Chapter 1: sweet-and-sour balls

Memories of Chinese food; an unwanted squeamishness; deep fat frying and wilting in a British heatwave.

I picked all the best tasks for one of the year's hottest days. It was plus 30 degrees C in parts of the UK (remember, we’re not used to it and it is in our DNA to moan about the weather) and the genius that I am thought baking a cake*, cleaning the bathrooms, sorting the kids’ bedrooms and heating a wok of oil to stand over and deep-fry battered cubes of pork in - all while jointly running about after and trying to entertain three overheating children - above any other day of the week was the way forward. In the end though I felt like a winner: the house was clean(er), I got a brief spell in the paddling pool before it got too murky, gross and full of grass and, of course, we ate deliciously that night.

*The very best cake and the highlight of summer for me: Nigella’s liquorice and blackcurrant chocolate cake, from Simply (used a frozen batch of blackcurrants from this year’s crop). Photo © Nathan Young-Ziolkowski 2023

Welcome! The cookalong is officially underway! My Seat at the Banquet, a 30-dish cookalong to Fuchsia Dunlop’s Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese. It’s so good to have you here. I’ll be aiming to post once a week on here but do feel free to follow me on Instagram for the ‘extended experience’ (photos and more wittering). Now, let’s begin.

Memories of Chinese food

Chinese food for me growing up was probably much the same as it was for any other westerner whose only glimpse into China’s huge array of gastronomic wonders was via their local Chinese takeaway. Where, in some instances, the food was so far removed from its roots, in order to survive relocation to the West and make sellable to our historically bland and skeptical palates, that it probably barely resembled the mother dish from which it hailed. In other cases, entirely new dishes were created just to gratify unschooled palates (for those unschooled palates unwilling to be schooled). Of course, I’m not saying Chinese takeaway food isn’t delicious; on the contrary, a good one, using the freshest ingredients, is a real treat. That aside, it still all tells a story. One which I never really took a moment to think about - until now.

Cue the Chinese takeaway deep-fried sweet and sour balls (I remove the protein in my reference here as I’m partial to all forms). Although a far cry from the Chinese food I want to get to know, they still hold a rightful place in culinary and cultural history. Symbolic in their own right. Fuchsia writes in her new book, Invitation to a Banquet, on sweet-and-sour pork balls: “They speak of the ways in which Chinese immigrants adapted to their new lives in the west, creating a simple, economical cuisine that would sustain them and their families and appeal to the palates of suspicious westerners. They are part of a story about how economic anxieties, the fallout of geopolitical events and racial prejudice conspired to muddy western appreciation of real Chinese food. They also highlight the irony of how westerners, over the course of more than a century, have shown an unerring preference for cheap, deep-fried Chinese foods in sweet, sour and salty sauces and then blamed the Chinese for their 'unhealthy' diet”.

We don’t takeaway often, but when we do they are always in our order. I usually to go for the chicken ones and am always reluctant to share, policing the crowds to ensure no one is helping themselves to more than their quota (a quota set by me). It’s true there are never enough! I won’t confess to what a usual Chinese takeaway order is for me, as it’s frightfully British, but I assure you this is simply a reaction to a previous night’s over indulgence and not because I am fussy or don’t want to try new things. I save all that for eating out!

I suspect Chinese food for many Westerners when they were younger or experiencing the cuisine (or at least what we thought was the cuisine) for the first time meant deep-fried sweet and sour balls, with that polystyrene pot of suspiciously neon sauce on the side for dunking/pouring over.

I don’t personally recall eating a lot of Chinese food in my childhood; we always lived in quite rural locations, where takeaways understandably didn’t deliver. I do have vague accounts of the odd meal in Chinese restaurants though, mainly of me burying my face deep into bowls full of wonton or crab and sweetcorn soups and ploughing my way through oval dishes of lemon chicken (a bizarre concept to a young me trying to figure out if I was eating dessert or the main savoury event). I remember loving the texture of battered/coated chicken drenched in a glossy sauce. I love crisp things turned soggy. The underbelly of a golden puff pastry pie lid where it makes contact with its bubbling filling during cooking is like the best thing ever, and I always turn the pie crust over to push the crisp, golden side into the filling, firmly with my cutlery to ensure full immersion (simply pouring gravy over is not enough, although this is my approach when shortcut pastry is in use). It’s the ritual of the pie. For battered goods, it’s that moist, light layer of batter between the crisp carapace and the bit that touches the item it’s enveloping that is a deep joy for me. Really, it’s the individual textures experienced as your teeth punctuate each layer, your lips also touching each one before pursing around that moist filling, that create that addictive, pleasurable mouthfeel. The underside of a battered piece of fish that’s gone a bit soggy, either from sweating in contact with the plate it’s sitting/the paper it’s wrapped in or from paddling in a pool of vinegar, is also a real fav!

