Beijing Boyce

Beijing Eats author Eileen Wen Mooney–who can obviously stand the heat, because she’s getting into the kitchen–has started Eileen Cooks. ”Classes are open to anyone who wants to learn how to cook Chinese and Western dishes and desserts,” she says. They are available four days per week, cost RMB600 for six, and cover “wholesome home cooking”–from green pepper and beef stir fry to onion soup to samosas and mint sauce. She provided some details over dinner last week and emailed me more this week, so here it is her own words, with some info about her culinary background and reasons for starting the program:

While growing up, I spent a lot of time in the kitchen of my house in Bali watching my mother–a Hakka native of Meixian, Guangdong province–mixing soy sauce, eggs, cassava starch, and white pepper into minced meat to make meatballs. I helped her wrap zongzi, glutinous rice parcels packed in bamboo leaves, which we made every year during the Dragon Boat Festival. I stood beside Nengah, our maid, as she ground candle nuts, chillies, garlic, shallots, ginger, turmeric, and palm sugar, all in a heavy stone pestle (called cobek in Balinese) to make bumbu kare, or curry paste. I loved watching her grind fried peanuts, fried shallots, shrimp paste, garlic, and chillies to make her own peanut sauce for pecel, a mixture of bean sprouts, yard long beans, and morning glory, adding a little squeeze of limao (a tiny lime indigenous to Bali) at the end. This added zest brought the peanut sauce to a higher level. I fondly remember her also grinding chillies and shrimp paste to make sambal terasi, a chillie paste, to go with fried tempe. These memories seem even more important to me today in this age ofprocessed foods.

When I was a high school student in Taipei in the late 1970s, I took my first Chinese cooking classes at a school run by Madame Fu Pei Mei, one of the islandʼs most famous cooks, where I learned how to cook non-Hakka dishes for the first time. Mapo doufu, Kong Pao chicken, and sweet and sour pork were among the other dishes I learned, in addition to learning how to cut and debone a whole chicken.

Living in New York for 8 years from 1977 to 1985, I also enjoyed watching Annmarie Receniello, my sister-in-law, cooking Italian food. This was my very first time learning how to make Italian meatballs, lasagna, manicotti, eggplant parmesan, and sauces. I also learned how to prepare my mother-in-lawʼs award winning baked clams (her mother won $5 for this recipe when it was published in the New York Daily News in the 1950s), spaetzle, different kinds of breads, cookies, cakes and pies.

As I learned how to cook more dishes, I began to collect recipes from friends and acquaintances who invited me to their homes. I was very curious about all kinds of foods, and so I would ask friends how their food was made, jotting down the recipes on scraps of paper that I later typed up at home. I never quit searching for new and
interesting recipes.

However, after taking up food writing, I was often away from the kitchen. I began to take my cooking skills for granted until one day I burned a pan of shallots to almost black charcoal. I was frustrated. How could this happen?

I realized that I had become detached from my beloved kitchen because of work; as a food writer, I had been eating my way through every corner of Beijing, and my soul was out of the kitchen. I was also affected by the feeling that the quality of Chinese food was declining rapidly in Beijing as a result of commercialization and greed, and I was also becoming more concerned about food safety. This all made me want to return to the kitchen, the epicenter of our life, where we ask ourselves daily “Whatʼs for dinner tonight?” I started by making a simple pot of stock, which was handy for a lot of purposes. I used it to make soup, three-cup chicken, a bean curd dish, and more. The options were endless.

I realized that with some basic skills and ingredients at hand, you can really create variety in the dishes that you make. For my cooking class, I have chosen recipes based on two criteria: 1) ones that my husband and children love and ask for on a regular basis; and 2) recipes that can be mastered easily in no time. I would like to inspire everyone to start to make their own food again. Once you start, youʼll love it.

When we first moved to Beijing, and I was working full time, I didnʼt always have time to cook for my family. Our ayiʼs dishes were simple and tasty, but there was not much variety in her repertoire and so we ate the same dishes over and over again. If youʼre a foreigner living in Beijing and want to learn how to cook Chinese, youʼre welcome to join us. If youʼre a good cook but donʼt have the time to teach your ayi how to cook, send her to my class. If youʼre Chinese and want to learn some Western dishes, youʼre welcome too.