. With a big shout from the contestants, the blade of the knife swiftly fell down, splitting the sugarcane in half. What amazing skills!
In my childhood, the open space outside the temple was actually a different Palace of Versailles where legends were told.
The stories were incredible but the protagonists were rough-and-tumble characters. There was a dishevelled man with mucus dripping out of his nose. He was bare-chested and had an image of a woman tattooed on his chest. Maybe he didn't have enough money to complete the job; the woman only had half a breast. Whenever he raised his knife to split the sugarcane, the woman’s half-a-breast would jiggle along with his chest muscles as the sugarcane fell to the ground. When he was done, the man simply put away his knife, heaved the pile of sugarcane onto his shoulder and left.
I stared at his knife as he walked away. It was black and heavy, and looked nothing like the yuchang jian in the novels. It certainly looked more like Mother’s kitchen cleaver.
Whenever there was a spare moment, Mother would sharpen the knife with her whetstone so it was always bright and shiny, unlike the blackened sugarcane knife.
Back in my friend’s Palace of Versailles kitchen, I picked up each of the knives and admired them, asking my friend what they were used for.
Nine out of ten times, she shook her head and said she didn't know.
A study of knives
There must be a specific purpose for each knife since there were so many types. I made a mental note to study the instruction manual when I had time.
In fact, it wouldn’t be enough just to read up on them — one had to actually use them to understand their functions and the exquisite dishes they’re capable of producing.
I told her, “You should spend more time in the kitchen.”
In the face of Palace of Versailles luxury, have we lost confidence in our simple and ordinary life?
But I immediately chided myself for expecting too much of her. I knew she was a busy lady. On Tuesday and Thursday nights, she had pilates lessons with a personal trainer; on Wednesday and Friday nights, she had ballroom dance lessons; on Saturdays and Sundays, she went for wine tasting lessons and book club meetings… and this was only a fraction of her schedule I was aware of. I took another look around the Palace of Versailles kitchen and told myself that grandeur was not designed for the ordinary man anyway.
Without living in the Palace of Versailles and the Petit Trianon, can people understand the blessing of living an ordinary and simple life like Mother’s?
Why was Mother’s kitchen so simple? Or even rather “plain and crude”?
In the face of Palace of Versailles luxury, have we lost confidence in our simple and ordinary life?
The grand life we dream of is to have a magnificent kitchen like the one in the Palace of Versailles, and to open a drawerful of exquisite knives. Yet we don’t know what each knife is used for, we don’t have time to use them, and we only show them to our friends when they visit.
Labour of love and love of labour
Mother used to use a pair of chopsticks to beat eggs. She would heat some oil in a pan in the meantime, its pleasant aroma slowly emanating forth. Once small bubbles formed, the egg mixture was slowly poured into the hot pan, gradually puffing up and spreading out evenly to form an omelette (Mother called it danpi (蛋皮, something like an egg crepe)). After it cooled down, Mother would roll it and use her cleaver to slice it into thin golden threads. Mother liked to add these to dumplings and cold vegetable dishes for added flavour and aroma.
Once, I bought Mother an egg whisk, but she only used it once saying it was “not good”. She preferred her pair of chopsticks.
Businessmen come up with new products to satisfy the need for tools to be upgraded and to earn the consumer dollar. They rack their brains on how to turn the kitchen into a brilliant Palace of Versailles. But alas, not everyone knows how to use these tools.
Mother used her pair of chopsticks all her life, possibly hindering market production and consumption, and very possibly progress.
Is that electric whisk really no match for a pair of chopsticks? This was a question we soon did not dare ask.
I enjoyed eating taro when I was little, but not those big Lipu taros (or areca taro 槟榔芋), which were too coarse for my liking. I loved the tiny ones which were soft and fragrant. Mother only added some chopped green onions and a little oil to her roasted taro with green onion dish, preserving the original taste of the sweet and tender taro.
But it is cumbersome to remove taro skin — they make your hands itch. Mother said, “Peel the skin yourself if you want to eat it.”
So, I often sat at a corner of the kitchen on a small stool, with a bowl of tiny taros in front of me. My tool was a flat iron spoon — the ones you use to eat fish ball soup at a roadside stall — it is thin, and can be used to scrape the skin off the taro. I tried many other new types of peelers, but none of them worked better than that iron spoon.
