Offtopic: Man Wife Lung Slices (夫妻肺片)

Tomorrow is a Cadence global holiday. That's what it sounds like. Breakfast Bytes will not appear, and as is now traditional, the day before any break I go off-topic. The Friday before Martin Luther King Jr Day, I wrote about cooking spatchcock chicken under bricks. I don't know how many people actually tried it as a result, but I got several emails about how delicious it looked and sounded. So I decided to do another somewhat off-the-beaten-track recipe.

This is a Sichuan recipe. By the way, "si" is four and "chuan" is river, so Sichuan means "four rivers". You've probably never heard of any of them. Sichuan is also known as the province of a thousand rivers, and there are apparently a lot more than that in reality. I've never been to Sichuan or its famous capital and largest city, Chengdu. But you can visit through its cuisine.

Many (most?) spicy Chinese dishes, such as mapo tofu or kung pao chicken, come from Sichuan. You've probably heard of Sichuan peppercorns. Since Sichuan food is spicy, you might assume these are spicy, too, but they are not. They have a weird effect of numbing your tongue and making it tingle. They look like tiny flowers, and in fact, the Chinese name for them, hua jiao (花椒) means flower pepper. They show up in most Sichuan dishes, and you can't really get an authentic flavor if you leave them out. You can buy them in any Asian market or on Amazon (see picture at the start of this post).

Today's dish is one you've probably never heard of. In Chinese, it is called 夫妻肺片 or "fu qi fei pian" (which sounds more like "foo chee fay pee en"). This means "man and wife lung slices". Curiously, the dish does not contain lung! It is famous enough that it has its own Wikipedia entry, Fuqi feipian. Since translating the Chinese name literally is not very informative, in English it is just called something prosaic like "Sichuan Sliced Beef in Chili Sauce".

According to Sichuan cuisine expert Fuschia Dunlop (her name sounds English because she is):

This gorgeous dish was originally a Chengdu street snack, sold in the Muslim district near the old imperial palace in the heart of the city. There among the Halal restaurants and slaughterhouses, street vendors picked up cheap offcuts of beef, tossed them in spicy sauces, and offered them to passers-by. In the 1930s, one particular vendor, Guo Chaohua, became known for his superb rendition, and the dish was eventually renamed in honor of him and his wife and business partner Zhang Tianzheng.

Fuschia says "renamed" because, she explains:

Before it acquired its modern moniker, the dish was nicknamed "liang tou wang", which might be translated as "frantic glances in both directions" because it was a cheap, somewhat disreputable street snack, but so delicious that well-to-do people couldn't resist stopping by to eat it, while looking around furtively to check they weren't being seen by anyone they knew.

Although it was originally made entirely from offal, today it is normally made with a cheap cut of beef such as shin, chuck, or brisket, perhaps along with some contrasting type of beef like tongue or tripe. I normally use either just brisket, or brisket plus honeycomb tripe for a contrast in texture.

One key ingredient is Sichuan chili oil. You can buy this. Or you can make it easily, if you have the ingredients. Get a bowl that is not going to shatter if you pour hot oil into it, and add:

• 4 tablespoons of Sichuan chile flakes
• 2 teaspoons of 5 spice powder
• 3 tablespoons toasted sesame seeds
• 1 teaspoon to 1 tablespoon ground Sichuan pepper

Heat up one cup of oil to between 370° and 400° and then pour onto the spices (which will bubble furiously). Stir and then leave to cool. This will keep pretty much indefinitely in the refrigerator.

Fu Qi Fei Pian, or Sichuan Sliced Beef in Chili Sauce

Start with a big piece of cheap beef. Normally, I use brisket, but this time I bought a chuck roast since it was on sale . Also something contrasting if you like, such as beef tongue or tripe.

Put all the meat into a large pan, cover with water, and bring to the boil for 5-10 minutes. It will get a foamy scum on top. You can either skim this off, or just throw away all the water, rinse the pan and the meat, and add clean water. The recipe adds soy sauce, green onions, a slice of ginger, and more to the water at this point. I'm skeptical that it makes any difference, having seen videos where people cook or marinate food in blue dye (yes, looks disgusting) and show that the dye really only penetrates about a millimeter into the food. But I put it all in anyway.

Simmer the meat for about two hours until it is cooked and tender, but not falling apart. You are going to slice it, and if it gets overcooked, you won't get slices, just something more like pulled pork. Reserve a few tablespoons of the cooking liquid. Take the meat out of the pan and discard both the rest of the cooking liquid and the green onions, ginger, and anything else you added. When the meat has cooled, slice it as thinly as you can and put it into a serving dish.

The secret to making the dish taste good is the sauce. To a bowl, just add all these ingredients and stir:

• 3 tablespoons of the reserved braising liquid
• 4 tablespoons of the homemade chili oil (see above) with some of the spices from the bottom of the jar
• 2 tablespoons of soy sauce
• 2 teaspoons of sugar
• 2 teaspoons of Chinese vinegar (or any other vinegar)
• pinch of salt
• maybe half a teaspoon of ground Sichuan peppers, or lots more if you feel like it
• 3 cloves of garlic, crushed or grated
• 2 chopped green onions
• a tiny piece of fresh ginger, grated

Toss the meat with the sauce. Chop up some peanuts and/or cilantro, and sprinkle on top. Don't refrigerate it unless it is a long time until you will eat it. The dish is normally served at room temperature.

Chinese Cucumber Salad

A great accompaniment to Fu qi fei pian is smashed cucumber salad. If, after being stuck in your living room for a year, you are feeling in need to inflict a bit of violence on something, then how about a cucumber or two. Get two English (sometimes called hothouse) cucumbers. The big difference with these is not that they are raised in a hothouse, but that in a hothouse there are no bees, so the unpollinated female flowers produce cucumbers with fewer and smaller seeds than normal American cucumbers. The weather in England is not hot enough to grow cucumbers outdoors, so they are always grown either in a greenhouse or a smaller enclosure called a cucumber frame, so in England, all cucumbers are like that. My mother always pinched the male flowers off the plants, so even if bees got into the greenhouse, they still could not pollinate the female flowers.

Take either a Chinese cleaver or a steak mallet, or pretty much anything heavy, and crush the cucumber. Then slice it into bite-sized pieces. On the diagonal is prettier. Make a dressing with a couple of teaspoons of Sichuan chili oil (you did make some from the recipe above, right?), a teaspoon of salt, a couple of teaspoons of sugar, a tablespoon of soy sauce, a tablespoon of vinegar, a teaspoon of sesame oil, and a couple of crushed cloves of garlic. You can probably tell that you can vary this recipe to taste.

Just before serving, toss the cucumber in the dressing. Don't do it too soon, or the salt and sugar will draw moisture out of the cucumber and make the salad watery.

Dinner Is Served

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