It is my turn at the wok. My classmates leer over me, ready for a laugh. Every afternoon, we cook in the same teams of ten, gathered round a table, with two gas burners, a couple of woks, a chopping board and a few bowls and plates at our disposal. None of my particular friends are in my team, so I am obliged to work with nine young men who make strenuous efforts to avoid talking to me, and who are openly sceptical about the idea of a foreign woman becoming a Sichuanese chef. It is tedious, really. I have to fight to participate when we divide up the tasks, or else I find they all scarper to the store cupboards and the sinks without me. And I have to draw on all my reserves of bossy older sisterliness to engage them in the most trivial conversation. But, as always, the cooking itself makes me so sweetly happy that I don’t really care about these inconveniences.
该轮到我上锅操作了。同学们斜眼看着我，准备大笑一番。每天下午，我们都按照固定的十人组一起做饭，围着一张桌子、两只煤气炉、几口锅、一块菜板和几个碗盘。和我同组的都不算朋友，九个小伙子，特别努力地躲着我、不跟我说话，而且对一个外国女人能成为川菜厨师这件事表示了公开质疑。但我被分到了这个组，只能硬着头皮跟他们合作，真的很烦。分工的时候我必须尽力争取积极参与，否则还没回过神来，他们就抛下我逃到碗柜和水槽边去了。我还得调动自己身上所有霸气与亲切并存的“大姐大”气质，尽量跟他们聊聊闲天儿。不过，和往常一样，下厨本身让我内心洋溢着甜蜜的幸福，所以这些不便都只是小事。
I flick on the gas tap and light the burner, ladle some oil into the blackened wok. My teammates smirk, and someone makes a witty remark under his breath in Sichuanese dialect which I don’t understand. I just ignore him, and concentrate on the cooking. I have prepped my ingredients already: the snaking strands of pork, marinated in salt, soy sauce, Shaoxing wine and wet pea-starch; the ribbons of cloud-ear fungus; the pale-green slivers of lettuce stem; the pickled chilli paste; the garlic, spring onion and ginger. These are the ingredients of fish-fragrant pork, one of the most famous of all Sichuanese dishes.
我扭了下煤气灶的旋钮，开了火，拿长柄勺舀了些油，倒进那口黑乎乎的锅里。我的队友们傻笑起来，有人压着声音用四川话说了句什么俏皮话儿，我没听懂，也不理他，就全心全意地做菜。食材我已经提前准备好了：猪肉切丝，用盐、酱油、料酒和水豆粉腌制；配料有木耳、莴笋、泡椒末、葱、姜、蒜。这就是鱼香肉丝这道川系名菜的材料了。
When the oil is hot, I tip in the pork and stir-fry briskly as the slivers separate and whiten. Then I tilt the wok, so the oil pools at the side, directly over the flame, and add the pickled chilli paste, which stains the oil a deep, rich orange. I scatter in the ginger and garlic, stirring as they release their punchy fragrances, add the vegetables, mix everything together. Finally, I pour in the sauce, a mixture of sugar, soy sauce and vinegar, with a little starch to make it thicken and cling. Seconds later, the dish is finished, and I ladle it neatly onto a small oval plate. It has turned out rather well. The lazy strands of pork are tender and glossy, entwined with the dark fungus and the green lettuce. The red oil pools prettily around the edges of the dish, and it smells extraordinarily good. My classmates are disappointed by my success, and I feel extremely smug. Ha!
油烧热了，我把猪肉入锅，迅速翻炒，炒到肉丝相互分离变白。接着我把锅倾斜，肉丝拨到一边。泡椒末加入锅底的油里炒，整个锅里呈现出深浓的橙色。继续倒入姜蒜翻炒，浓郁的香味扑鼻而来。再加入配菜，所有东西翻炒均匀。最后，把提前准备好的糖、酱油、醋、水豆粉调和的酱料倒进去，勾芡收汁。数秒以后，菜炒好了。我手脚利落地把锅中物盛入一只椭圆盘中，样子看着很不错：肉丝慵懒地与黑木耳和绿莴笋缠绕在一起，发出柔软的光泽；菜的周围溢出诱人的红油，味道闻着那叫个香啊！围观的同学好像对我的成功相当失望，我却得意得很。哈！
We all take turns to cook amid the jostling, subversive crowd. The boys are merciless in their criticism of each other, and of me. If anything goes wrong, they jeer and giggle. Every failure is jubilantly ridiculed. ‘Too much oil!’ ‘It’s all dried out!’ ‘The sauce has gone all sticky!’ ‘You stupid melon! (sha gua)’ As each of us finishes, we troop off to the side of the room, where Teacher Lu is ready to assess our efforts. He sits there with his usual benign smile, but is precise in his criticisms. He ticks us off for careless or irregular cutting: ‘Bu hao kan! (unattractive!) You’ve got thin slivers, thick slivers and chopstick strips, all mixed up together!’ He can tell from the smell of the dish and the texture of the pork if the oil temperature was too hot or too cool, and he will taste to see how skilfully we have balanced the flavours. Today, he approves of my fish-fragrant pork. ‘Bu cuo bu cuo (not bad, not bad),’ he says.
我们这一群你争我夺的“危险分子”轮流上锅操作。男生互相批评起来真是毫不留情，对我也是一样。只要出了一点儿差错，他们就傻笑着起哄。一个小错儿都能引起他们欢天喜地的嘲笑。“油放多了！”“都烧干了！”“汁收得太稠了！”“你个傻儿（1）！”都完成了，我们就排队走到教室的一边，吕老师正等着评判我们的作品。他坐在那儿，脸上一如既往地挂着和蔼的微笑，但开口批评却一针见血。粗心或者参差不齐的刀工逃不过他的眼睛：“不好看！你这些细丝、粗丝、筷子条都混起来了！”拿起一盘菜闻一闻，观察一下猪肉的质地，他就知道油温是高了还是低了；再尝一尝，就能知道我们平衡各种味道的技巧到哪一步了。今天，他很认可我的鱼香肉丝。“不错不错。”他说。【注：（1）傻儿，四川方言，即“傻瓜”，音为“哈（三声）儿”。】
Everything we made at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine was cooked from scratch. We had only rudimentary equipment: there were no mincing machines or food processors to save us time. If we were making pork balls, we had to pound the meat to a paste with the backs of our cleavers, teasing out with our fingertips every wisp of sinew. Eggwhites were whisked on a plate, with a pair of chopsticks. If we were using walnuts, we had to crack them open, soak them and then, laboriously, peel off their skins. (‘Sichuanese cookery is so ma fan, so much trouble,’ moaned one of my classmates, coaxing reluctant shreds of skin from a walnut kernel, dismayed at the prospect of a lifetime performing such tasks.) Some of the ingredients were still alive when we got them. We scrambled competitively to be first to collect our team’s allocation of, say, thirty glinting crucian carp, which we had to clean in the sinks on the balcony, ripping their gills out and slitting their bellies as they jumped and twitched in our hands.
我们在四川烹饪高等专科学校做的每一道菜，都是从最原始的形态开始。下厨装备也都很初级、很简陋：没什么绞肉机或者食物处理机帮我们节省时间。想做猪肉圆子的话，就拿刀背把猪肉剁成泥，拿手指尖把每一根肉筋细细地挑出来。蛋清就放在一个盘子里，拿筷子搅匀至起白沫。菜里要用到核桃仁，就得自己把核桃砸开，浸泡之后艰难地剥掉薄薄的核桃皮。（“川菜简直麻烦。”一个同学一边抱怨，一边把核桃仁外皮给一点点弄下来。想到有可能一辈子都要做这样的苦活，他一脸的灰心丧气。）有些食材到我们手里还是活的。我们争先恐后去抢着挑的，可能是三十条闪着鳞光的鲫鱼，必须要去阳台上把鳞片刮下来，掏出鱼鳃和内脏，把鱼肚挖出来，而它们就一直在我们手里乱跳狂扭。
Unfortunately we are not allowed to eat what we cook, though we may taste it. The finished dishes are bagged up and sold from a table at the school gates to people in the neighbourhood. They are brave, these guinea pigs, because it’s such a lottery: one day they might end up with an appetising supper, another day some ghastly, oversalted, stodgy mess. Reluctantly, I hand over my dish in its haze of delicious aromas, and go back to watch my classmates run the gauntlet of their peers.
可惜了，我们炒出来的菜，尝尝可以，但是不准多吃。做好的菜要包起来，摆在校门口一张桌子上，卖给住在附近的人。这些“小白鼠”可真是勇敢，因为这就跟买彩票一模一样的：今天可能晚餐桌上摆了道美味佳肴，明天可能就咸得难以下咽，或者调味一塌糊涂。我不情不愿地上交了我那道香喷喷的菜，回去继续观摩同学们瓢盆铲勺中的刀光剑影。
Life in Chengdu in the mid-nineties appealed to this old longing of mine for the fundamentals of cookery. There were no shortcuts. Centuries-old methods of food preservation were used in most households. On sunny days, the backstreets were hung with cabbage leaves, which had to be half-dried before they could be rubbed with salt and spices and packed into jars to ferment. There were coils of drying tangerine peel on everyone’s windowsills. And as the Chinese New Year approached, people started to smoke bacon and make sausages, hanging them out to wind-dry under the eaves.
