The Other China

Chiang Kai-shek always provoked rabid controversies. He was China’s nationalist hero against the Japanese invaders and the inept dictator who lost his country to the Communists; the savior who turned Taiwan into an Asian economic model and the jailer of democratic dissidents; the preserver of Chinese culture and the defender of reactionary values.

But when I think of the generalissimo, I think of great Chinese food. Let me explain.

As the Communist flood swept over China in 1949, Chiang assembled a fleet of Noah’s arks for the elites in every field, with the avowed intention of keeping alive all that was best about Chinese civilization in Taiwan, a hundred miles off the mainland. And since the Chinese have always held cuisine in such lofty esteem, scores of the leading chefs were invited to join the generalissimo in his island exile, along with artists, intellectuals and entrepreneurs.

As a result, on tiny Taiwan--and especially in its capital, Taipei--more regional cuisines have been brought into close proximity than ever before in Chinese history. On the mainland, gastronomy has only recently recovered from the dark ages of Maoism, and food remains largely linked to geography. In Hong Kong, dishes from any region have become readily available in the last couple of decades, but Cantonese cooking still reigns supreme.

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In Taipei, by contrast, veterans of Chiang’s flight into exile and their disciples have been rubbing elbows with fellow master chefs from all over China for half a century. Inevitably, they have enriched and modernized their native recipes by borrowing ingredients and techniques from other provinces--the fiery earthiness of Hunan’s dishes; the complex layers of oils, garlic, peppers and chiles typical of Sichuan; the incomparable diversity, clarity and freshness of Cantonese cooking; the rich, strong flavors preferred in Shanghai; the lightness and elegance of Hangzhou cuisine.

It is no idle metaphor to call Taipei a culinary bazaar. Window-shopping some months ago along Chongqing Road South, a bustling thoroughfare of antiquarians and electronics stores in the old downtown district, I turned down an alley and found myself in a smoky maze of food stands offering food from every Chinese province. The fare included freshly fried finger-length pieces of yellow fish with dry seaweed, a Shanghai specialty, crisp and briny on the outside, delicately ginger-flavored on the inside; from Canton, salt-roasted chicken, its almost translucent skin tasting of wine, pepper and salt, its flesh of green onions and anise; from Sichuan, spicy beef tendon, in chewy strips explosively flavored with chile oils, sesame, pepper and vinegar; and loofah rice porridge, a comforting Taiwanese specialty of slivered pork and shrimp with slices of a pale-green gourd that tastes like a sweet, spongy cucumber.

There was food for the soul as well. At dusk, I walked along the edge of the coffee-colored Tamsui River to the city’s oldest and most famous temple, Lung-Shan. Stone dragons on the dozen pillars holding up the central hall seemed to writhe in the unsteady glimmer of lanterns. Hundreds of faithful prostrated themselves in front of the altars and thrust forward offerings of buns and cakes of sweet red beans, sesame, date paste or nuts to their ancestors.

Dusk is the moment when the spirits of the dead rush up from the underworld to rekindle ties with living relatives and share a symbolic feast with them. The different shapes and fillings of the pastries hint at the regional diversity of the bereaved. Taiwan, Sichuan, Shanghai, Canton--each lays competing claims even on meals for the afterlife.

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The following evening I’d arranged for some friends to join me in a banquet at a Hunanese restaurant named Peng Yuan. Its floors are marble, its upholstery pink, and the framed calligraphy on the walls has a contemporary flourish. We’d eaten there before. But on this occasion, we were hoping the owner--Peng Chang-kuei, one of the few surviving master chefs (and the only one still active) brought over by Chiang--would explain the principles behind some of our favorite dishes on the menu. Unfortunately, Peng, in his 80s, was ill, and his story was told instead by his son, Chuck Peng.

A slim, modishly tailored 48-year-old with oversized glasses, Chuck cut short his own career as a real estate developer in Texas--where he picked up his nickname and the twang of his English--to join his father’s restaurant business. “I didn’t like the idea, but my father was struggling,” he said. Resentment softened into admiration as he learned his father’s innovative kitchen techniques. “The more I appreciated his food, the more I became fascinated by his story,” Chuck said.

