Babi pangang. Chop Suey. Nasi goreng. Koo loo yuk. Chicken with pineapple. Foe yong hai. Who doesn’t know them, the classics from the Chinese Indian Specialties Restaurant? For an entire post-war generation, these dishes represented the first introduction to eating out, the first takeaway, and certainly also the first introduction to Asian cuisine. They were exotic flavors. Long menus. Unknown vegetables such as bean sprouts and bamboo shoots. Mysteriously shiny red sauces. And above all, a lot of everything. Everyone knew that with a meal from ‘the Chinese takeaway’ you didn’t have to cook for at least two days.
Long Wall. Beijing. Lotus. Rose Garden. Hong-Kong. Golden City. Golden Bowl. In Chin. Ind. Rest. the authors pay a warm tribute to this, in their own words, ‘franchise without a franchise’. Ka Fai Lee is chef and owner of restaurant Fook Sing in Amsterdam. His son Danny Lee is a creative entrepreneur in the capital. Sun Li describes himself as a lawyer, writer and glutton. Yan Ting Yen is a writer and filmmaker: her documentary Chin. Ind.; a life behind the hatch was nominated for a Golden Calf in 2001. The four of them created this book, which won the jury prize of the Food and Friends Golden Cookbook 2023 last week.
The book provides a wonderful insight into a world that most people only know from the outside.
Naturally, the history of the origins of Chin. Ind. Rest., a unique Dutch concept – fusion avant la lettre – is explained. But the pleasure of reading also lies in small anecdotes and asides. Take that story about rarely ordered dishes. ‘There was little worse than when someone ordered an obscure dish that no one ever chose. As soon as such a receipt was read, panic broke out in the kitchen. Supplies were dug up from the deepest corners of the freezer, cold room and pantries, while the brain worked hard to remember the preparation method.’ Who realized that when he or she asked for number 114 on a Sunday evening?
Come on, it’s time to order, er, cook something. Of all the dishes in the book that made me nostalgic, foe yong hai made me most nostalgic. That used to be my favorite dish; I couldn’t get enough of that plump omelette containing chicken, so incomprehensibly tender and juicy, soft and slippery, and the velvety, opaque sweet and sour sauce in which it floated. Thanks to Chin. Ind. Rest. I now know the trick behind that chicken, and I would like to share it with you. We start the preparations immediately, because the recipe is long.
Soak 200 g chicken fillet in cold water for 10 minutes and rinse. First cut the fillet in half lengthwise and then cut each half diagonally into ½ cm slices. In a bowl, beat 1/3 of a (beaten) egg with 1 tbsp water, 1 tsp cornflour, a pinch of stock powder, a pinch of baking soda and salt. Add the chicken and mix until all the marinade is absorbed. Pour 1.5 tbsp peanut or rice oil over it and let the chicken marinate covered in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes. Also remove the chicken from the refrigerator at least 30 minutes before cooking it. Stir again. Heat a good dash of peanut or rice oil in a wok and fry the chicken for 2-3 minutes until it is done. Remove the chicken from the oil and let it drain on a rack. (And taste: so soft, so tasty!)
#kitchen #serving #hatch