Hot Pot in China

 

Hot Pot in China (Zhongguo Huo Guo 中国火锅)

I’d been on a long walk that Saturday in January. It never seems to get really cold, like Minnesota or Rocky Mountain cold, in the coastal city of Yantai, Shondong, China where I’d been living. But when the evening comes on early in winter and the temperature dips below freezing, the steaming windows of the many restaurants look mighty inviting. Big, glowing red Chinese characters on signs or windows welcome you in. Contented diners inside leave a solo walker with longing for even the camaraderie of a smiling waitress. After walking long stretches of the beaches that stretch for miles, gently curving below the hills and tall towers of the city, I was ready to eat.

I opened the glass door of the restaurant set above a narrow street that sloped down to the sea, hesitant about the unknown nature of this type of eating. There are hot pot places where you can sit with just your own little simmering pot on a counter, but here were bigger tables.

And how would I order and cook the food? But the kind young host had just enough English to get me to stay. We ordered off the Chinese menu and cooked the thin slices of meat and vegetables in small batches in the steaming pot on my table, I ate and was contended.

The Tradition

The Chinese tradition of hot pot cooking is about a 1000 years old. It is, much like it is named, a pot of hot broth that is kept simmering on the table of the dinner. At the restaurant I was at, a temperature adjustable electric element keeps the soup a-simmering. Sterno flames, fire or coals can also heat the pots. You order what you like: vegetables, meats, and seafood. The ingredients arrive on small trays. Then you place them, a few at a time,  into the pot where they quickly cook up and are retrieved by chopsticks or a spoon. You put the cooked morsels onto a small plate and then spoon some special hot pot sauce onto the freshly cooked ingredients and eat away.

So, along with the on-table cooking in liquid, the other distinctive part of hot pot eating is the dipping sauce. Each restaurant has their own secret concoction that adds great flavor to the ingredients as you eat them. It is a brown sauce, balanced with saltiness, a touch of sweetness and unami richness. Its base is sesame, with hints of peanut and soy. At the restaurant I first visited, you took the base sauce and then added an assortment of other ingredients like finely chopped garlic or ginger, a cilantro paste, a chili oil, or perhaps some hosin. You mix it all up with a spoon and it still carries the fine taste of the base sauce with a fresh little kick. 

Many Chinese say the Chongqin Hot pot from southern China is the best. It is also the spiciest. But there are plenty of non-spicy varieties to choose from in other parts of China.

 

Autumn

Francis, Emma, and Maggie

It was a golden fall day, a Saturday. One of the last when you could still wear just a short sleeve shirt. Most of the leaves on the Plane trees that grew along the streets were still green. I was picked up in a black sedan outside my apartment tower around noon on the busy street that ran past the University, a plaza of a new shopping mall, and down along the beach. The driver was Maggie, Mr. Yu’s secretary. Mr. Yu was a part owner of the school I worked at, among his many business ventures. He is generous and kind to his friends, and for whatever reason, I was one of those. Maggie spoke limited English, but she too was kind. Her medium length black hair was colored with auburn that is the style now in China. Her oval face broke easily into a thoughtful smile. Her daughter was an extremely cute 4-year old named Yo-Yo who had affection for me and loved to practice her English words with me. YoYo was in the back seat, sitting on the lap of Sherry, one of the Chinese English teachers in our affiliated schools. “Happy” Sherry (Cheng Ming Shuang), as her e-mail name went;  indeed she was particularly cheerful, helpful, and welcoming to me since I arrived ten months previously. Her long black hair was also tinted with streaks of auburn and her eyes were dark and thin, hinting of sprightly contentment. On either side of Sherry in the back seat were two other Chinese teachers from our school, Emma (Jiang Chun Hong), a 30-something with a PHD in chemistry who also spoke good English and whose long bangs sometimes sidled over her right eye mysteriously, and Francis (Gao Fan Jun), a music and dance teacher with long black hair, a tremendous smile, doe-eyes, as well as a restrained energy that arose out of her small frame.

Sherry and Mr. Yu in the halo background

With this fair escort, we arrived after a drive, to an older section of Yantai. The streets were narrow and old. Fork-branched plane trees lined the lanes, their leaves changing from green to yellow in the soft light that filtered down through the  5-story dirt-streaked, white buildings that blended into the hills just above the city.

 

Mr. Yu wanted to have me experience the mutton (yang rou) hot pot. It is considered, in China, good for male health to eat mutton in the fall. Outside the small narrow restaurant hung a bone sheared of meat, but with a bit of red flesh still on it. It was the testament to freshly slaughtered goat being served.

Inside, Mr. Yu was awaiting us in a private room with a round table and seating for 8. It is common in Chinese restaurants to have a number of private rooms for bigger parties. The rooms may be elaborate with their own bathrooms and fancy chairs and side tables, or simple as this one was—a table with just enough space to walk around, a window, a door, and a tile floor. Mr. Yu’s was there along with a business associate of his and another woman from the office. The hot pots were steaming away. This time the pots were the small, individual ones, heated by Sterno flames underneath. Mr. Yu had already flavored our broth with oysters, a common, inexpensive food item here in Yantai. The warm aroma was pleasant. The round table was filled with platters of food, ready to be cooked in your own pots. Many of the plates held thin slices of fresh mutton, and when a few were gone, more quickly came to fill their place. Other plates had spinach and mushrooms on them.

We sat and ate in the afternoon. We drank bottled sweetened tea with our food. It is a  common accompaniment that balances the flavors of the hot pot. The slow pace of cooking and eating is wonderful for bigger groups of people, which is how the Chinese like to eat hot pot. The eating is informal and table manners aren’t so important.

I asked Mr. Yu if he knew where the mutton came from. He said it came from the hills, where the goats fed below the apple trees that have prospered in Shandong. Big juicy apples fill the stores and the back of trucks in Yantai. For a Minnesota boy who has feasted on Honey Crisps, Zestars, and Sweet Tangos, I give the Shandong apples a two thumbs up. So I suppose the meat had some of this sweet, fruity undertone. It was delicious. We ate and ate, talked and talked.  And when it was time for the meal to finish, noodles are traditionally cooked in the broth. No matter how full you are, don’t pass up the noodles cooked in the redolent broth!

We put out the flames in our burners, dropping a lid onto the flame. Mr. Yu paid the bill with a roll of 100-Yuan notes. The afternoon was still and sweet. This time, on the drive I sat in the back with YoYo on my lap. We finished the afternoon in a mellow, wood-lined coffee shop called the House Cat where English songs played and our voices of mixed English and Chinese exchanged thoughts in the lazy afternoon.

Steamboat

I remembered I had had something like this food before, something like this experience. In another life, south, near the equator, with another group of Asian women and a well-off businessman, I ate from the table-cooked food, fed perhaps by those women of my Chinese wife’s family and my ex-father-in-law. In Malaysia hot pot is called steamboat, for the steam that rises from the broth and the doughnut hole at the top of the metal pot.

Near the equator, I probably sweated when we ate the hot food. But I’m sure it was delicious.

Now, when visitors like my family come, I take them to have hot pot. I can even order a few things in Chinese.

I’ve been lucky to live in peace, bounty, and beauty. Cherish the meal, the satiation that really has probably been rare in human history. Be grateful for the bounty of beauty and food and warm places to sit by each other. It will all be gone someday, or you will.