Chinese lettuce wrap recipe

How to Prepare / Make / Cook - ?Chinese lettuce wrap recipe

Most Chinese meals have at least one seafood dish and no banquet is complete without a whole fish. The Chinese love of seafood and the special care and skill they give to its final presentation have made them experts at seafood preparation.

When it comes to fresh seafood, the Chinese are fanatics. If it’s not alive, it’s not fresh. In almost every restaurant in Hong Kong and Taiwan, there are aquariums with all kinds of fish and shrimp swimming around. Even land locked areas of china have fish farms where freshwater fish are raised.

Once my husband, Keith, and I were in a Hong Kong seafood restaurant sitting next to an open tank holding live eels. Suddenly one large eel got out of the tank and squirmed under our table. We leapt up and watched with horror as this snakelike creature slithered around. No one else in the restaurant seemed the least bit upset. Then a cook appeared with a net, scooped up the eel, dropped it unceremoniously back into the tank, covered the tank with a screen, and walked back to the kitchen. We sat back down and ordered our meal as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

Goldfish or fancy colored carp, known as koi in Japan, are kept for decoration and good luck, not for eating. Many businesses have a large fish tank as part of the office décor for good luck. The Chinese word for fish is yu, which is a homonym for abundance. So whenever there is fish, on the dining table or in a tank, it symbolizes prosperity and having more than one needs. Certainly an important notion in a country where food was scarce and famine common.

Some larger Chinatown markets carry live freshwater fish in tanks. Other fish are usually displayed whole on a bed of ice, to be cleaned and filleted if you wish. To give you an idea of the variety of seafood the Chinese have at their disposal, I listed the number of different seafood I found on one day in a Boston Chinatown market. Eight varieties of live freshwater fish were swimming in tanks. Sitting on ice were butterfish, smelts, whiting, pomfret, grouper, squid, yellow croaker, hybrid striped bass, sea bass, bigmouth bass, scup (porgie), belt fish, gray sole, white perch, bighead carp, buffalo carp, tilapia. Wiggling about in baskets were live blue crab and rock crab. Now that’s quite a choice!

To get the best seafood, you should go to a market specializing in seafood if you can. The quality will be higher, and many fishmongers will order whole fish or a particular kind for you if you let them know in advance. The Chinese almost always buy a whole fish, unless of course the fish is so large that they have to buy portions of it. If you buying a whole fish look for clear, smooth eyes, not sunken or cloudy; bright red gills; firm, smooth flesh without a trace of sliminess; and a fresh smell without a hint of fishiness. If you are buying fillets, use the last two tests.

Crustaceans and mollusks must be live. No Chinese will buy a dead lobster, crab, or calm. In the Far East all the shrimp are alive and swimming about seconds before they are cooked and brought to the table. A specialty in Hong Kong is freshly steamed shrimp with the heads still on. A dramatic dish in the Far East is something called Drunken Shrimp. Live jumbo shrimp are brought to the table in a clear heatproof bowl. The maitre d’ pours in a vodkalike liquor, inebriating and flavoring the shrimp and flambes them, tossing them in the flames until they’re cooked. The taste is incredible.

Dried seafood is commonly available in Chinese markets and sometimes, as in the case of dried scallops, they command a very high price. Since there is no refrigeration, salting drying, and curing are ways to preserve seafood. Fish, shrimp, scallops, oysters, and squid are used in both the fresh and dried forms. Although the preference is always for fresh, the Chinese would rather use good dried seafood than seafood that is not fresh. Many recipes in this book use dried shrimp as a flavoring.