After peeling taro skin for a long time, I learnt that my skin wouldn’t itch if it didn’t come into contact with water.
I guess the biggest regret of living in a Palace of Versailles must be that we don’t need to use our hands anymore. If we don’t use our hands, how do we know the value of our existence?
The kitchen teaches you many things. Holding a small taro in your hands — some are even smaller than a chicken egg — you will learn that you can’t peel the skin with too much or too little force. You have to find that sweet spot. Looking at my hands after I’ve peeled the entire bowl of taros myself really gave me a sense of achievement.
I guess the biggest regret of living in a Palace of Versailles must be that we don’t need to use our hands anymore. If we don’t use our hands, how do we know the value of our existence?
I thank Mother’s kitchen for allowing me to experience the different smells, textures, temperatures, and also colours and shapes that cannot be put into words. I thank Mother’s ordinary cleaver — so plain and simple — for making so many extraordinary dishes.
After I returned home from my friend’s place, I wanted to expel every last bit of yearning for the Palace of Versailles in my mind. I focused on remembering Mother’s kitchen, and especially her cleaver.
Wonders of Mother’s kitchen
I guess you can find a cleaver in every traditional Chinese kitchen. It's difficult to understand just how amazing it is if you’ve not used it before.
I was often by Mother’s side in the kitchen and was well acquainted with her cleaver. It was rectangular-shaped, about a palm size in length and about four fingers wide. It always felt a little heavy in my hands.
But it was as light as a feather in Mother’s hand.
I loved watching her slice (片 pian) firm tofu with the knife.
The verb pian (片) is rarely used nowadays.
You won’t be able to shred tofu or draw paintings like Li Gonglin if your breathing is uneven. Drawing and cooking must be done with a calm and stable mind.
Pressed down with one hand, the firm tofu is sliced down its cross-section very thinly. The downward pressure exerted on the left hand has to do a delicate dance with each cut of the cleaver on the right hand to achieve perfectly thin tofu slices. Six or seven paper-thin tofu slices can be cut from a piece of firm tofu. These slices are then stacked and further cut into fine strips.
It felt like I was watching exquisite and beautiful handiwork in progress.
Later when I watched art students practise line drawing by copying Song dynasty painter Li Gonglin’s Five Horses (五马图), especially the part where they drew the fine strands of hair on the horse’s mane, I am always reminded of the shredded tofu that Mother sliced with her cleaver knife.
You won’t be able to shred tofu or draw paintings like Li Gonglin if your breathing is uneven. Drawing and cooking must be done with a calm and stable mind. Whenever I see practice paintings that are messy and frazzled, I always think it would be a good idea for their maker to go into the kitchen and practise basic knife skills first.
The modern kitchen is equipped with tools that make it easy to slice ingredients or prepare various dishes.
However, handmade shredded tofu is different — it has a different texture and flavour.
If you’ve never eaten handmade shredded tofu, you won’t be able to tell the difference, just like you can’t tell the difference between machine-made and handmade noodles. If you can’t tell the difference, it would be difficult to understand the brilliance of Li Gonglin’s Five Horses painting as well.
Handmade goodness
I am impressed by two handmade products in Taipei. The first one is finely shredded tofu, sliced by hand and tossed in a little soy sauce. They’re absolutely divine.
The second one is noodles made at Ju Yue Ting (掬月亭), a little Japanese restaurant in Xinbeitou. The head chef’s shirataki (konjac yam) noodles are absolutely delightful as well. The konjac yam is first sliced into paper-thin translucent slices and then cut into hair-thin threads. It is then tossed in a mix of a little mustard, finely chopped green onions, and bonito soy sauce. This dish is not on the menu — the head chef only makes it occasionally when he is free.
Knife skills are the foundation of every professional chef. Kitchen assistants spend years honing their knife skills. It is a little like Leonardo da Vinci, who started off as an apprentice at his teacher’s workshop, and then slowly honed his skills from washing paint brushes, applying the background, drawing an outline, and applying colour. Three years later, he painted an angel in the corner of his teacher’s painting. When people go to Florence today to look at that painting, they only focus on that tiny corner.
