The Four Treasures of the 'Just Right' Dining Table: A Seasonal Guide — Epoche B2
Introduction: The Art of Balance on Your Plate This is a method for putting four dishes on a table for four people: a main dish, a contrasting side, a soup and a grain, chosen against the season and against each other. It is not a recipe for a single dish but a recipe for a table. The idea governing the choices is Chinese and old. Zhongyong (中庸) is usually translated as 'the Doctrine of the Mean': zhōng is the centre or equilibrium, yōng the ordinary and unchanging, so the title points at a steady equilibrium held in everyday things rather than a philosophical extreme. It began as a chapter of the Book of Rites and was singled out in the twelfth century by the scholar Zhu Xi, who grouped it with the Analects , the Mencius and the Great Learning as the Four Books. From 1313 those four, in Zhu Xi's edition, were the set texts of the imperial civil service examinations, and they remained so until the examinations were abolished in 1905 — which is why one can say that Chinese students memorised the book for centuries and mean it literally. One point from the text itself matters for cooking, because it prevents the whole method from being misunderstood. The mean of the Zhongyong is not the midpoint of a scale. The text calls the gentleman's mean a timely mean — the right point for these circumstances, which moves when the circumstances move. A table for an elderly guest and a table for a teenager back from football are both balanced, at different points. Ingredients: The Four Treasures Think of the table as carrying 'Four Treasures' — four categories that stay constant while their contents change with the year. The name is borrowed, with a nod, from the Four Treasures of the Study, the classical set of brush, ink, paper and inkstone; the four-part table is a device for teaching this method and not a category from any Chinese classic, and it is better to say so than to let it pass as ancient. What is ancient is the reason for keeping the frame fixed while the contents move. Xunzi, writing in the third century BCE, opened his discussion of Heaven with tiān xíng yǒu cháng , 'the course of Heaven is constant' in Eric Hutton's complete translation — and went on to say that it does not persist for the sake of a good ruler nor cease for a bad one. His argument was that nature runs on regularities indifferent to human affairs, so the sensible response is to work with them rather than appeal to them. The seasons are the constant; the menu is the response. Quantities below assume four people sharing. 1. Seasonal Star (时令主菜 — shí lìng zhǔ cài) The main dish, built on whatever the market has in quantity and therefore cheaply. The economics are worth stating because they are the whole of the shopping rule: a crop arrives all at once, supply jumps, and the price falls — so abundance and cheapness and ripeness are three names for the same week. Spring: Spring bamboo shoots (春笋) or toon shoots, stir-fried; or a whole steamed sea bass of about 600 g with ginger and spring onion, steamed for eight minutes and no longer. Summer: Smashed cucumber with garlic (拍黄瓜) — two cucumbers, crushed with the flat of the cleaver so the dressing catches in the cracks — or bitter melon with black beans. Autumn: Pork belly braised with chestnuts (板栗烧肉), roughly 500 g of belly to 300 g of peeled chestnuts, simmered for an hour; or taro, if the harvest is early. Winter: Lamb hotpot (羊肉火锅). In Beijing this means thin-sliced leg of lamb dipped in a plain broth for ten seconds and then into sesame sauce. Two of those quantities are doing more work than they look. The 800 g of pork and chestnuts together is 200 g a head before anything else reaches the table, which is why the side that follows it is a small plate and not a second substantial dish. And the hour of simmering is not a tradition but a transformation: pork belly is threaded with connective tissue, and the collagen in it only converts to gelatin when held for a long period at a temperature below boiling. Rush the braise and the meat is tough; boil it hard and the muscle fibres tighten and squeeze out their water. The chestnuts, being starch, take up the liquid the pork gives off. 2. Complementary Side (配菜 — pèi cài) A smaller plate chosen for contrast rather than for its own sake: sharp against rich, cool against hot, crisp against soft. If the star is the braised pork, the side is a plate of blanched greens with a spoonful of oyster sauce — nothing more elaborate. 3. Balancing Soup (调和汤 — tiáo hé tāng) Soup is drunk throughout a Chinese meal rather than only at the start, and its weight should move opposite to the weather. That is a generalisation across a very large country, and E. N. Anderson's survey of Chinese food and its regions is a reminder of how far local practice diverges: in Cantonese households a long-boiled soup is often taken before the meal rather than during it, and the guidance here is a working rule, not a national custom. Hot months: A clear winter melon and dried shrimp broth — 500 g of melon, peeled and cut into thick slices, simmered twenty minutes. Cold months: A long-simmered chicken and goji soup, three hours on the lowest flame, skimmed once. The name of the first one misleads people every year: winter melon is a summer crop, and it is called winter melon because the waxy bloom on its skin lets a whole one keep until winter. It is about ninety-five per cent water, which is why twenty minutes is enough and why it belongs in the hot months. The chicken soup takes three hours for the opposite reason — three hours is what it takes to draw gelatin out of bone and cartilage into the water, and the gelatin is what gives the finished soup its body. 4. Staple Grain (主食 — zhǔ shí) Rice or noodles, in the quantity that fills whatever the other three dishes leave unfilled. The grain also marks the calendar. At the winter solstice (冬至, around 21 December) northern families eat dumplings and southern families eat tangyuan; nobody in either place thinks the o