The turbulence of 20th century China is reflected in Peng Chang-kuei’s life and cuisine. The son of a small farmer in Hunan province, he fled the drudgery of fieldwork as a teenager and became an apprentice cook for a warlord who was more gourmet than warrior. “He wanted my father to prepare him earthy Hunanese dishes--like these,” said Chuck, as the waiters began to serve us.

The first was a beef soup, slowly cooked for hours with chunks of meat on the bone, whole garlic heads, salt and several mild chiles. I slurped down the aromatic broth--rich enough to remedy a host of ailments. This was sheer carnal pleasure, as if aged beef had been squeezed through a press and reduced to its juicy essences.

The next course--another of the warlord’s favorites--was Hunan noodles with fried minced pork. Red chile oil, garlic, soy sauce and rice wine vinegar bound meat particles to the thick noodles. Wondrously spicy, salty and sour waves lapped across my palate.

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In the 1930s, Chuck told us, Peng followed Chiang’s army on its offensives and retreats across China throughout the Japanese occupation and then during the losing civil war against the Communists. He made mental notes of recipes he encountered in cities and villages far from his native Hunan. Once settled in Taiwan, he began to infuse Hunanese dishes with ingredients of other regions.

“Hunan was considered to have a backward and provincial cuisine--too spicy and salty for formal meals,” said Chuck. “My father had to create more sophisticated dishes that could be served at government banquets.”

He illustrated this upscale transformation by offering us a dish that still goes by the name minced squab in bamboo, though instead of using a traditional bamboo section, the restaurant serves the squab in a small melon, a technique Peng learned from Cantonese cuisine. The minced squab had first been flash-fried with green onions, then cooked in its own stock with the flesh of the melon and finally ladled back into the hollowed-out rind. The result was a curious, deliciously delicate mix of sweet melon and faintly nutty tastes.

There were more dishes: crunchy, sweet and sour slices of lotus root; cold pork marinated in soy sauce and tart vinegar; a breathtaking dish of bean curd that had absorbed the flavors of its spicy red chile sauce, green onions, garlic, soy sauce and shredded pork--inspired by a Sichuan specialty but packing more wallop; a shark’s fin soup, richer than the Cantonese original, flavored with ginger root and green onions and simmered with pig’s feet to an almost gelatinous consistency. But the high point was the General Tso’s chicken, a recipe Peng invented and popularized in the United States during the 1970s when he owned a midtown Manhattan restaurant.

Having had so many tepid, overly sweet takeout versions of this dish back home in New York, I was at first dubious about the General Tso’s chicken placed in front of me. The chicken had been cut into chunks, coated with beaten eggs, soy sauce and corn starch, plunged briefly into boiling peanut oil, over and over, to make them crisp on the outside, and finally sauteed in a brown sauce of garlic, ginger, green onions, red chiles, rice vinegar and sesame oil, just enough to leave the inside of the chicken chunks soft and juicy. With every crunchy bite, I experienced a lusciously full spectrum of seasoning. Peng named this dish after a 19th century Hunanese warlord whose character reputedly shared the same traits--a fiery, armor-like exterior that hid an inner tenderness.

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Flush with fame and fortune, Peng decided several years ago to make a triumphant return to his native Hunan. He opened a restaurant on the outskirts of Changsha, the provincial capital, near his childhood village--and also not far from the birthplace of Mao Zedong.

Neighbors thought his food delicious but no longer considered the recipes Hunanese. In fact, when travelers from Taiwan visit the village and ask for Peng’s restaurant, the locals are likely to comment something to the effect: “Oh, you mean the Taiwanese restaurant?”

Nonetheless, according to Chuck, the Beijing government sends young cooks to the restaurant to learn new-style Hunanese cooking. “And when Communist officials from all over the country come to Changsha to visit Mao’s birthplace, they always eat at my father’s restaurant,” says Chuck.

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Peng Yuan, 2F, 380 Lin Sen North Road, Taipei, Taiwan, 104. (886) 22551-9157.