九十年代中期的成都生活接近我多年的夙愿：回归到烹饪的基本，没有捷径，无法偷懒。很多人家都还在使用有几百年历史的方法来储存食物。响晴的天气，小街小巷的住家挂满了青菜叶，要晒得半干才能取下来，揉进盐和香料，放进密封好的罐子里发酵。家家户户的窗棂上都摆着陈皮。临近春节的时候，人们开始腌腊肉、做香肠，挂在屋檐下风干。
As a child, my dream was to live in a cottage in the country, doing everything by hand. I wanted to grow my own vegetables, rear chickens, bake bread, make jam. Growing up, I was moved by the beauty of raw things, the silvery gleam of a fish in my hands, pink juices flowing from a cut beetroot. I enjoyed the kind of basic kitchen jobs that might seem boring to anybody else, like picking over a trayful of rice for stones, or topping and tailing green beans. Teenaged, I learned how to pluck and clean pheasants, and I made my own pastry and mayonnaise by hand. My family mocked me. ‘When you grow up, you’ll have machines to do everything. It’s just a fantasy.’ (I think I have the last laugh: years later, I still live without a television, a dishwasher or a microwave, and I still pluck pheasants and make pastry and mayonnaise by hand.)
小时候，我梦想着有一天能住在乡下的农庄，什么都亲手来做。我想自己种菜、自己养鸡、自己烤面包、自己做果酱。长大的过程中，我被生鲜的美深深打动：手中闪着银光的鱼、切开的甜菜根流下的粉色汁水。厨房与水槽里，别人看着无聊的琐碎活路，我却特别喜欢做。比如拣米（2）择菜什么的。十几岁的时候，我学会了给野鸡拔毛、处理肉皮；点心面皮和蛋黄酱也是亲手制作。家人都爱开我玩笑：“长大了，你就会买各种机器来做所有的事情了，真是想想就美啊。”（我想我笑到了最后：多年以后，我仍然没有电视、洗碗机、微波炉。我还是会给野鸡拔毛、处理肉皮，亲手做点心面皮和蛋黄酱。）【注：（2）作者小时候从印度商店买米，有时候米中还会掺些小石子，所以人们把米放在托盘里，看到有小石子就挑出来。拣米是一种独特的时代现象。】
There was only one thing that jarred for me in this prelapsarian world of cooking, and that was the use of monosodium glutamate, or MSG. Like most Westerners, I saw MSG as a nasty artificial additive, used only in junk food and trashy takeaways. In England, you never find MSG in a domestic kitchen, and it would be a public scandal if it was discovered in the store cupboard of a serious restaurant. Yet in China, every kitchen has its jar of MSG, tucked away amid the soy sauces and vinegars. Top chefs use it in their most acclaimed dishes, and it is treated as a normal seasoning at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine, the nation’s top school for chefs. The Chinese even call this white powder wei jing, ‘the essence of taste’, and translate it into English as ‘gourmet powder’ (jing itself means not only ‘essence’, but also, among other things, ‘refined, perfect, meticulous, clever, skilled, energy, spirit and sperm’, which gives you some idea of what a wonderful word it is). There is no shame, in China, in using MSG.
在这个原始纯粹的烹饪世界，只有一件事让我震动和惶恐，就是使用味精。我和大多数西方人一样，觉得味精是糟糕的人造添加剂，只有垃圾食品和毫无营养的外卖中才会使用。英国人家的厨房里是不可能有味精的；要是某家还算像样的餐厅橱柜里发现了味精，那就是厨界丑闻了。然而，中国的每家厨房里都有一罐味精，和酱油、醋放在一起。顶级大厨会在自己的拿手菜中放味精。在四川烹饪高等专科学校，全国最棒的厨师学校，味精也被当作最平常不过的调味料。听听这中文名字，“味精”，味道的精华（而且“精”还可以解释为精美、精细、精明、精湛、精神、精液……你看看，这是个多好的字）。在中国，用味精完全不需要脸红心跳。
At the cooking school, the pickles we used in our recipes were made in the traditional manner. There was a storeroom where waist-high clay jars lurked in a constant twilight. We lifted the inverted bowls that covered their mouths, and reached into the glowing scarlet of pickled chillies in brine, plucking them out with our chopsticks. When we wanted to lend a rich brown colour to a stew, we caramelised our own sugar in oil. There were no ready-made sauces, except for the slowly fermented chilli bean paste; we mixed them ourselves from the essential seasonings: sugar, vinegar, soy sauce and sesame paste in various combinations. I loved the alchemy of it, conjuring such basic elements into gold, my only tools a knife, a ladle, a board and a wok.
在烹饪学校，菜谱里用的泡菜是用传统方法制作的。学校有个储藏室，总是光线幽暗，其中“潜伏”着很多齐腰高的陶坛。抬起倒盖着坛口的大碗，把筷子伸进盐水中那层鲜红发光的泡椒，把泡菜挑出来。烧菜的时候想要增添醇厚的棕色，我们会用油炒糖，变成焦焦的样子。除了慢慢发酵腌制的豆瓣酱之外，再没什么现成的酱料了。我们用最本原的调味料自己来混搭：糖、醋、酱油和芝麻酱，很多种排列组合。我热爱这其中的魔力，仿佛把最基础的元素炼成了闪闪发光的黄金，而手头的工具只有一把菜刀、一把大杓、一个菜板和一口炒锅。
MSG is not a traditional ingredient in Chinese cookery. It was discovered in 1908 by the Japanese scientist, Kikunae Ikeda, who was intrigued by the intensely delicious taste of the broth made from kombu seaweed. In his laboratory, he managed to isolate its source, glutamates in the seaweed, and to their wonderful taste he gave the name umami, derived from the Japanese word for ‘delicious’. His findings led directly to the industrial manufacture in Japan, and then worldwide, of MSG.
味精并非中厨里的传统调味料，其发明者是日本科学家池田菊苗。他从一碗海带汤异常鲜美的味道中得到灵感，在实验室提纯了海带里的呈味物质，并把这独特的味道称为“旨味”（相当于中文的“鲜味”）。他的发现直接引发了日本对味精的工业化制造生产，接着又扩展到全世界。
In the beginning, MSG was thought by scientists to be just a ‘flavour enhancer’, a substance with little taste of its own, but able to react with various savoury flavours to produce a pleasant sensory kick. Recently, however, biologists have found that human tongues have specialised receptors that pick up on the taste of MSG and a wider family of umami compounds, and that some of our brain cells respond specifically to the umami taste. This has led to growing acceptance that umami is not merely a flavour-enhancer, but a discrete ‘fifth taste’ in its own right, alongside the traditional quartet of sweet, sour, salty and bitter.
一开始，科学家们认为味精只是“增味剂”，本身没什么味道，但是可以和很多菜肴中的味道发生反应，产生感官上的愉悦。然而近年来，生物学家发现，人的舌头有专门的神经末梢，对味精和别的“旨味”合成物特别敏感，还有些脑细胞也会对“旨味”有特别的反应。这样的发现使得大家越来越普遍地认为，“旨味”不仅是增味剂，而且本身也是独立于传统“酸甜苦咸”之外的“第五味”。
Although umami is associated with manufactured MSG, the taste is found naturally in many animal and vegetable foods, such as tomatoes, shiitake mushrooms and tuna. Their umami flavours come from the building blocks of proteins, amino acids and nucleotides, which include not only glutamates, but also inosinates and guanylates. These delicious molecules appear when animal and vegetable proteins break down, which is why processes such as cooking, ripening and fermentation intensify umami tastes. Many of the flavours adored by Europeans and Americans, like those of Parma ham and Parmesan cheese, owe their intensity to these umami compounds.
“旨味”虽然和人工制造的味精联系在一起，但大自然中很多动物与蔬菜也含有这种味道，比如番茄、香菇和金枪鱼。它们的“旨味”来自组成蛋白质的氨基酸和核苷酸模块，这里头不止含有味精的组成部分谷氨酸，还有肌苷酸和鸟苷酸。动物与蔬菜的蛋白质分解开来，这些美味的分子就出现了，所以烹饪、熟成和发酵这些过程能够更烘托出食材中的“旨味”。欧美人很喜欢的味道，比如帕尔马火腿与帕玛森干酪中的香醇浓郁，都多亏了“旨味”化合物。
The Chinese have been using umami-rich products such as black fermented soybeans and related sauces for more than two millennia. Intensely flavoured broths enhanced by cured ham and dried seafood are among the staple flavourings of traditional Chinese cuisine. Cheesy fermented beancurd and the preserved duck eggs that so appalled me on my first visit to Hong Kong are both prized for their strong and complex umami tastes. In a sense, MSG is simply a continuation of this tradition.
