Unseen City by Nathanael Johnson

Author:Nathanael Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rodale
Published: 2016-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

Ginkgo Cooked Right

After I overcooked my ginkgo seed I was determined to find someone who could show me how they were supposed to taste. Josephine and I returned to the trees and filled a bag with seeds, which by this time were spotting the sidewalk. I cleaned them and then took them to Carolyn Phillips’s house, near San Jose. Phillips, a friend of a friend, had lived in Taiwan for eight years in the 1970s, and returned to the United States with a passion for Chinese food.

Phillips met me at the door, offered me slippers to replace my shoes, and ushered me into a house filled with Eastern art. She had short blond hair and a gaze so avidly focused that I found myself unconsciously matching her intensity, breathlessly peppering her with questions, even before we had perched on the couch.

Her husband, J. H. Huang, was as gentle as she was acute. He ghosted in, accepted introductions with a smile, expressed regret that I hadn’t been able to bring Josephine, then nodded to excuse himself and returned to his study, where he was reading Lao Tzu.

I’d wanted to find someone who understood the culinary tradition behind the cooking of ginkgo nuts because all the recipes I’d found in English were written by Westerners experimenting rather than drawing on East Asian history and practice. Phillips was well positioned to serve as a translator of culinary tradition: When she arrived in Taipei she found herself in the nexus of Chinese food cultures. When the Communists took over mainland China, many of the wealthy nationalists moved to Taiwan, she told me, and they brought with them cooks representing every regional tradition. “You have all the foods of China in one spot, all the most amazing foods. There were these incredible dining palaces. I just fell face-first into the cuisine.” She became a student of Chinese foods and recently poured everything she had learned into a cookbook: All Under Heaven: Recipes from the 35 Cuisines of China.

As it turned out, there wasn’t much to cooking ginkgo, but Phillips had also prepared a small feast so I could try the seeds in the proper context. She had used store-bought, precleaned seeds, but when I produced mine she rolled them in a hot wok, toasting them like popcorn. The meat that emerged when we cracked them was bright green—like jade, she said—utterly different from the shriveled brown product of my overcooking. The seeds were, to my surprise, nearly tasteless, and a bit tacky. It was like eating stiff gnocchi. After all I’d read about the flavor of ginkgo, I’d expected them to be exciting and difficult, but they were mild and starchy, with just the faintest hint of bitterness. They were bitter in the way some beers are, pricking the taste buds just enough to make me take notice.

It’s not all about flavor, Phillips told me. Chinese culinary theory seeks to balance taste, texture, and color. For instance, Phillips had made a stir-fry that emphasized textures,

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