Staring at that corner, you will know that this person is capable of slicing konjac yam noodles or firm tofu as thin as hair.
Mother’s cleaver was so amazing that it could cut such thin shreds of tofu, as Du Liniang, a fictional character from Tang Xianzu’s play The Peony Pavilion, sang when she fell in love: “A delicate silk thread (qingsi 晴丝, silk thread spun by insects, is a homonym of 情丝, threads of love) blown into the garden, and spring (chun 春, meaning either spring or longing) ripples like a thread in the wind."
Strangely, the cleaver could fly into a rage like a “monster” in an instant, bearing down on ginger and garlic on the chopping board, like the Green Dragon Crescent Blade (青龙偃月刀) in the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, ever ready to decapitate the enemy.
When Mother was in the kitchen, she was sometimes like Du Liniang and at other times like Huang Tianba.
Mother told me the stories about Investiture of the Gods, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and The Three Heroes and Five Gallants while she cooked, making each cut and slice of her cleaver clean and swift. She was never wishy-washy.
The swift motions of crushing ginger and garlic would not be something that Du Liniang could do. One would need someone like Huang Tianba (Wong Tin Bar 黄天霸), a fictional character in Chinese Sherlock Shi (《施公案》).
When Mother was in the kitchen, she was sometimes like Du Liniang and at other times like Huang Tianba.
I loved watching her crush garlic, ginger and cucumber — in two, three smashes, the ingredients looked fine but they were all broken up inside. I tried crushing them once, imitating Mother’s “Huang Tianba” stance and aggressively smashing my “victims”. The ginger and garlic flew and its minced bits landed everywhere on the floor. It took me such a long time to find every last bit while crawling on all fours.
Mother burst out laughing, telling me that I should use “inner force” (内力), not brute force.
I was reminded of martial arts novels again. The masters always used neigong (内功) on their opponents. The latter would seem alright on the surface but their intestines and organs would be damaged.
The deft dance of smashing, chopping and grinding ingredients
Later on, I slowly realised that I could use some neigong of my own to crush garlic and ginger. After my calculated blows, the ginger and garlic seemed unchanged but their juices within would ooze out, emanating a fiery and pungent smell. If ginger and garlic are not smashed but merely chopped, their juices would not be released.
Mother often prepared noodle dishes, wrapped dumplings and baozis, and made savoury pocket pies (菜盒子) — all of which requires chopped meat.
Before meat grinders were invented, meat was minced on the chopping board with a knife. After meat grinders came into existence, I got lazy and dumped my meat in it directly. But I soon realised that there was a difference between machine-grinded and hand-chopped minced meat.
Chopping meat is a basic skill in making lion’s head meatballs. After the meat is sliced into fine strips, it is chopped (剁 duo), which uses the weight of the knife — a little like crushing garlic — to break up the muscle fibres of the meat. Muscle fibres must be chopped and flipped over repeatedly so that the meat filling becomes tender.
Mother added diced water chestnuts and tofu into her lion’s head meatballs and steamed them before adding them into boiled cabbage soup. Bobbing on the surface, the meatballs were tender, flavourful, soft and not oily. This is a dish that requires a certain amount of skill. It combines both knife skills and heat control; you can’t rush it or make a huge fuss about it. Restaurants can hardly pay such attention to detail, and so I haven’t had lion’s head meatballs outside for a long time.
If we trust too much in the advancement that tools can bring, are we neglecting what our hands are actually capable of doing?
The verb duo (剁) is also rarely used nowadays. Meat fillings and shredded tofu are no longer chopped and sliced respectively because we have machines now. The Palace of Versailles is always improving but people are no longer skilful with their hands.
I am amazed by the wide array of knives in the kitchen of the Palace of Versailles, but Mother’s cleaver knife seems to work better than ten of them combined.
If we trust too much in the advancement that tools can bring, are we neglecting what our hands are actually capable of doing?
Shaping and plating
I learnt a lot from being in the kitchen with Mother. I am not as dexterous as Mother, but I am still able to plate my own braised beef shank — fall-off-the-bone tender, translucent and finely sliced — into the shape of a flower owing to a lot of practice.