两千多年来，中国人一直都在使用富含“旨味”的产品，比如豆豉和相关的酱料。传统中厨的主要调味技巧中，就有往浓汤里加火腿和干海味提鲜。第一次去香港时让我受到巨大惊吓的皮蛋，以及后来遇到的腐乳，都是中国人民喜闻乐见的食物，因为其中的“旨味”强烈又繁复。从某种程度来说，味精不过是这种传统的延续。
In China, it’s different. People like science. In a country where famine and hunger are recent memories, and drought and floods a constant threat to agriculture, it’s not surprising that people are more open to the possibilities of genetic modification. Advances in food technology and the availability of new household gadgets like washing machines have only just begun to liberate women from the treadmill of domestic labour: it’s too early for nostalgia about ‘doing everything by hand’. And there are also historical reasons for a widespread trust in the benefits of science and technology.
中国就不一样了。人们欢迎科学、倡导科学。在这个国家，饥荒的记忆还未远去，旱涝灾害也时时威胁着农业的收成，所以人们对转基因的可能性抱着更开放的态度也就不奇怪了。在这里，食品科技的进步和洗衣机等新的家用电器才刚刚开始把妇女从繁重的家务劳动中解放出来。中国人对“一切靠双手”的时代的怀念还早得很。大家普遍相信科学技术会带来好处，这其中还有历史原因。
But why did the Chinese take to the use of manufactured MSG with such joy when the West rejected it? I suspect it’s partly because the Chinese generally have a positive view of science and technology. The kind of Europeans who love to cook and eat often regard science as the enemy: epicurianism tends to go hand in hand with a kind of back-to-nature fundamentalism. People like me think that advances in food technology are forced on humanity by corrupt scientists in the pay of greedy multinational companies. We expect that genetic modification will lead to ecological disaster; we are certain that pesticides will give us cancer. MSG, as a relatively recent, and artificial, seasoning, is inherently dubious.
然而，为何西方人这么排斥人工制造的味精，中国人却欢天喜地地敞开了用呢？我猜部分原因是，中国人普遍对科学技术抱着积极的态度。欧洲的厨师和“吃货”通常都觉得科学是天敌：享乐主义必须和“回归自然”的哲学并行。我这样的人觉得，食品技术的进步是强加在人类头上的，都是贪婪的跨国公司付钱让堕落腐败的科学家一手制造的。我们认为转基因会带来生态灾难，我们肯定农药会让人罹患癌症。味精，作为一种相对年轻的人造调味料，天生就是非常可疑的。
When I first lived in China, traditional cookery, Tai Chi and Traditional Chinese Medicine were the norm, at least for the older generation. Now I meet young people who tell me they prefer sports to martial arts, pills to Chinese herbal medicine, and hamburgers to Chinese food, because they are ‘modern’. In chefs’ circles, the hot topic of discussion in recent years has been ‘Western nutrition’, which is seen as ‘very scientific’. I wear myself out reminding advocates of Western nutrition that Westerners are totally confused about what they eat, and increasingly fat, cancerous and diabetic. We are drowning in scientific studies, I tell them! One month we are told that a glass of red wine a day will protect our hearts, the next month that it will give us heart attacks. Yesterday we were told to eat only protein and no carbohydrates, today we are told this will give us bad breath and kidney failure. Our food products are plastered with complicated information about salt and sugar content, calories, glycaemic indices — but does anyone actually know how to eat? Many people just go home and shove some rubbish in the microwave.
刚在中国安定下来的时候，传统烹饪、太极和中药都很常见，至少在老一辈中还是备受推崇。现在我遇到的年轻人都跟我说，不爱武术爱运动、不爱草药爱西药、不爱中餐爱汉堡，因为他们是“现代人”。厨师圈子里，近几年的热门话题都是“西方的营养”，大家觉得这“非常科学”。我费尽口舌地对那些“西方营养”的中国倡导者们解释，西方人对自己的饮食完全没有清楚的认识和节制，肥胖人群、癌症人群和糖尿病患者越来越多。我很激动地告诉他们，我们这些西方人快要被淹没在科学研究结论之中了！上个月还说每天喝一杯红酒对心脏有益，这个月就说喝红酒容易得心脏病；昨天还说只能摄入蛋白质拒绝碳水化合物，今天又说这样会导致口气不佳，甚至引起肾衰。我们的食品包装上的确写着十分复杂的盐、糖、卡路里含量和血糖指数，但真的有人知道怎么吃吗？很多人回家就是把垃圾食品塞进微波炉了事。
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the evident supremacy of the Western powers triggered a crisis in Chinese identity. Some thinkers and political activists came to see traditional Chinese culture as luo hou (backward), as a millstone round the neck of the nation: they despised it. The future, they thought, lay in Western science and rationality. The philosophical turmoil of the educated class was one of the triggers of revolution. A century later, these anxieties about the Chinese past, and green-eyed envy of the West, are as strong as ever. Ironically, just as the Western middle classes are losing their faith in science, and getting soggy with emotion over the holistic traditions of the East, the Chinese seem to be on the brink of ditching what’s left of their own philosophical and technological heritage.
十九世纪末二十世纪初，西方列强显而易见的霸权引发了中国人的身份危机。一些思想家和政治运动家认为中国传统文化十分落后，如同扼住国家咽喉的沉重磨石，应该遭到蔑视和摒弃。他们认为，中国的未来要靠西方的科学与理性。受过高等教育的阶级在哲学上的骚动成为革命的导火索之一。一个世纪后，对国家往昔历史和西方杰出科学的焦虑仍然有增无减。讽刺的是，西方的中产阶级已经逐渐丧失对科学的信念，沉浸在东方的全套传统中陶醉不已；而中国人似乎马上就要全盘摒弃自家硕果仅存的哲学和技术遗产了。
Contrast this with the traditional Chinese approach to food which is simple, holistic and, as far as I can see, remarkably beneficial. The older generation may not have figures and facts at their disposal, but they are masters in the art of balance in food. They know what to eat when they suffer from different kinds of illness and indisposition. They vary their diets according to the seasons, and their age. It’s one of the things that impressed me most about China, this pervasive knowledge of how to eat well and healthily. ‘Your traditional culture of food and medicine is one of the glories of Chinese civilisation! You should be teaching it to us!’ I tell Chinese friends. They look at me, surprised and nonplussed, as if such a thought had never occurred to them.
与之形成鲜明对比的，是中国对待食物的传统方法，简单、全面而且益处多多（至少在我看来是这样）。老一辈也许不能对数字和证据什么的张口就来，但他们才是真正的食物平衡艺术大师。他们知道得了各种病或者不舒服的时候，该吃些什么来调节舒缓。他们根据季节的变化和年龄的增长调整饮食。几乎人人都知道怎么吃得好、吃得健康，这是中国最让我叹服的地方之一。“你们传统的饮食和医药文化是中国文明中最灿烂的明珠！你们应该当我们的老师！”我告诉中国朋友们。他们震惊而困惑地看着我，好像从来没往这上头想过。
MSG, of course, is very modern and scientific, which is clearly part of its appeal. But it must also have taken such a hold because of when it started to become widely available: the seventies. This was a period of great hardship in China, when meat was scarce and even grain was rationed. Suddenly, MSG offered the possibility of emulating the rich, savoury tastes of traditional stocks without using meat. It must have seemed like a miracle. Add a spoonful of MSG to a bowl of hot water, scatter in a few sliced spring onions, and you have a soup of sorts. Sprinkle some into a vegetable stir-fry and it will be fantastically delicious, as if you had added luxury ingredients like chicken oil or Yunnan ham.
当然，味精是现代与科学在烹饪界的代名词，这可能就是其吸引力之一。不过，占据了这么大的地盘，肯定也跟它在中国开始大量供应的时代有关：二十世纪七十年代。那时候的中国生活非常艰难，肉类很少，连粮食也要定量。突然，味精横空出世，不用肉，传统的高汤也能有那种醇厚浓郁的鲜美。当时这一定恍若奇迹。一勺味精加进一碗热水，撒点葱花，一碗汤就出来了。炒菜加点味精，那味道立刻变得妙不可言，好像加了鸡油或云腿（云南火腿）这种奢侈的食材。
At the cooking school, my classmates and I learned how to add MSG in small quantities to dishes at the final stage of cooking, to enhance their xian wei, as the Chinese refer to umami. We were taught to mix it into dressings for cold meats and vegetables, and to use it as a dip for appetisers. We were told to add MSG to almost everything. It was and is the same in restaurant kitchens, where MSG is used almost as widely as salt. Superior chefs might be scornful of those who use it as a substitute for decent stocks and fine ingredients — I’ve heard them refer to such amateurs snidely as ‘MSG chefs (wei jing chu shi)’ — but they all use it as a flavour-enhancer.
