'Village Style' tofu preparations, substituting mushrooms
for pork.
Like many a lazy little Englander, I grew up with the received notion that tofu was for health freaks. The sort of people who got up early by choice, and ate weird tasteless discs made of bran fortified with fairy dust. This sort of health masochism fares well in Britain. It is the obverse of the national tendency to debase ourselves with kebabs, abattoir effluent sausages, reconstituted frozen meat-like kiddie nuggets, Rustlers Burgers and 'hot' curries. Now that we no longer wear sack cloth and ashes, or self flagellate in public, we choose to cleanse ourselves with a new type of suffering. Witness the preposterous rise of Raw Food Veganism for instance. Anyhow, it is understandable how anyone growing up in such a climate might come to see the favoured foodstuffs of the movement with some disdain. The foodbiz, and this is not particular to veggies or healthies, is ruled by simplistic faddishness. Like tofu, the sandals and yoga crowd adopted quinoa in absentia of recipes or cultural baggage. Nowardays, pretty much everyone has pocketed pulled pork, without taking much of a second glance at the cuisines of barbecue, smoke pit, and southern states creole.
'Ma Po' tofu and rice.
Whilst bean curd is itself vegan, the problem for vegetarians is that pretty much all the best recipes are meat or fish based. In much domestic Chinese cooking for instance, very little meat is used for reasons of economy, but tofu rice and noodles are used in addition, not as a substitute. It would be all too simple to put this type of domestic oriental cuisine on a pedestal, especially as the growing problem of feeding the world's population means that we all need to start figuring out how to eat fewer animals and fast. I personally find restaurant meals, which tend to be skewed in favour of animal protein less satisfying than my home cooking. As an aside, asking China for the answers might not be the best idea. The booming middle class in a country of billions, now demands to eat like the rich, and native land, thick with industrial pollutants cannot sustain the growing population, and besides, if you think the rights of the human animal are meagre, the treatment of livestock would chill any bunny cuddler.
Notwithstanding, I live in Sheffield in the early twenty first century, and if you eat out as often as I do, the chances are you're going to eat a lot of rice and noodles. As luck would have it, Sheffield has cultural links with the capital of Sichuan, Chengdu, a city which has it's own Sheffield United. I promise I'm not making this up: the Chengdu Blades. The important thing is that Chengdu is one of the gastronomic capitals of the East, of a cuisine as reliant on fragrant pepper and fermented chilli as southernmost France is with duck fat. The more I became obsessed by this style of cooking, it became apparent that I was going to have to learn to love certain things. Duck's tongues I can take or leave, and I must learn to appreciate preserved eggs, but it soon became apparent that my childish misapprehensions about tofu couldn't have been more wrong.
One of the finest dishes of the classical repertoire is the fabulous MaPo Tofu, named for the smallpox scarred street vendor who've her name to this particular preparation, now served across the world, albeit often in bastardised forms. Although it is now typical for cooks to use pork, the base is a few grams of minced beef cooked to flavour the oil in the wok, which is then infused with a great dollop of fermented broad bean and chilli paste. This is available in all oriental marts (Hong yo du ban). Buy it. Even if you don't make this recipe, and I implore you to do so), buy it anyway. Put it in soup, beans, burgers, chillis, everything. Once the beef and paste are sizzling away, it's simply a case of adding some stock, spring onions and ground Sichuan pepper, and then letting your cubed tofu simmer and absorb the flavours. Because the bean paste is not particularly hot, chilli powder or oil, or extra pepper allows for tweaking of the flavours to suit your desire for chilli sweats. I haven't given this as an exact recipe because it's something that should come naturally and is easily made in a few minutes while your rice is boiling. Rice cooking water can be substituted for stock, though leftover gravy adds a serious boost. You can eliminate the meat altogether, though I feel this lacks something, so if you want a totally vegan version, start with a good quantity of chopped mushrooms, or better still dried shiitakes, porcini, or such, with a tablespoon of 'olive vegetable' for extra depth of flavour.
These adaptations are unashamedly inauthentic, but then authenticity in food is an ambiguous idea. What matters, with all cooking, is that we have to delve into the past if we want to learn how to do things right. Repeat what others have done before you, and then repeat yourself, again, and again, and again. Jumping aboard the bandwagon of the latest 'super food' may be all the rage, but there is more pleasure and craft to be learned from tradition, and that is how I came to terms with tofu.
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