Mother’s cleaver really comes in handy. When I went to Paris, I didn’t carry this type of knife with me and could not slice firm tofu or chop meat. After cutting vegetables, I couldn’t use the flat side of the blade to scoop them up like a shovel either. That was when I realised how versatile this knife is.
Yet, it is still Mother’s knife skills that I dearly miss. In that plain kitchen of hers, Mother held her cleaver knife and prepared brilliant dishes of every kind.
Mother actually didn’t care too much about knife skills, although she often said this was basic in order to help out in the kitchen. Mother instead focused on heat control (火候) and said mastering this required time. If one could not comprehend time, s/he would never control the flame well.
Heat control goes beyond cooking and transcends into the realm of literature and the arts as well. The term is often used in how we conduct ourselves and do things. It is about understanding the right balance in things and making appropriate decisions. It is about not being too subservient nor too aggressive. It takes a long time of trial and error before we reach perfection.
Yet, it is still Mother’s knife skills that I dearly miss. In that plain kitchen of hers, Mother held her cleaver knife and prepared brilliant dishes of every kind.
In that era, roundness (圆) was important, especially during the Lunar New Year festivities, because roundness symbolises “perfection” (圆满). It is only logical that lion’s head meatballs are round, pearl meatballs are round, glutinous rice balls are round… I witnessed this unbelievable obsession with the round when I watched Mother cut radish into pieces with her cleaver knife before using a small fruit knife to shape it into a sphere.
Honing skills with time
The small fruit knife can also be used to make cucumber roll-ups: first cut the cucumber into pieces roughly the length of a thumb, place it horizontally, and start slicing the cucumber from its outer skin while rotating it, making it into ribbons. Discard the seeded centre, and soak in a mixture of vinegar, soy sauce, sugar and sesame oil. This is the recipe for making cold cucumber roll ups in the Yangtze River and Zhejiang regions. It is made purely by hand — if they are not dexterous enough, the ribbon breaks as soon as you start slicing and rotating the cucumber.
Because I was always in the kitchen, I was naturally Mother’s little helper. Till today, I remain very interested in cooking. I’ve cooked on occasion with my students, who were all eager to help. As I was busy pan-frying fish, I pointed at the radish on the table and told one of my students, “Cut it into gun dao kuai (滚刀, lit. roll knife pieces) for me.”
Shokunin is not something that can be proven by words alone — it needs to be honed and sharpened over time.
After saying that, I saw that he was staring blankly back at me with a knife in his hand, not knowing what to do. I then realised that gun dao kuai (which can either be 滚刀块 "roll knife pieces" or 滚刀快 "roll knife quick"), was a term Mother and I used when we were in the kitchen.
Mother used to roll radish and cut it quickly at the same time, making radish pieces that were of the same size and rhombic pyramid-shaped so that they could be cooked evenly. This effect can only be achieved with a cleaver, not a Western knife. A swift slicing speed is a skill accumulated over a long time, when one becomes a shokunin (artisan, or a skilled craft worker), a term that the younger generation adopted from Japan.
Shokunin is not something that can be proven by words alone — it needs to be honed and sharpened over time.
The student who stared blankly at me in the kitchen studied architecture. He later practised gun dao kuai diligently, and told me that it was very helpful for basic designing.
Make peace, not war
Later on, when it was time to change her cleaver, Mother received a new one — in 1958 during the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis, Kinmen accidentally produced steel knives made out of Chinese artillery shells.
People who loved their families took good care of their stoves. They hated war and detested people who advocated war.
I think the factory was called Chin Ho Li. It spearheaded the development of Kinmen’s artillery shell-turned-specialty knife industry because of the bombing mission on 23 August 1958. Friends and relatives would bring the knives back as souvenirs whenever they visited Kinmen. One artillery shell could produce up to 60 knives, somewhat like an unexpected blessing from the tragedy of war.
Mother was pensive when she received such a gift. She had been frightened by war, escaping from them for the first half of her life and fighting to protect her six children at all costs. She always felt that war was a terrifying thing that could take happiness away at any moment. People who loved their families took good care of their stoves. They hated war and detested people who advocated war.
She placed the steel knife in a drawer, and never took it out to use.
This article was first published in Chinese on United Daily News as “五行九宮蔬食6 (上) and 五行九宮蔬食6（下）”.
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