Lunar New Year celebration recipe features shrimp
Red banners and signs are adorning doors and stores and streets, which means the world is ready for China’s Lunar New Year, which began on Feb. 1.
Over 2 billion people around the globe are expected to celebrate the Year of the Tiger. But it will involve more local and stay-at-home festivities this year than usual: China’s Ministry of Transport has forecast that this year’s holiday travel will be down 60% in the country from pre-pandemic levels as a result of COVID-19 outbreaks around the country.
For everyone staying close to home, Lunar New Year is an excellent opportunity to support your neighborhood restaurants. It’s also a chance to dig into a cookbook that speaks to the holiday. One of those is “My Shanghai: Recipes and Stories from a City on the Water,” by Betty Liu (Harper Collins; $28), which came out in March 2021.
It’s a stunning book from both a visual and a storytelling point of view. The images come from all over Shanghai, featuring landscapes and fishermen and farmers, as well as the kind of pictures that make you immediately hungry. The images are accompanied by recipes that transport you to a home kitchen in China thanks to Liu. She takes on the formidable task of chronicling her family’s Shanghai dishes, which had not been put down on paper.
The book is stocked with good candidates for Lunar New Year, such as steamed fish (symbolizing luck) and golden egg dumplings (fortune), cooked quickly on a hot ladle in Liu’s delightful rendition. One of the book’s most compelling pictures is for scallion oil noodles, representing longevity.
But Liu looks beyond obvious candidates for holiday menus. “Lunar New Year is also about celebration of food with your family, so there are more choices than people think,” she says.
An excellent candidate is one with a powerful name, Oil-Exploded Shrimp. “The name sounds more aggressive than it is,” says Liu. She likes it for Lunar New Year because of what its Chinese name represents.
“Xia is the name for shrimp in Chinese and xiao is the word for laughter. Because the words are so similar you can say that
shrimp can symbolize laughter or happiness for the coming year,” says
Liu. It’s one of her favorite “quintessentially Shanghai-ese” classic dishes.
It’s also easily and quickly prepared in a matter of minutes, including prep and measuring time. Liu makes her dish commanding by frying the shrimp twice, which shocks them so the shell
becomes extra crispy and the meat notably succulent.
The shrimp are then sautéed in an aromatic mix of soy sauce and rice wine, scallions, and ginger, just enough to thicken and provide the shellfish with a thick, sweet, and pungent caramelized sauce.
Liu’s advice for people who aren’t familiar with Chinese cooking: Don’t
stress. “These recipes are very forgiving. Traditional cooking can scare people, but substitutions work.” For instance, you can easily use inexpensive dry sherry if you can’t find Chinese Shaoxing wine. Or open a bottle of sake and drink that with the shrimp after you’ve transferred the steaming, fragrant seafood from wok to plate.