在烹饪学校，我和同学们学习如何在菜收尾的时候加少许味精来提鲜。老师教我们把味精加进凉拌菜的调味料，还可以调成小菜的蘸水。老师说，几乎每样菜都要加味精。餐馆里过去和现在都一如既往，味精是和盐几乎同等重要的调料。可能有些高级厨师会鄙视那些用味精代替精熬高汤和高级食材的人，我听过他们满含嘲讽地把这些非专业人士称为“味精厨师”。不过，他们也都会把味精用作增味剂，只有极少数的例外。
My friend Zhou Yu grew up in Chongqing in the seventies. During the Cultural Revolution, he remembers hearing the sound of gunfire as rival Red Guard factions battled for supremacy on the streets. As a teenager, when he was showing signs of the rare talent at the er hu or two-stringed Chinese violin that would make his career, he yearned for the delicious savoury powder that added a speckle of stardust to the humblest broth. He vowed that, when he had his own income, he would eat it every day. And so, when he finally enrolled in the Sichuan Conservatory of Music, he celebrated by buying four kilos of MSG.
我的朋友周钰就成长在二十世纪七十年代的重庆。他还记得“文革”期间听见红卫兵的不同派别之间在街上争斗开枪。十几岁的他已经在拉二胡上显现了罕见的天赋，后来也成为终身的事业。天才二胡少年周钰渴望着往最简陋的汤里加点那美味的粉末。他发誓说，等自己能挣钱了，一定天天吃味精。所以，终于被四川音乐学院录取之后，他的庆祝方式就是买了四公斤味精。
The ubiquity of MSG in Chinese cookery puts me in a difficult position. Instinctively I loathe it, and I never use it when I cook at home. It’s fake, it goes against all my principles. And I suspect that the excessive use of MSG in Chinese kitchens corrupts people’s palates, deadening them to the pleasures of natural flavours. (Chinese chefs tell me they now have to use MSG, because their customers find everything tastes boring without it.) But is it any worse than refined salt or sugar, both of which are psychologically addictive and damaging in excess? There seems to be no conclusive proof that MSG is harmful to health: the existence of ‘Chinese restaurant syndrome’ has been widely discredited. Some scientists argue that MSG is a ‘neuro-toxin’ that overstimulates the pancreas and the nervous system, triggering diseases like autism, asthma, diabetes and obesity: but I’m not in a position to assess their findings myself, and I’ve seen little reflection of such theories in the wider MSG debate. Furthermore, all my great Chinese culinary heroes use MSG, and their food tastes delicious.
味精在中餐中的这种无处不在让我进退两难。我从本能上厌恶和排斥味精，在家做饭从来没加过。这是人造调味品，违背我的一切原则。而且我还怀疑中厨对味精过分的使用毁掉了人们的味觉，让他们感受不到自然之味带来的愉悦。（中国厨师们告诉我，他们不用味精都不行，因为要是任何一道菜不加味精，客人就会觉得不够味。）但其实精盐和精糖也是一样啊，让你心理上上瘾，一旦过量也会有害。难道味精就低它们一等？似乎还没有证据证明味精有害健康：所谓的“中餐厅综合征”（3）（西方过去众口相传的词）现在已经被普遍否认了。有的科学家提出，味精是一种“神经毒素”，对胰腺和神经系统都会产生过度刺激，引发自闭症、哮喘、糖尿病和肥胖等疾病。但我没什么资格去评估他们这些发现。在更广泛的对味精的辩论中，我也很少看到有人提出这样的理论。另外，我崇拜的大多数中厨英雄都会用味精，他们做的菜可好吃了。【注：（3）这是过去存在于西方的一种说法，据认为是由中国菜中的味精所引起的头痛、呕吐等症状。】
Frankly, I’m still confused about MSG, but I made the choice long ago not to use it in my own cooking. I don’t find it necessary, since I buy good ingredients and make my own stocks. I’m also tired of being bombarded with MSG-laden food in Chinese restaurants which makes me thirsty and exhausts my palate. I prefer flavours that are gentler and more natural. For me, MSG is the cook’s cocaine, a white powder that offers a turbo-charged intensity of gastronomic pleasure. But isn’t life beautiful enough, without taking drugs?
坦白说，我对味精仍然感到困惑，但很久以前我就做出了选择，自己做菜时不加味精。我觉得没必要，因为我会买很好的食材，自己熬制高汤。而且老在中餐馆吃加了味精的菜，我会口渴，舌头也很累，实在承受不起。我更偏向于温和自然的味道。在我看来，味精就像厨师的毒品，白色粉末带来富有冲击力的愉悦美味。但有句话说得好啊：“珍惜生命，远离毒品。”
I’m also conscious that, whether or not MSG really is a bad thing, Western prejudice about it has done untold damage to the international reputation of Chinese cuisine. And in my work as a sort of ‘ambassador’ for Chinese cookery, I realise that including it in recipes written for a Western readership would be shooting myself in the foot. So I stick to the traditional road, rejecting MSG just as I reject unnecessary kitchen gadgets and cable TV. Perhaps I’m still trying to prove something to my family.
我也很清楚，不管味精到底好还是坏，西方人对它的偏见已经无形中破坏了中餐的国际声誉。我作为一个中餐的“大使”，要是给西方人看的菜谱上写着味精，那真是搬起石头砸自己的脚。所以我继续着传统的烹饪之路，拒绝味精，就如同我拒绝不必要的厨房电器和有线电视。也许我还在努力向家人证明着什么。
Fortunately, my avoidance of MSG made absolutely no difference to my training as Sichuanese chef. No dish relies on MSG, and no special techniques apply to it. It is simply added to the wok with other seasonings. So I just omitted it, end of story. And given the overwhelming intensity of the natural flavours of Sichuanese cookery, I didn’t miss it at all. My classmates regarded this as eccentric, but then they regarded everything I did as eccentric. Not using MSG was just the kind of thing you’d expect from a green-eyed alien like me.
好在拒绝味精完全不影响我成为川菜厨师。没有一道川菜是依赖味精的，也没有什么相关的特殊技巧，就是和别的调味料一起加进锅里。所以我就不加味精咯，就这么简单。川菜本来就有那么丰富浓郁的自然味道了，我一点也不想念味精。同学们觉得这样很奇怪，不过反正我做什么事他们都觉得奇怪。反正，我这么个绿眼睛外星人，不用味精也是情理之中啊。
MSG aside, the consideration of flavour was a crucial part of my Sichuanese culinary education. It was a thread that ran through the theory lessons that began each school day, the demonstrations given by Teachers Long and Lu after the mid-morning break, and the practical classes that occupied the afternoons.
味精按下不表，我的川菜教育中，对味道的考量思虑是至关重要的一部分。我们每天最先上的是理论课，然后上午中途一次课间休息，再由龙老师和吕老师来进行操作示范，下午就是我们实践练习。无论什么课，调味都是贯穿其中的永恒线索。
Our teachers introduced us to the unsavoury aspects of the natural flavours of meat, poultry, fish and seafood, known collectively as yi wei, ‘off-tastes’, and more specifically as xing (fishy), shan (muttony), and sao (foul, uriney) tastes or odours. As chefs, my classmates and I had to learn how to refine or dispel these unpleasant tastes, and to bring out the delicious xian wei (umami flavours) that lay behind them. So we blanched our ingredients in boiling water, or treated them with salt, Shaoxing wine, crushed spring onion and ginger; and we discarded the bloody juices that leaked from meat and poultry. With foodstuffs where the yi wei were particularly heavy, like beef and mutton, eels and offal, we would add the wine and seasonings with a generous hand, and freshen up the final dishes with garnishes of coriander. Such techniques have been used in China for thousands of years: the chef Yi Yin, who lived in the sixteenth century BC, warned of the fishy, foul and muttony flavours of some ingredients, but said they could become delicious if treated properly.
