❧ by Jingting the gourmet
The original Nanmen Market [南門市場] is a curious place, and lately some dear recollections have resurfaced.
When it comes to the new-year shopping in those ‘groceries from south to north’ [南北貨], Dihua street [迪化街] and Nanmen Market are the prime choices. The retreat to Taiwan back in the Chinese civil war incidentally endowed us dishes in the ‘eight styles’, and a thorough walk in Nanmen’s does provide a representative if incomplete sample.
Seldom have I bought ingredients from Nanmen’s, after I started cooking myself. A few kinds of supplies I do replenish are dried foods—the cured Jinhua ham [金華火腿] for stewing, infant shrimps for frying, baby fish for sauces, and scallop for steamed egg. A slight disappointment is however the lack of Xinjiang pepper as of now, which has a flavor heavy but not excessively spicy. To make the ‘fried cured meat with garlic leaf’, which I crave for every year or two, one can’t go wrong with Nanmen’s, or possibly the ‘Peng’s Hunan Cured Meat’ [彭記湖南臘肉].
The stinky tofu, if steamed rather than fried, I tell you, smells ten times worse. If you find it not strong enough, do leave that at room temperature for days to let it ferment, and the softer it is, the more stinky, so much that it can well deserve a quarantine in the balcony. But I stopped buying it upon discovering that it is made from gene-modified soybeans, and later, to avoid extra estrogen in it.
Jinhua ham too is finicky to make, in that, rather unlike the honey-cured ham, it requires more than a year to age. But an old store I frequent has their own bacteria colonies, and even their own factory in Taoyuan that insists on using local Taiwan pork: a principle (which I failed to appreciate before) rare in the time of pig pandemic and with the presence of the contending imported US pork.
While Guangdong people love to have the ‘ham in steamed soup’, ham actually originated in Zhejiang in the era of Northern Song. The Northeastern sour cabbage, equally indispensable in seasoning the hot pot, is another thing: As the salt brings out the sweetness, the sour cabbage rids the oil. Indeed I have once, out of rebelliousness, made a ‘sour cabbage with fat meat pot’ with leaner pork, and they simply didn’t go well, and I thus realized the wisdom of insisting on fat meat passed all along from the ancestors.
But as for cooked food, quite a few highly regard the Yichang Royal House [億長御坊], where I remember a more friendly price before it enjoyed its fame. The ‘sweet sour ribs’, and the ‘baby fish with chillies’ have stayed in my childhood memories; though after I could cook better, I hardly purchased them any longer. Still there are the ‘Lion’s Head’ (a stewed meatball), and the ‘braised goldfish with green onion’, one in Huaiyang style and one in Sichuan style, all so intricate yet meticulous prepared that I can hardly tell the original ingredients by their final look, hence my principle of refraining from eating out is reluctantly compromised, when I fancy them once in a long while.
Just next to the stairs in the basement of Nanmen’s, is a stand of Chouzhou-style Zongzi [潮州粽], which at its best is comparable to that of Dintaifung’s [鼎泰豐]. Another stand sells some mantou, baozi, among other sweet breads and pastas. (But you have to go up to the second floor for “babaofan”, a sweet rice with fruits.) Further down the basement are stands of raw foods, such as some ridiculously priced vegetables, and giant pork rib bones excellent for stew, which are sold out so early in the morning. In the end of the hall, before electronic slaughter was popularized by the government, there used to be a stand of raw chicken, and it was there that I saw chicken slaughtered, blood drained, and hair removed by hot water. The peculiar dark walk therefore cast, for some time, a long shadow in me when I was a kid.
Jinfeng’s [金峰] “lobahpng” [滷肉飯], or ‘rice with minced pork’, served there with fried tofu, is something I have favored as a kid, but my taste buds somehow no longer prefer them. While it has been a tourists’ place of interest, the incredibly long queue always astonishes me. A path near Jinfeng’s leads to a stand of “loumei” [滷味], or ‘soy braised snacks’. There, they know how to cure ingredients overnight to let the sauce in. Tofu, chicken wings, chicken legs, and wood-ears are the best in my opinion, and the holder is so good at advertising, that you have to ‘harden your ear’ and stand firm in your ground.
PS. The original Nanmen Market is being remodeled, and has moved into a makeshift building for now.
❧ translated and adapted November 19, 2020; revised July 8, 2021