HERB MASTER
A prominent Beijing chef completes the first chapter of an encyclopedic labor of love: a professional’s guide to the herbs of Yunnan province, Mike Peters and Jiang Wanjuan report.
First, the bad news: This story contains no gossip about what government celebrities eat. After a three-hour interview and a cooking studio tour with Xu Long, the Western chef at the Great Hall of the People, we still don’t know any juicy tidbits about the international leaders he has served. What does President Xi like to eat? Is President Putin picky about his food? Does Chancellor Merkel really like spicy Sichuan dishes?
We’re not going to find out any of that from Xu, whose primary responsibility is state banquets and other official functions at the hall. He just smiles and shakes his head at such questions.
What does get him talking, however, is herbs — the fragrant and flavorful plants that add zip to all manners of foods. His new book Fragrance about those plants is hot off the press, and he’s presenting it this week at the Beijing International Book Fair.
“When I first began working at the Great Hall of the People 32 years ago, ‘Western food’ meant Russian cuisine,” he says. That quickly changed with China’s reform and opening up, and Xu suddenly had a mandate to explore the breadth of European cooking.
“I remember going to the Peninsula Hotel in Beijing in 1990 and being thrilled to see fresh herbs like rosemary, thyme and basil,” he says. “Before that, I had only seen and used the dried forms that were quite different in flavor and smell.” The hotel manager at the time had brought herb seeds back from Europe in a suitcase, which the kitchen staff used to plant in their own garden.
“I began to realize that herbs play an important role in cooking,” he says. “Herbs do more than just make food taste better — they help people connect with food. Some herbs have stories that go back to Greek and Roman mythology, and other have stories that come from religions and cultural traditions.”
A good chef, he says, needs to embrace the whole picture of food culture: “It’s the emotion in cooking.”
The idea of doing a book on herbs began to take shape — a book for chefs, he says, that would allow him to share his knowledge and enthusiasm with his Chinese peers.
His pursuit of the stories behind those plants has taken him to 13 countries — “I like to find the origin place of the herbs” — but his travels inspired a new enthusiasm for plants closer to home.
“The herbs of the West and Western cuisines are well-documented in many languages,” he says. “But many people, especially Western readers and food lovers, don’t have much of an idea about Chinese herbs.”
Thanks to China’s vast temperate-zone area, more plants are indigenous here than in any other country in the world, say Flora of China authors Wu Zhengyi and Peter Raven. Yunnan, China’s southernmost province, is the richest of all in vegetative variety, and the region’s geographic advantage quickly captured Xu’s imagination. He was determined that his book needed to reflect his own firsthand experiences — rather than compiling the work of others.
“I didn’t expect Yunnan herbs to have so many roles, so many smells,” he says.
They also have a legacy of stories as rich as Western herbs do.
“One of the minority communities in Yunnan believes that tea is literally their ancestor,” he tells a book fair audience. Another uses leaves as serving bowls and plates, and they eat with their hands — “a very eco-friendly approach ”, he says.
He abandoned the immense scope of trying to write a Chinese compendium of the world’s herbs and instead focused on Yunnan for what he sees as the first of several volumes in a series. He frowns as he utters the title in English, and a lively exchange ensues with the translator.
“Fragrance”, it seems, is far too simple a word for the spirit of the book. “In Chinese, the name is more poetic,” he says with a sigh.
When he hasn’t been overseeing banquets for state leaders, he’s been going back and forth to Yunnan — a photoshooting trip in May was his seventh trip to the province for research on his book and the columns he writes for Global Gourmet magazine. In all, he’s covered thousands of kilometers, visited with cooks from 17 of Yunnan’s many ethnic minorities to gather data on 70 kinds of herbs. He narrowed down his plant list to 47 for the book, including knotweed, citronella, basil, choucai (Acacia pennata) and shuixiangcai (Elsholtzia kachinensis ‘Prain’).
“Many Chinese think herbs like pepper and lemongrass are indigenous to China, because they have been in our food culture for centuries,” he says. In fact, they came here in the era of the Silk Road. Rosemary, a herb that has become popular as Western cuisine has become wellknown in the past two decades, was recorded in Yunnan a couple of hundred years ago, Xu says.
Gathering material for his book, he spent many hours in local markets — at least 30, he says — but that was as much for convenience as necessity. “In Yunnan, herbs are growing everywhere — they are in nature for the taking,” he says.
In the process of his research, he found considerable overlap between the plants of traditional medicine and traditional cooking.
“Some of the plants smell bad,” he says with a grin, “but they taste good.”
Contact the writers through michaelpeters@chinadaily.com.cn