老师们也会告诉我们肉、禽、鱼和海鲜那些不好的味道统称为“异味”，具体说来，又分为腥味、膻味和臊味。这是我在欧洲烹饪中从未接触过的概念。我和同学们这些菜鸟厨师必须学会调节或消除这些异味，提出这背后的鲜味。所以我们会把食材焯水，或者用盐、料酒、葱、姜来腌，并处理干净肉禽上渗出的血水。异味特别重的食材，比如牛羊肉、黄鳝和内脏，我们就用大量的料酒（偶尔用白酒）和调味料来处理，起锅的时候还要加一点香菜。这样的技艺在中国已经传承了数千年：公元前十六世纪的烹饪鼻祖伊尹就曾告诫过，有些食材里面有腥膻臊味，但如果处理得当，就能非常美味。（4）【注：（4）《吕氏春秋·本味篇》中记载，伊尹以烹饪比喻治国时说过，“……夫三群之虫，水居者腥，肉攫者臊，草食者膻。丑恶犹美，皆有所以。凡味之本，水最为始，五味三材，九沸九变，火为之纪；时疾时徐，灭腥去臊除膻，必以其胜，无失其理。”】
But these fundamentals are common to all Chinese regional cuisines. It’s the tiao wei, the mixing of flavours, that is the fundamental skill of the Sichuanese chef and the most fun to learn. Outsiders, Chinese and foreign, tend to stereotype Sichuanese cuisine as being simply ‘hot and spicy’. It’s a gross oversimplification. What really distinguishes Sichuanese cookery is its mastery of the arts of flavour. Sichuanese chefs delight in combining a variety of basic tastes to create dazzling fu he wei (complex flavours). A well-orchestrated Sichuanese banquet will titillate your palate in every conceivable way: it will awaken your tastebuds through the judicious use of chilli oil, stimulate your tongue and lips with tingly Sichuan pepper, caress your palate with a spicy sweetness, electrify you with dry fried chillies, soothe you with sweet-and-sour, calm your spirits with a tonic soup. It’s a thrilling rollercoaster ride. So many and varied are the fu he wei of the Sichuanese kitchen that one might twist the words of Samuel Johnson and say ‘If a man is tired of Sichuanese food, he is tired of life.’
这些也不是川菜独有，而是中国所有地方菜系共同的基本原理。四川厨师要学习的最基本技艺是调味，这也是川菜中最有乐趣的部分。不管是中国的外地人还是外国人，都会简单地把川菜的味道形容为“麻辣”，这实在是以偏概全了。真正让川菜独一无二的，就是调味的艺术。川菜大厨十分擅长组合多种基本味，创造出勾人魂魄的复合味。一场精心安排的川菜宴席可以用你能想象到的任何方法来挑逗你的口腹。先是用适量的红油唤醒你的味蕾，再用麻酥酥的花椒调动你的唇舌，辣辣的甜味是对味觉的爱抚亲吻，干炒的辣椒也在对你放电，酸甜味又使你得到安抚，再来一口滋补的浓汤，整个精神都舒缓下来，真是过山车般惊险刺激的体验啊。川厨中的复合味实在是庞杂精深、变化多端，塞缪尔·约翰逊的话稍微改改，放在这里极恰：“厌倦了川菜就等于厌倦了生活。”（5）【注：（5）十八世纪英国作家塞缪尔·约翰逊曾经说过，“When a man is tired of London， he is tired of life”（厌倦了伦敦就等于厌倦了生活）。】
As trainee chefs, my classmates and I studied a canon of some twenty-three ‘official’ complex flavours — the equivalent, perhaps, of studying the composition of the ‘official’ French sauces. It wasn’t a matter of exact measurements or precise ingredients, but of developing a sense of the character of each fu he wei, its balance of flavours, its strength and intensity. Take the fish-fragrant flavour (yu xiang wei) of our pork sliver recipe, for example, which derives its curious name from the fact that it uses the seasonings of traditional Sichuanese fish cookery (there is no actual fish in ‘fish-fragrant’ recipes).
我和同学们这些还在培训的未来厨师，按照规范学习了大概二十三种“官方”复合味，大约相当于学习法国菜里“官方”的各种酱。川菜调味无关乎精准的称量和准确的调料，而是要培养一种对复合味的感觉，去感知味道的平衡、其中的力量与张力。比如炒肉丝的鱼香味，有这么一个令人好奇的名字，就是因为调味方法来自传统川菜中的鱼类料理（现在的“鱼香”菜中其实是没有鱼的）。
‘Fish-fragrant’ is based on the mellow heat of pickled chillies, sometimes on their own, sometimes in combination with fermented broad beans in the famous Sichuanese chilli-bean paste, but always alongside the intense flavours of ginger, garlic and spring onion. Furthermore, it involves an element of sweet and sour. It’s a classic fu he wei, engaging the palate simultaneously on several levels, and it’s one of the most irresistible combinations of tastes you can imagine. Once you understand the mechanics of the ‘fish-fragrant flavour’ as a cook, you can apply it to all kinds of ingredients: cold chicken, slivered pork (the most famous ‘fish-fragrant’ dish), aubergines (that old favourite of mine), deep-fried chicken or seafood.
调制“鱼香”要加入泡椒，制造一点轻微的辣味；有时候只加泡椒，有时候还要加入著名的郫县豆瓣酱，但一定要用葱姜蒜这“重味三剑客”。另外还要调出酸甜味。这是很经典的复合味，多层次、全方位地调动和刺激味觉，称得上是世界上最不可抵抗的复合味之一了。作为一个厨师，你一旦了解了“鱼香味”的机制，便能将其应用于各种各样的食材：凉拌鸡、肉丝（鱼香肉丝是最著名的“鱼香”菜）、茄子（鱼香茄子是我长久以来的最爱）、炸鸡或者海鲜。
This emphasis on flavour makes Sichuanese a robust and confident cuisine. It doesn’t rely too much on specialised local ingredients, like the cuisines of the eastern Chinese with their delicate water vegetables and acquatic creatures. You can’t make a hairy-crab beancurd without a hairy crab, but you can make a ‘fish-fragrant’ dish or a ‘numbing-and-hot’ dish with anything. Perhaps this is why Sichuanese people are so open-minded and open-hearted compared with people in other parts of China: they don’t have to worry that contact with the outside world will deprive them of their own identity. Just cover the outside world in a fish-fragrant sauce, and you will make it Sichuanese.
对调味的重视让川菜成为自信而生机勃勃的菜系。它不用特别依赖就地取材，这一点不像中国东部的菜系，十分需要当地的水产蔬菜与河鲜：做蟹粉豆腐就必须用大闸蟹，但鱼香味和煳辣味可以应用于任何食材。也许正是因为这个原因，和中国别的地方相比，四川人思想更开放、性格更直率：他们不用担心和外部世界的联系会剥夺自我的身份认同。面对外面的世界，浇上一勺鱼香酱汁，就变成四川的了。
In contrast, there is the notorious ma la wei (numbing-and-hot flavour), which combines chilli heat with the tongue-numbing effects of Sichuan pepper. It can be quite overwhelming if you are not used to it, but it’s not meant to be like slamming your tongue with a sledgehammer — more like rousing the palate and awakening it to the other flavours of the meal. There are other permutations of the chilli-and-Sichuan-pepper mix, like hu la wei (‘scorched chilli flavour’). Here, the two spices are sizzled in oil until the chillies are darkening, but not yet burnt and bitter: a marvellous taste. Throw in a bit of sweet and sour, and you have gong bao wei, the sweet-sour-scorched chilli combination found in the famous Gong Bao (or Kung Po) chicken. And so on.
相比起来，著名的麻辣味就毁誉参半了。辣椒的辣，花椒的麻。要是吃不惯，这口味算是很重的了。但这麻辣味不是说要拿大锤子狠狠打击你的舌头，而是想略略挑逗你的味觉，唤醒它去感知菜的其他滋味。辣椒和花椒还可以产生其他的排列组合，比如煳辣味：两种香料加入热油中，翻炒到辣椒颜色变深，但不要烧糊变苦，这滋味甚是绝妙；调入点酸甜，就有了宫保味，酸甜煳辣的味道造就了宫保鸡丁等一系列名菜。
As the one outsider in the class, I found myself not only learning the theory and practice of cooking, but also absorbing some Chinese ways of imagining flavour. On damp winter days, I knew I should eat more heating food than usual, so I spooned extra chilli oil on to my breakfast dumplings, and I discovered that sourness was refreshing in the sultry heat of summer. I learned how to say that someone who felt jealous in love was ‘eating vinegar’ (chi cu). And of course, I realised that ‘eating bitterness’ (chi ku) was the only way to describe the sorrows and hardships of existence. To learn the language of cookery in China was, in part, to learn the language of life. And as I went deeper into my culinary studies, I found that I was not only cooking, but also in some ways thinking, like a Chinese person.
作为班里格格不入的老外，我发现自己不仅在学习烹饪的理论和实践，竟然还潜移默化地接受了一些中国式的“画味之道”（想象味道的方法）。阴湿的冬日，我知道应该比平常吃得温热些，所以早餐的饺子汤里就多舀一勺红油；而夏日闷热的酷暑中，则来点酸的能让人神清气爽。原来爱情里的嫉妒叫做“吃醋”，生而为人所经历的疼痛与艰难叫做“吃苦”。在中国学习烹饪的语言，原来也是在学习人生的语言。烹饪的学习越深入，我就越发现自己不仅是在做饭，而且也在思考，像中国人那样思考。
When we took our dishes to Teacher Lu for assessment, he would tell us if we had the balance of sweet and sour tastes right for the li zhi wei (‘lychee flavour’) needed for crispy rice crust with pork slices, or if we had made it so sweet that it spilled over into the territory of a regular sweet-and-sour. Had we managed to create the right degree of harmonised chaos for guai wei (‘strange flavour’), where sesame paste, sesame oil, soy sauce, sugar, vinegar, chilli and Sichuan pepper were mixed together into a sauce for cold chicken? If one seasoning was out of proportion, the flavour would jangle. So we sat there like chemists, scraping our little china spoons in our bowls, mixing and tasting, trying to come up with the perfect formula.