In my teens, Chinese takeaway food was dominated by the chips and barbecue rib sauce sold by the local takeaway down the road from school. On Fridays, or the weekends we didn’t go home, we’d skip the evening meal in the canteen and head down the road to the hybrid Chinese takeaway/fish and chip shop for a portion of chips with a few scoops of crimson-hued, highly fragrant sauce - which was sold by the ladle. How many you got depended entirely on whether you’d recently been sent some money in an envelope by Nan and Grandand, or if it was time to get the pen and paper out and start writing to other relatives in the hopes they’d respond with a cheeky fiver slipped in. If you were really lucky, a tender piece of rogue rib meat that had slipped off a bone as the ladle plunged into the shimmering, oil-slicked crimson lake, disturbing the bed of ribs that lie beneath, would find its way into the utensil and onto your chips. In all my years there, I never once tried a whole rib.

I might not have the most adventurous set of experiences when it came to trying the wide variety of dishes on the menus at Chinese restaurants, but the dishes I did try I remember being exciting and new (as a Westerner). All kinds of flavours - sweet, sour, salty, spicy - all coming at you at once. Like nothing ever eaten at home. I never grew up thinking, ‘this is exactly what Chinese food is’ though. I have my maternal grandparents to thank for sharing their experiences of a wedding they went to in Hong Kong and the 10-course fairytalesque banquet they sat down to. I remember being in awe, totally fascinated, by the food they were presented with and exposed to while out there. I can’t recount the specifics, but whole suckling pigs and all parts of the duck featured. As I’ve got older, I’ve become quite squeamish (am working on it), but I wonder if younger me would have jumped at the opportunity to try such things. Then again, when I was about 8 or 9 I did cry at the waiter in a restaurant in Whistable, Kent, when he put a whole lemon sole down in front of me. Poor guy, but it so wasn’t the breaded fillet from the supermarket I was expecting! I think I might be naturally squeamish - the total opposite to my kids, who eat absolutely anything - because I never led a sheltered childhood. We ate out a lot, travelled a lol. I ADORED (cooked) shellfish. But there were just some things that would cause an involuntary shudder - a lip curl I couldn’t control. I’d say we’re making good progress though: the recent years have seen me fall in love with anchovies, raw oysters and even eat jellyfish (more than once). I love smoked salmon now, which I spent over 30 years trying to fall in love with but just couldn’t; I’d try a mouthful each Christmas until one year it just clicked. I broke that involuntary reflex, which then cleared the path for me to connect with sushi and fall in love with that too. If I don’t like the taste of something, I won’t keep eating it. But if it’s that annoying, pre-programmed squeamishness preventing me from giving it a shot, I will do my best to persevere until victorious. I don’t like missing out!

The discovery of balls

My love for deep-fried sweet-and-sour balls didn’t blossom until my early 20s, which is when I remember trying them for the first time. (In person, this is probably where I’d raise my eyebrows up and down and make some kind of reference to my 20s also being the decade of experimentation for me - involving other kinds of balls and concluding my sexual orientation - but I’ll spare you from that childish humour here.) A Chinese takeaway my housemates and I used to frequently order from while studying as undergrads in Plymouth used to do set meal for one, consisting of a main dish, rice (or chips), a giant spring roll and six deep-fried balls, for a total sum of about £5.50. At the beginning of terms, fresh after the student loan payment was in, I’d add a tub of Singapore rice noodles to my order too. Before even getting the bag of food to the kitchen to plate up the meal, I’d have already rustled my way into the paper bag and plucked out a golden ball to sink my teeth into. Of course, this set meal for one would do for the movie/sofa dinner, late-night snack when the movie marathon was over (oh to be younger with a constitution that can support midnight snacks!) and next morning’s breakfast (oh to be younger with a constitution that can support those kinds of breakfasts! I really miss starting the day with a cold lasagne). I never liked sweet and sour, so I subbed for curry sauce.

