Northeast Style Dishes Are like Old Friends

3 min read

People from the northeast are rustic and rough. Menare usually bold and unrestrained by nature while women can be fractious. In the depths of winter, the breath can turn into ice. Despite this, the winter is still the best season to go sightseeing in the northeast and to enjoy the food. When going to a peasant’s house in the northeast, carry a bottle of top-quality liquor and tread all the way on top of the snow, because the host will surely invite you into his kang clay bed to warm your feet.

Sitting around a brazier and chitchatting, you’ ll find lots of fragrant northeast style food being placed on the kang table.

Of all northeast dishes, northeast sheet jelly is often the first course served. Sheet jelly is made from bean or sweet potato starch, sparkling and clear, smooth and chewy. Sheet jelly is cut into broad slices, added with shredded cucumbers, shredded carrots, shredded pork, and coriander and mashed garlic. Then this colorful dish is ready to be served.

The basic dish in northeast style food is prepared by stewing. People from the northeast love stewed food, mixed stew(or medley) in particular. Mixed stew is made by putting whatever food, vegetables and meat one likes into a pot at once and stews them. The representativedish of northeast style food is stewed pork, which is very popular among peasant families. At the end of the year, each family kills a pig and makes sausage with pig blood. The pork is then cut into large cubes and stewedin a pot together with bones, offal, pickled vegetables, vermicelli made from bean starch, frozen bean curd, etc. When it is finished, all the neighbors will be invited to share the dish, presenting a splendid scene. The famous northeast dish at present is “Stewed Pork with Vermicelli,”the exquisite and improved popular version of the stewed pork. The well-cooked, streaky pork is sliced; the vermicelli is steeped and softened in water, and the pickled vegetables are cut into shreds and stewed in pork bone soup. The longer they are stewed, the more delicious they taste.

Stewed chicken with mushrooms is another famous dish of the northeast stewed food. As a common practice, a mother-in-law from the northeast uses this dish to treat her new son-in-law. So, naturally this dish is often made more exquisitely and carefully than the stewed pork with vermicelli, which is usually done for the father-in-law as a dish to accompany wine. The chicken used for this dish is domestic and eats all kinds of food grains; the mushrooms are hazel mushrooms collected from the Changbai Mountains, with small, umbrella-shaped tops and long handles, giving off a delicate fragrance of the wilderness. The new son-in-law will already betransported by the flavor of the stewed chicken with mushrooms before it is even served.

After eating stewed food, people feel warm insideand out. Then they can take a thick bone seasoned with soy sauce with both hands and enjoy the marrow.

What follows is a dish named “three seasonal vegetable delicacies,”which is made of potatoes, peppers and eggplant. Potatoes taste soft; peppers, crisp; and the eggplant, sweet in the aftertaste.

Having enjoyed the northeast dishes, people also need to have a taste of peasants’ home cooking. The northeast abounds with corn and there are over a dozen refreshments made from corn flour.A bowl of fragrant, sweet corn porridge and corn buns will be served as the last course to complete a perfect meal.

When having meals at peasants’ homes, apart from feeling free to have your fill, don’t make excuses whenit comes to drinking wine or liquor, as people from the northeast are heavy drinkers. For them,”bottoms up”is a high priority. The warm-hearted, uninhibited people from the northeast, in many ways similar to their well-cooked northeast food, are sincere and honest, though not dazzling and ostentatious. Take them as your friends upon the first meeting and take them also as lifelong friends.