我们把菜拿给吕老师评判赏鉴。比如锅巴肉片，他会告诉我们是否达到酸甜平衡，调出了恰到好处的“荔枝味”；或者说调得太甜，就越了界，变成了普通的糖醋味。凉拌鸡的时候，我们得混合芝麻酱、芝麻油、酱油、糖、醋、辣椒油和花椒，用看似纷繁复杂的调味料调出刚刚好的和谐“怪味”。任何一味调料放多或放少，味道就不对了。所以我们都跟化学家一样，拿着小小的瓷勺子在面前的碗里刮来擦去，边混合边品尝，想得到最完美的配方。
I remember days when the dishes my classmates and I made turned out completely differently, although we were all supposedly following the same recipe. With fish-fragrant pork, the colour of our oil varied from clear to deep orange-red, the fragrance of the ginger-garlic-onion trinity in some of our efforts was light and raw, in others so profoundly mellow it made you sigh. The pork slivers were supple as custard, or slightly chewy and shrivelled. I gazed at the array of dishes laid out on the workbench in front of Teacher Lu. ‘Why do they all look so different?’ I asked him.
我记得有些时候，同学们和我做的菜虽然参照的都是同一个菜谱，成品却完全不同。一道鱼香肉丝，我们的油色从清亮到深红；有些人炒香的“葱姜蒜三剑客”闻起来很轻，带着生味儿；有些人的则特别成熟醇厚，竟能让你长叹；有些人的肉丝口感像奶冻一样柔软嫩滑；有的则略带嚼劲，皱得厉害。吕老师面前的工作台上摆着一盘盘的菜，我出神地盯着，问他：“为啥子每道菜都这么不一样喃？”
‘Huo hou,’ he replied, smiling at my puzzlement.
“火候。”他为我的疑惑而发笑。
Huo hou literally means something like ‘fire-time’, and it refers to the control of the degree and duration of cooking heat. The third pillar of the Chinese culinary arts, after the arts of cutting and of mixing flavours, huo hou is probably the most difficult to master. It cannot be taught in a clinical way, it is grasped only through experience, by trial and error. It’s not surprising, therefore, that huo hou can also be used to describe the attainment of great skill and sensitivity in other arts, like calligraphy. Taoists traditionally used it, too, to refer to their practice of making pills of immortality.
火候是对烹饪用火的大小与持续时间的控制。中国烹饪艺术有三大柱石：一是刀工，二是调味，三就是火候，可能也是最难掌握的一门技艺。这不是可以手把手教得精准明确的，只能通过多年的经验，通过多次的出错与反复来调整和积累。所以也难怪，“火候”还用来形容别的艺术中高超技艺与熟能生巧的成就，比如书法。传统的道家文化也喜欢用“火候”来描述长生不老丹药的锤炼。
Ultimately, though, huo hou was about a general sensitivity to the behaviours of hot oil and water, and to the ways in which they reacted with your ingredients. In the mid-nineties, most Sichuanese chefs didn’t even have gas cookers, let alone thermometers. They were working with the ferocious heat of a coal-burning stove, of a design that hadn’t changed much in two thousand years. There was no way of simply turning the heat up or down. Everything depended on the ability of their eyes and noses to function like military radar, picking up on every change in the micro-environment of the cooking pot.
不过，归根结底，看火候还是要看热油或者热水的状态，以及食材与油水发生反应的情况。九十年代中期，四川很多厨师连煤气炉都没有，使用温度计简直就是天方夜谭。他们得对付火势凶猛的煤炉子，这种厨具的设计两千年来都没怎么变过，根本不可能简单地把火开大关小。一切都要依靠他们那军事雷达一般高速运转的眼睛和鼻子，不放过锅里“微环境”中每一个蛛丝马迹的变化。
At the cooking school, we were taught about the different types of flame: the intense heat and dazzling light of the high flame (wang huo); the vigour of the strong or ‘martial’ flame (wu huo — the character wu is the same as that in wu shu, the martial arts); the gentle swaying of the ‘civil’ flame (wen huo — the character wen carries connotations of culture and literature); and the pale-blue glow of the tiny flame (wei huo). We didn’t use thermometers, but we had to become familiar with the Sichuanese scale of oil temperatures, which ran from one to eight cheng.
烹饪学校教了不同大小的火势：旺火（火苗蹿得老高，火焰炫目、热气袭人）、武火（顾名思义，武术一样的火，精壮强悍、气势逼人）、文火（温柔摇曳的火，文明、文学的火）以及微火（蓝白色的火苗，安静微弱的火）。没什么温度计给你精确衡量，但必须要熟悉这些火候之上川菜里的油温，从一成到八成。
The beauty of huo hou, and its relationship with tiao wei, are best expressed by the legendary chef Yi Yin, again, lecturing his king on the art of cookery in the sixteenth century BC:
对于火候之美及其与调味的关系，表达得最好的还是公元前十六世纪的传奇厨师伊尹，还是他在对君王讲述烹饪之道的时候：
So, my classmates and I had to learn to recognise when the oil was hot enough to coax out the deep-red colour of the chilli-bean paste in our fish-fragrant pork, but not so hot that it would scorch it; when it was hot enough to set the velvety starch-and-water gloss on slivers of pork, but not so hot that the slivers would be dry and chewy. Garlic had to be sizzled to unlock its richness of flavour, but not for so long that it became bitter. As soon as we could see bubbles like ‘fish-eyes’ rising in our syrups, we had to remove the pan from the heat. Huo hou is the key to se xiang wei xing (colour, fragrance, flavour and form); it is the key to everything important in the Chinese kitchen.
于是乎，同学们和我就必须学习把握油温，看几成热的时候才能炒出豆瓣酱那深红的亮色，为鱼香肉丝增光添彩，但又不能太热，免得烧糊了；还要观察几成热的时候能加入水豆粉，让肉丝挂上一层柔嫩的光泽，但又不能太热，免得肉丝炒干了太柴；蒜要先爆锅，炒出醇厚的香味，但又不能炒太久，不然就糊了、苦了；炒糖的时候，只要一看到冒出“鱼眼泡”，就得马上离锅。火候是色、香、味、形的关键，是中厨里一切关键的关键。
Among the five tastes and three materials, the nine boilings and nine transformations, fire is the modulator. At times fierce, at times gentle, it eliminates fishiness, removes foulness and dispels muttoniness. Thus the control of fire is fundamental to nurturing the inherent qualities of all ingredients. Harmonious blending depends on the sweet, the sour, the bitter, the pungent and the salty. But as to when each is added and in what quantity, this is a matter of extremely subtle balancing, for each has its own effect. The transformations that occur in the ding [cooking pot or cauldron] are so supremely wonderful and delicate that the mouth cannot express them in words, nor the mind comprehend them. They are like the fine-tuned skills of the archer and the charioteer, the fluctuations of yin and yang, the passing of the seasons.
五味三材，九沸九变，火为之纪。时疾时徐，灭腥去臊除膻，必以其胜，无失其理。调合之事，必以甘、酸、苦、辛、咸。先后多少，其齐甚微，皆有自起。鼎中之变，精妙微纤，口弗能言，志不能喻。若射御之微，阴阳之化，四时之数。（白话译文：五种味道、三种材料、九种沸腾和形态的变化，都需要依靠火来调整。有时候凶猛、有时候温柔，能够去除腥臊膻味。因此，对火的把控，是调和所有食材本性的基础。和谐的调味要依靠甜、酸、苦、辛和咸的融合。但要讲究加入的时间和多少，这是极致微妙的平衡，因为每种味道都自带特殊的效果。锅里的变化精妙至极，语言无法描述，思维无法理解。这就如同射箭的高精之道、阴阳的转化融合与四季的变迁流转。）（6）【注：（6）原文出自《吕氏春秋·本味》，白话译文由作者引用的英文翻译而来。】
During the months I spent at the cooking school, my life in Chengdu settled into a delicious routine. I would rise early in my worker’s flat near the university, and cycle across the city, picking up a bowlful of rice porridge or dumplings in chilli sauce for breakfast on the way. Familiar shopkeepers and street vendors would greet me as I passed. ‘Chu shi, ni hao! Chef! Hello!’ some of them would say (used, by now, to my sniffing and tasting, my incessant culinary questions). At school, I put on my chef’s whites, tied back my hair, unwrapped my cleaver, and spent the day in a kind of kitchen bliss.
