Worst Kept Secrets

Last night, we went out to dinner with a high school student we’d been joint-tutoring over the last month, his father, and his cousin. He’d decided to discontinue the lessons, because he needed to take a ton of IELTS classes in the hopes of getting his score up to a 6.5, but apparently etiquette demands a lavish dinner be bestowed upon anyone offering a service, no matter how brief.

Sam and his family picked us up at school, and we drove over to the Confucius Temple area for dinner. We ate at a dim sum-ish place (anybody: how do you say dim sum in Mandarin?), where they brought out tiny plate after tiny plate of odd dishes. It was actually pretty good - we got to try about fifteen soups, a whole bunch of different kinds of dumplings, duck, fish, crawfish, etc. Sam’s cousin is a student at Nanjing University, and we both *really* enjoyed talking to her. She studied in Paris for a year, and focuses in urban planning - beautiful public spaces, sustainable building practices, etc. - things that China needs DESPERATELY and pretty much mean that she is a ton more intelligent than I am. She admitted to us later that before dinner, she’d declared, “my only responsibility will be to eat,” because she was nervous about her English. Her English was really damned good, incidentally (and she also speaks French) - she was really well-spoken, friendly, and minus the Chinese flash that tends to rear its head during formal dining situations. She was also a little more in synch with what China looks like through foreign eyes. At one point, bowls of soup with little dark brown chunks in them came out, and she asked Chris and I, “do you not fear the duck blood soup?” Hells no, I drained mine. I might have been a little more hesitant about it if I’d known beforehand that the duck blood wasn’t part of the broth, but was named for the little brown chunks that were actually congealed duck blood, but it really tasted pretty good.

Duck blood soup is one of Nanjing’s specialty dishes. Others include cold salted duck (which I LOVE if it’s boneless), some other ducky things, stinky tofu (which is claimed as a specialty by most Chinese cities, since there are so many variations on it), and five fragrance eggs. I just read about five fragrance eggs this morning, and I wish I tried the one we were served last night. When the plate came out with a black egg shaped thing on it, I immediately thought it was one of these and managed to avoid even trying it. Sam described it as a “five taste egg” though, which sounds absolutely DELICIOUS:

A nutritious snack, five fragrance egg is an egg boiled in a broth composed of anise, cinnamon, ginger, other herbs and sometimes tea leaves.  It is left to simmer in the broth for hours.

From here, which also has some other descriptions of Nanjing dishes.

Chris also thought it was a nasty rotten egg, and he got us out of eating it by saying, “Um, we had so many eggs for lunch…” which was a completely acceptable excuse, apparently. I don’t know if it made sense according to Chinese logic, or if they were just willing to accept whatever weirdo hangups the foreigners had.

I’ll definitely take any visiting friends or family to that restaurant (*aHEM). There were performances going on, and a nice view of crazy neon Confucius Temple. One lady played a guzheng jawdroppingly well, and I’d go back just to see that again. I really, really, really want to learn how to play that thing. I’ve always thought it would be kind of cool to learn the harp, but now that’s been replaced with the guzheng all the way.

I have a really weird relationship with Chinese food. I hardly ever want to eat it during the course of my day. Chris is far more acclimated than I am, and he’s perfectly happy to eat fried noodles for lunch, whereas after a morning of teaching, I always feel like I need “real” food and get disappointed with noodles or fried rice. It doesn’t taste bad, at all, I just never get full and it always seems a little boring. On the other hand, the handfuls of times I’ve gone out for a proper Chinese dinner, I get really into it. Like last night, I felt full and happy and wanting to repeat the experience. Last night I had so many tiny bowls of flavors I can’t even describe that my mouth waters upon remembering. But why can’t I manage to get excited about the more basic fare? The problem isn’t that I have no sense of adventure - I’ll eat some strange stuff without complaining (except previously discussed lines drawn at rotten eggs and feet). I really need to work on it, I guess, because I’m in the middle of arguably the most exciting and bizarre culinary tradition in the known universe, and four days out of five, I’d rather have a ham sandwich.