£5.50 for all of that seems an unsustaining amount of money for the vendor, but I guess they sold a lot; cooking for the hundreds of students in the nearby area that wanted as much as they could get for as little beer money as possible (not that all students spend their money on booze!). Okay, the quality wasn’t splendiferous - we’re talking a lucky dip of whether your deep-fried ball of batter actually contained any meat (which didn’t really bother me), mains that consisted mostly of vegetables with perhaps a few slivers of bad quality meat submerged in a mass of gloopy sauce, and grease-saturated spring rolls with unknown content - but what can you expect for a fiver? That’s not to say it wasn’t enjoyable (clearly returning most Saturday nights for the same order is proof it served a purpose), but it’s obviously a contributing factor to the cheap, junky conception forced upon Chinese takeaway food and not an accurate representation of how delicious even Westernised Chinese restaurant/takeaway food can be. We can’t the blame cheaper takeaways for simply cooking to the needs, budget and palates of their regulars.

There’s a Chinese restaurant near us that we reserve for special occasions. In fact, we’ll be going there soon my for birthday - not that I like to make a fuss about such occasions. Who am I kidding, of course I do. The bar is set high though after one experiences Nigella singing happy to birthday to them at the River Cafe. At least I think she joined in; I drank quite a lot of wine that evening and my memory of much after the main course(s!) is a little fuzzy. Anyway, back to our local Chinese restaurant (you know, the one we’re going to for my birthday in a few weeks). The menu, though I am no expert, is Anglicized to a fashion, but the quality and freshness of the food is far superior to that of any I’ve had before (outside of London’s Chinatown). The symphony of hissing woks and the short, sharp, skilled scrapes of metal spatulas can be heard in all their harmonious glory in intermittent blares as the kitchen doors swing open and closed. Each dish is cooked on order, your food arriving at the table steaming and glistening with freshness just minutes after it’s so speedily and skillfully swiped from wok to plate - the wok hei (breath of a wok) practically billowing in your face. The price is reflective of this, hence it’s a rare treat, but quality costs. And so it should.

Pretty sure I’ve babbled on aimlessly for long enough now, so let’s move on to the reason you are here: the food.

Kwoklyn Wan’s Chinese Sweet and Sour Pork Balls

I considered ordering this one in, then reminded myself this is supposed to be a cookalong - a challenge requiring a bit more effort than picking up the phone and reading off a bunch of numbers. So now we find ourselves back in my (newly pimped up Nigellan-pink-and-eau-de-nil-meets-Barbie-kitsch) kitchen, chopping pork, beating batter and readying the oil. I used Kwoklyn Wan’s recipe from his book, Takeaway in 5, which I found on the Food and Travel blog, Kaveyeats.com. The recipe is published (with author permission) alongside a book review. You can find both here: Kavey Eats » Chinese Sweet and Sour Pork Balls by Kwoklyn Wan.

Chinse sweet-and-sour pork balls, with homemade sweet and sour sauce, (badly) stir-fried pak choi and plain white (Jasmine) rice. Photo © Nathan Young-Ziolkowski 2023.

They were just perfect. The batter had a crisp carapace, a moist and spongy dermis and the pork inside so juicy and tender. Rightly or wrongly, I felt compelled to splash the pork cubes with a little Shoaxing wine and leave for 30 mins, before patting dry and immersing into the waiting batter. I learnt from Fuchsia’s Land of Fish and Rice that this is used in Chinese cooking to ‘dispel’ strong fishy, meaty or gamey flavours, add depth and balance everything out. I worried this decision would make the pork too wet, but the batter adhered just fine.

Went fully homemade and mixed up the sauce as well, using a recipe featured on the BBC Good Food site (Sweet & sour sauce), with the addition of a bit of tomato purée and a blessing of sesame oil (influenced by recipe for spareribs with sweet and sour sauce in The Food of China, by Deh-Ta Hsiung and Nina Simonds). This is a sweet and sour sauce I can get behind. Also served some (very badly) stir-fried greens and fragrant on the side; by the end of the day I was more wilted than a bowl of stir-fried greens and just didn’t have it in me to keep the necessary motion going with my wok scoop (feeble, I know).

There we have it: the start of another cookalong. I sit hear, slurping noisily on a bowl of ‘springtime’ noodles, re-reading over and over again what I’ve written, knowing full well I’ll not spot any of the mistakes until I press send, trying to pluck up the courage to hit publish. So if you’re reading this, I guess I found that courage (or just grew tired at the hundredth re-write and hit send anyway). I must admit, I find it a bit intimating and disconcerting having subscribers. Maybe I feel more exposed on a new platform? But, I am happy to be here and am very happy to have you along for the journey - thanks for giving it a shot.

See you next week for Chapter 2, where I will be revelling in the xiang (hope I used that right?) of my first time cooking cha siu pork.