On food and kitchens with three stoves

Home made tofu

We had gone to Qiandao Lake, about three hours by car from Shanghai, for a weekend of diving: at the bottom of the the lake was a thousand year old village that had been flooded back in the 1950s for a dam project.  When we arrived and suited up and threw ourselves overboard, we discovered that we wouldn’t be seeing much that weekend: because of silt that had been recently dredged by the local fishermen, visibility was nearly nil.  We did a few experimental dives but it was like swimming in vanilla pudding.

By noon on the Sunday, we were done.  Packed into a mini van driven by the dive guide, we tore down winding rural roads to a farm house somewhere deep in the hills.  While exploring the underwater city over the past few years, the dive team had made many connections in the area- essential when so far away from the nearest town. The farmers would prepare lunch for us.

The farm was forested, with chesnuts spread out on sheets to dry in small clearings, pigs housed in a wattle and daub barn, orange trees sprouting clusters of mandarins, potatoes growing up hillsides, and greens growing wherever they could.  The husband of the house was bent over at the waist, pulling up the fresh greens for our meal from a patch just behind the kitchen.  We sat at a table outside the kitchen house. It was a stand-alone  building with not much more than some haunches of hanging dried meat, piles of stored pumpkins, a spartan cooking area and a sink inside. A small irrigation stream ran past it.

The woman of the house chose some squash and chilis from the storage piles in the kitchen corner and slowly everything was methodically assembled and chopped and cooked on three different stoves (one gas,one coal, one wood). Endless dishes came streaming out of the wide open doorless kitchen.

Good things burbling away.

I stalked the woman in the kitchen as she cooked, watching her chop and stir and move from stove to stove to stove. There was rice, home made spicy tofu, fatty pork, mildly sweet stewed pumpkin, several sleekly oiled greens, slivers of savoury courgette. She tried to explain to me, in words I have yet to learn, exactly what she was making and how.  I jokingly asked her to come cook for me in Shanghai for those days when I’m just too tired to do anything after work and she winked and said she couldn’t come this year but maybe next year.

When we left, we were told to take as many oranges as we wished. I took a few, but then the cook insisted I take more and more and grinned from ear to ear as she piled dozens of mandarins into my gear bag. I had an awful lot of oranges to eat.

Lunch is served.