October 8, 2012
Amuse-Bouche
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travers douce
(sweet baby back ribs)
In the fall of 1974 and the following spring, I had a peculiar ailment. For a six-week period each season, I has “sick” every Wednesday from 9:30 in the morning until 12:30 in the afternoon. I told my employer that I had a doctor’s appointment. That was partly true. I had an appointment but not with a doctor. On those Wednesdays, I headed over to the kitchen of the Aldersgate United Methodist Church in Los Altos, California, for a Chinese cooking class I was taking through Foothill Community College. I still remember how curious it felt to drive up to a Japanese-American church to learn Chinese cooking when I should have been at work designing the interior lighting of the Space Shuttle.
A little earlier in my life I had attempted to teach myself Chinese cooking from a book, The Thousand-Recipe Chinese Cookbook by Gloria Bley Miller, but had gotten nowhere since I was too paranoid to go into Chinese shops for the ingredients, and I was too prone to making substitutions to both ingredients and techniques. Now I sat in a class of a dozen or so students, mostly retirees, who like me wanted to learn how to “cook Chinese.” The teacher was Mrs. Helen Lee, a recent immigrant from Taiwan. On the first day of class, she handed out a multi-page list of Chinese ingredients with a one- or two-line description of each item. She also recommended a small shop, Easy Foods in Mountain View, where they could be obtained. I still wondered if I would be able to communicate with the shopkeeper, and if I would be welcomed. After my first visit, I became a regular and happy customer until a few years later when a larger, better-stocked store opened across the street.
Each week, Mrs. Lee would demonstrate half a dozen or so dishes, and we students would make copious notes on our printed recipe sheets. It was only much later that I would learn that her cooking knowledge was somewhat narrow and was just “one piece of the elephant.” She did manage in those 24 hours of talk and demonstration to give a broad introduction that would serve me well as I studied and cooked the cuisine almost exclusively for much of the next 20 years. Mrs. Lee’s class was just the first, yet significant, step on a long journey.
In the end, I probably recreated in my kitchen over half of the recipes she presented. Today, seven remain in the file of Chinese recipes that I carry with me in my iPhone and that reside in my kitchen on my iPad. One recipe in particular, Spare Ribs Shanghai Style, was a regular part of my early repertoire until one unhappy event around 1980.
In those days I was purchasing most of my non-Chinese groceries from the Co-op Supermarket near my apartment. The market was started by some socialists in 1935 as a true cooperative buying club. Over the years it expanded to six conventional markets. You could still buy a share in the cooperative, but for most customers, shopping in the store was the same as any other grocery store. By the time I became a frequent shopper, they had started their slow contraction to just one store. On April 7, 2001, after losing money for 18 straight years, the last market closed. By then, I had not shopped there for many years.
During my time shopping at the Co-op, I always went to the spot at the meat counter where they would put hard-to-sell or out-of-date meats. Here I would find inexpensive lamb neck sawed into stew-size pieces or a slightly gray steak that was still pink on the inside. The price was always much cheaper than if the meat would have been in the regular display case. It was in this “cheap meats” section that I would find the odd-sized packages of the pork back ribs that I needed for the Spare Ribs Shanghai Style recipe. Back ribs are usually between 8 and 10 cm (3 and 4 in) in length. For some reason, those sold in this section were sawed into strips of meat with ribs half the normal length, the perfect size for the recipe.
Then one day the unspeakable happened: The ribs were their normal length. Someone had failed to saw them in half. No problem, I thought. I picked up the plastic film-wrapped Styrofoam tray with the ribs and rang the bell for the butcher. I asked him if he could saw the ribs in half, and he said no problem. A minute or so later, he returned and handed me the package. To my horror, he had sawed the entire package—Styrofoam, plastic wrap, and all—in half and then repackaged the two halves on a new tray. I now had my ribs on two Styrofoam trays, the sawed one inside the outer one. I also had ribs coated with Styrofoam “sawdust.” This dust, mixed with the bone dust from the ribs and fat from the meat, made an unappetizing combination. Disappointed, I paid for my ribs and headed home.
I first tried shaking the ribs, but the white stuff was firmly attached. Next I tried rubbing it off with a paper towel. No luck. Lastly, I tried washing the ribs in hot tap water. Each act I tried helped a little, but the only way I could see cleaning the ribs thoroughly was by picking off each Styrofoam particle with tweezers. That would have required patience that I simply didn’t possess. The ribs and their packaging went into the trash, and for 30 years I didn’t make the dish again.
Then, a few weeks ago when I was looking through the packaged meats at my local 99 Ranch Market, I found a package with a half rack, six ribs, of the meatiest back ribs I have ever seen. This time, I bypassed asking the butcher to saw the ribs. Once home, I chopped each rib in half with a heavy, No. 1 Chinese cleaver aided by a 1-kg (2-lb) rubber mallet. Now it was time to prepare Spare Ribs Shanghai Style as an amuse-bouche.
The recipe required a bit of adjustment. It was originally written for 700 g (1-12 lb) of ribs, about 26 pieces. I needed a recipe for 8 pieces, 2 per serving. But with a pencil, paper, and a bit of ciphering—as they used to say in television westerns—I was able to figure out a recipe for 4 servings.
4 meatly
pork back ribs, cut into 2 pieces each
2 T
Chinese dark soy sauce (Pearl-River brand is my preference)
2 T
granulated sugar
1
green onion, cut into 5-cm (2-in) pieces
1 thick slice
fresh ginger
1 thin slice
crystalized tangerine, peel only, finely diced, for garnish
1. Place all the ingredients except for the crystalized tangerine in a small saucepan, and set it over high heat. When the liquids come to a boil, stir once, lower the heat, cover the saucepan, and braise until the meat is tender, about 30 minutes or so.
2. Uncover the pan, increase the heat to high, and reduce the sauce until sticky. Stir quite often.
3. Arrange a pair of ribs on each serving plate and garnish with the crystalized tangerine.

© 2012 Peter Hertzmann. All rights reserved.