在烹饪学校的数月中，我的成都生活进入了美味的日常。住在川大附近职工公寓中的我每天早早起床，骑车穿城，路上喝碗稀饭或者吃碗红油水饺当早饭。熟悉的店主和小摊贩一路跟我打招呼；有的人会说：“厨师你好！”（很多人都已经习惯了我在他们店里嗅来嗅去、尝这尝那，还不断抛出烹饪方面的“十万个为什么”。）到了学校，我穿上白色的厨师行头、扎好头发、拿出菜刀，然后一整天都在厨房这个“极乐世界”中度过。
The culinary expositions of Yi Yin were recorded by a merchant called Lu Buwei in an essay entitled ‘The Root of Tastes’ (ben wei pian), written in the third century BC. It is perhaps the world’s oldest extant gastronomic treatise. Yet much of what it says, astonishingly, is still relevant in the twenty-first century Chinese kitchen.
伊尹广博的烹饪理论由一名叫吕不韦的商人记录在《吕氏春秋·本味篇》中，成书于公元前三世纪。这可能是全世界现存最古老的烹饪学论述。不过令人惊奇的是，其中的很多理论仍然适用于二十一世纪的中国厨房。
Late afternoons, I cycled back to the university district, more slowly this time, savouring the pleasures of the backstreets. Often I would be distracted by a chance conversation, and stay out until late. Sometimes I dropped into the foreign students’ building, where I still had a few friends, and we would go out for dinner or drinks in the ‘Old House’, a revolutionary new bar that had opened in one of the timber-framed cottages just outside the university. In my second year in Chengdu, we no longer had to drink watery beer or Great Wall wine: the bar owners had acquired a stock of imported spirits, so even cocktails were possible.
临近黄昏的下午，我又骑车回到川大附近。这下速度就比较慢了，因为一路要享受小街小巷中的愉悦欢乐。我经常跟谁摆起个龙门阵，一直待到很晚才回家。有时候我会去留学生楼看看，有几个朋友还住在那儿，然后就一起出去吃个饭，要么去“老地方”喝喝酒。“老地方”是个比较前卫的新酒吧，就开在川大外面那排木房子之间。这是我在成都的第二年，我们不用再喝寡淡的啤酒或者长城干红了：酒吧老板们囤了进口的烈酒，甚至还有人能调鸡尾酒了。
Sometimes I threw dinner parties in my flat, testing my latest recipes on Bamboo Bar veterans like Davide and Pasha, or making gnocchi with the Italians. By Western standards, my flat was a grotty place to live. It was drafty and damp in winter; hot and infested with mosquitoes in summer. Laundry, hung out on the balcony for more than a few hours, became grey with fallout from the polluted sky. My mattress and bedding never seemed to be entirely dry. Strange creatures lived in the bamboo furniture; I could hear them munching quietly at night. Fat cockroaches patrolled the kitchen: every evening I went hunting with my spatula, splatting them against the tiles. Occasionally a rat paid a visit, too, and I found myself devising a trap made from a bra, a tape cassette, a plastic basin and a heavy dictionary (amazingly, it worked). But after more than a year in China, I was so besotted by the country that such minor deprivations didn’t bother me at all.
有时候我会在公寓里办晚宴，让“竹园”常客戴维德和帕莎测试下我最新学到的菜谱，或者和意大利人一起做他们的饺子。公寓并不舒适，冬天潮湿透风，夏天闷热且蚊蝇滋生。窗外的天空污染严重，飘着尘埃，洗好的衣服在阳台上挂几个小时就灰了。我的床垫和床单好像永远湿乎乎的。竹家具中住着奇怪的生物，晚上能听到它们窸窸窣窣的咀嚼声。但在中国住了一年多了，我对这个国家着迷不已，这些小烦恼完全抛诸脑后、不在话下。
By now I enjoyed dipping into expatriate life. In my first year in Chengdu I had wanted life to be as Sichuanese as possible. But now that I was spending each day immersed in China, my ears ringing with Sichuanese dialect and twenty-five different expressions for ‘fry’, nothing was more sweetly relaxing than sipping a gin and tonic with a bunch of other foreign students in one of the Westernised drinking places that had begun to spring up here and there.
偶尔过过外国人的日子还是不错的。在成都的第一年，我想尽量融入四川人的生活。而现在，我每天都沉浸在中国文化中，耳边轰鸣的是四川话，还有二十五种不同的“炒”法；这样的一天之后，和几个留学生朋友喝点小酒是最惬意、最放松不过的了，何况成都也冒出了些还挺西方味道的酒吧。
Six days a week at the cooking school were not enough for me. In my free time I sought out restaurants and snack shops I hadn’t visited before, and begged them to let me study in their kitchens. Sometimes I had to prove my mettle before they agreed. ‘So, you’re a trainee chef, huh?’ said the owner of a beancurd restaurant in Leshan, a city near Chengdu known for its giant Buddha statue. ‘Go on then, make us a dish.’
一周在烹饪学校上六天课仍然满足不了我。空闲的时候我就到处去探询以前没去过的馆子和小吃店，求他们让我到后厨偷偷师。有时候要征得他们的同意，我还得证明自己。在成都附近，以一尊巨大佛像闻名的城市乐山，一家豆腐主题餐馆的店主说：“哦，你是预备厨师啊？那进去给我们做个菜噻。”
So I rolled up my sleeves, borrowed some chef’s whites and a cleaver, rummaged around in the kitchen for the ingredients of Pock-Marked Mother Chen’s Beancurd (ma po dou fu), and then cooked it, surrounded by twenty young chefs, who had all abandoned their work stations to gawp. When they had seen that I could make a reasonably decent ma po dou fu, the boss gave me immediate permission to hang around in the kitchen for as long as I pleased.
我二话不说就卷起袖子开干，借了某个厨师的衣服和菜刀，在厨房里翻找着“麻婆豆腐”的食材调料，然后做了这道菜。二十个年轻的厨师丢掉手上的工作，团团围观。他们发现我的麻婆豆腐做得还可以，于是老板立刻答应我，想在厨房待多久就待多久。
The manager of the famous Long Chao Shou snack restaurant in Chengdu, peering at me over his glasses, agreed to take me on as an ad hoc student. ‘You are very lucky,’ he said, ‘I have a daughter who is studying in Canada, so I am sympathetic to your desire to understand another culture.’ It was typical of the spontaneous generosity of so many people I met in China. The manager summoned his head pastry chef, Fan Shixian, and asked him to give me a free rein in the kitchens.
成都著名小吃“龙抄手”餐馆的经理透过眼镜片研究了我一番，同意我做个“特别学生”。“你运气好哦，”他说，“我女儿在加拿大上学，我比较懂得起你这种想了解别国文化的迫切心情。”我在中国遇到的很多人都有这种发自内心的慷慨和开朗。经理叫来首席面点师范先生，叫他带我去各个厨房自由地看一看、学一学。
Master Fan turned out to be one of the most delightful chefs I’d ever met, and a treasure trove of information on Chengdu street snacks. I spent days in the restaurant, not only during my time at the cooking school, but also when I returned to Chengdu in the following years. There I learned the arts of the ‘white board’ (bai’an), as they call pastry-making in China (the other branch of cookery is known as the ‘red board’, hong’an). I sat for hours with the gossipy wrappers of the famous Long (‘dragon’) wontons, many of whom had been there for decades, as they turned out hundreds and thousands of dumplings. I learnt how to stuff glutinous riceballs with black sesame paste and to wrap ‘cockscomb dumplings’. I made a mess as I tried and failed to master the knack of making bao zi, the little steamed buns with twirly tops, but no one seemed to mind. They just looked at the tangled rags of dough and minced meat I produced with good-natured smiles. Master Fan told me stories, made me laugh, and taught me how to make delicate zheng zheng gao (literally ‘steamed steamed cakes’ — it sounds lovely in Chinese — made from ricemeal and candied lotus seeds) and other rarely seen, old-fashioned snacks. The staff at Long Chao Shou took to calling me, teasingly, Master Fan’s ‘foreign apprentice’.
范师（7）真是我见过最可爱讨喜的厨师之一，说起成都的街头小吃如数家珍，简直是个宝藏。我常在“龙抄手”泡着，不仅是烹饪学校学习期间，还有后面几年回到成都的每一次。我在“龙抄手”学到了“白案”的艺术，也就是中国面点的制作（别的烹饪称为“红案”）。店里那些负责包抄手的人都很健谈，我常常和他们一坐就是好几个小时。很多人在那儿干了几十年了，包成百上千只抄手是转瞬之间的事情。我学会了包黑芝麻馅的汤圆，还掌握了鸡冠蒸饺的造型。包子的褶子我弄不好，整个操作台搞得一团糟，但好像没人在意。他们只是看着我那摊烂糟糟的面和肉馅儿露出善意的微笑。范师用有趣的故事把我逗得哈哈大笑，还教我怎么用米粉和莲蓉做精美的蒸蒸糕，甚至把其他一些少见的传统小吃的手艺传授给我。“龙抄手”的员工们都戏谑地称我为范师的“洋徒弟”。【注：（7）“师”是四川人对“师傅”或拥有特殊技能的职业的简称。】
Sometimes you can see that my notebook has been taken over by someone else: an old woman listing remembered delicacies from her childhood, a chef writing out the names of some obscure ingredients, a noodle-shop acquaintance directing me to a favourite restaurant. (The work always feels like a collaboration, not mine alone.) Some notebooks cover a period of a month or two. Others, written feverishly during a period of intense learning, are filled in a matter of days. And it’s not all about food, either. When I’m in China, these notebooks are my life. They contain train times and shopping lists, records of anxieties and inspirations, dreams and memories; descriptions of the view from a train or the swishing sound of bamboo in the wind.
有时候能看得出来是别人写的：老太太回忆小时候吃过的美食、厨师写下某种奇怪食材的名字、面馆遇到的熟人给我介绍他最喜欢的餐馆（总觉得这些笔记本不是我一个人的，而是大家合力完成的作品）。有的笔记本用了一两个月，有的可能恰好遇到高强度学习的日子，天天都在不停地记记记，几天就写满了。也不全是关于吃的：在中国的岁月中，这些笔记本就是我的生活，里面写着列车的时刻、购物清单，还记录了焦虑与灵感、梦想和回忆；火车上看出去的风景在本子里面有所描述；风中传来竹叶的“龙吟细细”也都用文字记了下来。
My kitchen notebooks from that time are smudged and stained, splattered with cooking oil and batter. The words strewn haphazardly over their pages are written in a mixture of English and Chinese characters. It was often easier to write in English, but I had to use Chinese when I wanted to be precise about the name of an unusual vegetable, or to record one of the countless untranslatable cooking terms. There are also sketches and diagrams, reminding me how to wrap a new kind of dumpling, garnish a dish, or cut up a soaked dried squid. In some places there are herbs or flowers flattened between the pages, restaurant namecards, tickets for a Taoist temple or a train.
那时候我带进厨房的笔记本全都脏兮兮的，留下很多印子，有的是菜籽油，有的是面糊糊。每一页杂乱的字迹中混杂着英文和中文。写英文总是要容易些，但有时候记某种少见的蔬菜或者无数没法翻译的烹饪术语，要想准确就得写中文原文。还有些草绘和图表，提醒我新学到的饺子包法、一道菜怎么装饰摆盘、怎么切泡发的鱿鱼干。偶尔中间还夹着被压得平平的花花草草、餐馆的名片、道教庙宇的参观券或者火车票。
Most importantly, my notebooks are filled with recipes. Daily, I stood at the wok or pastry board, watching, writing swiftly in a mixture of Chinese and English, whichever was fastest at any particular moment. I became astute at judging quantities by eye. A tablespoon, a rice-bowlful, a handful: I knew my own measures by then.
最重要的是，笔记本上写满了菜谱。每天，我站在炒锅或者和面台旁边飞速地记录着，管它中文英文，当下最快就行。我的眼睛练尖了，光看也能看出一道菜该放多少调料。什么一小勺、一饭碗、一把：那时候我已经有了自己的一套称量标准。
Chengdu, meanwhile, was changing at surreal speed. One week I would be cycling through a district of old wooden houses on my way to school; the next, it was a plain of rubble, with a billboard depiction of some idealised apartment blocks overhead. Narrow crossroads metamorphosed suddenly into vast open junctions. Familiar landmarks just disappeared. It was like a dream, in which familiar places appeared to me, unmistakeable in their identities and yet strangely unknown. Luckily, I have inherited from my father an internal Global Positioning System that is very reliable, so I always knew where I was going, even if I couldn’t physically recognise my location.
而此时的成都，正以“超现实”的速度发生剧变。上周我去上学骑车经过的一个全是老木楼的片区，这周就变成一片瓦砾场，竖起高高的广告牌，宣传着特别美好的公寓街区。狭窄的岔路口突然就变成了开阔的交汇点。熟悉的地标就这么毫无预兆地消失了。仿佛是个梦，梦里这些熟悉的地方我肯定都去过，但却显得这么陌生。好在我从父亲那里继承了天生的“内在全球导航系统”，认起路来特别可靠，所以就算认不出到底是什么地方，也总能找到方向。
When I first knew Chengdu, there were only two high-rises in the city — the Minshan Hotel and the People’s Department Store — and even they weren’t very high. Now, new buildings were sprouting up like bamboo shoots after rain. All too often, I found myself sitting in a peaceful teahouse in a leafy alley, sipping tea and nibbling watermelon seeds, lost in the mellow atmosphere of cards and conversation, only to glance up and find that there was an immense skyscraper looming up over the wooden rooftops. ‘Where did that come from?’ I asked myself. A whole new city, futuristic in its gleaming ambition, was rising up around me, as if by stealth.
刚到成都的时候，城里只有两栋高楼：岷山饭店和蜀都大厦，而且就连这两栋楼也没那么高。现在，新的建筑都雨后春笋般地冒了出来。我经常坐在绿树浓荫的小巷子中安静的茶馆里，喝着茶、嗑着瓜子，沉浸在牌九与闲聊的舒适氛围中，结果一抬头发现，巨大的摩天大厦在木屋顶上投下影影绰绰。“这是怎么冒出来的？”我自问。在我周围，一个全新的城市正挥舞着闪闪发光的抱负往未来狂奔，似乎暗中计划了很久的厚积薄发，让我措手不及。
On the one hand, all this destruction was a tragedy. It felt like a personal tragedy for me, to fall in love with a place that was vanishing so quickly. My culinary researches began as an attempt to document a living city; later, it became clear to me that, in many ways, I was writing an epitaph. It also felt like a tragedy for the people of Chengdu, although they didn’t yet recognise it. To start with a city so charming and distinctive, and to replace it with one that might be anywhere in China — what a waste.
一方面，这样的拆除实在是个悲剧，是我个人的悲剧：竟然爱上了一个正如此迅速地消失着的地方。我对饮食烹饪的研究，初衷是想记录一个生机勃勃的城市。后来我才明白，从很多角度来说，我都在书写老成都的“墓志铭”。我感觉这也是成都人的悲剧，虽然他们并没有意识到。这个城市是多么迷人、多么独特啊，现在要用一个中国任何地方都存在的城市取而代之，暴殄天物、可悲可叹。
One of my favourite streets, Upper Heavenly Peace Street, which lined the southern bank of the Brocade River, was eaten away, day by day, by the demolition crews with their sledgehammers. First, the Chinese character chai, ‘demolish’, was chalked up like a sign of hopeless disease on the walls and doors. The teahouses and small shops closed. The old houses were reduced to skeletons, and then just stacks of timber on the ground. Household by household, people were shunted out to apartment blocks in the suburbs. When the last house was about to fall, I stole as a souvenir the sign which bore the name of the street (it now hangs in my flat in London).
有条我特别喜欢的街，太平上街，就在锦江的南岸顺着河水延伸。拆迁队每天带着大锤来“蚕食”这条街。一开始，墙上、门上都用粉笔写上了中国字“拆”，仿佛无法治愈的传染病。茶馆和小店关门大吉。老房子被拆得只剩空架子，再变成地上的一堆废木头。家家户户的人们都被分流安置到郊区的公寓楼里。最后一座房子快要拆完的时候，我偷了一块写有街名的门牌留作纪念（现在挂在我伦敦的公寓里）。
On the other hand, there was something so vital and optimistic about China in the nineties. Gone was the utilitarianism, the sexlessness, the uniformity and the stultifying boredom of the tail-end of Chinese communism. The whole country was mobilised for action, moving forward by the collective will of 1.2 billion people. In England we agonised over the demolition of every old shack; in Sichuan, they just went ahead and flattened whole cities! You had to admire the brazen confidence of it, the conviction that the future would be better than the past.
另一方面，九十年代的中国似乎又洋溢着满满的生机与乐观。之前那种功利主义、禁欲主义、千篇一律的呆板与单调乏味消失不见。全国上下都在动起来，十二亿人团结一心、一致向前。在英国，哪怕拆除一栋破旧的老楼，我们都会烦恼苦闷。而在四川，他们一路挥舞大锤，把整座城市都拆平了！这无所顾忌的信心让人不得不佩服。他们坚信，未来会比过去更好。
So though my heart ached as I cycled through the ruined streets, I was simultaneously buoyed up by this dynamic optimism. I was in a state of flux too, my life was changing. I was rediscovering my creativity, forging fantastic friendships, shedding skins like a snake.
所以，尽管经过那些被夷为平地的街道时我的心还是会痛，但同时又被这充满活力的乐观鼓动着、躁动着。我也处在一种不稳定的状态，我的人生也在改变。我在挖掘潜在的创造力、在交很棒的朋友，像一条蛇一样慢慢蜕皮。
0 条评论