Free The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones Page A

would say in her ear.
    What? she’d ask, sleepy, but then she’d open her eyes and see his gaze and know. She loved this about him. Even when they didn’t agree — as happened, halfway through their marriage, with children — he was a natural river of honesty. She had learned with him to be honest in return, and so she told him the truth, which at first was some version of “I don’t know.” Let me work a little more, she would say. Let me think about it. They both knew it was not what they’d agreed. Still, she’d consider it. Give me a year. In this way they bumped along.
    She watched the chef drop the shrimp into a sizzling wok and swoop them around with his arms. She took up her pen and wrote, He has a shape like a marmot. It felt good to write, not to think about Matt. Now he was adding something to the wok — what? — which made the shrimp fragrance climb. She didn’t want to break the spell by asking. He turned the shrimp onto a plate and cranked off the hissing ring of flame.
    Only then did he turn and see that she’d finished. “Hi,” he said.
    “I love this.” She touched the pages. “Can you tell me what happened to them?”
    He wiped his hands on his apron. “First the dynasty fell. That was 1911. They had to leave the palace. They all opened restaurants, Peng and my grandfather Liang Wei here in the capital and Xie in Hangzhou. They did well. My grandfather wrote The Last Chinese Chef and it was a sensation. Everyone prospered, for a while.”
    “Until?”
    “Communism. The new government closed the restaurants down. They kept a few places open for state purposes. My grandfather’s was one of those liquidated. That turned out to be lucky, because a few years later they were jailing people who ran imperial-style restaurants.
    “That was what happened to Xie. His place in Hangzhou was one of the ones they left open. But later, having his restaurant was what got him sent to prison. He died there. But he’d had a son in the thirties, who grew to be a great chef too. This is my Uncle Xie in Hangzhou — the one I call Third Uncle.”
    She looked at her notebook, checking the names. “What happened to Peng?” she asked.
    “Peng’s fortune was not shabby.” He pronounced the name back to her the proper way, pung. “He was admired by the Communist leadership, especially Zhou Enlai. No matter that he cooked imperial — he was that good. They wanted to keep him. They gave him a restaurant in the Beijing Hotel, Peng Jia Cai. He became their imperial cook. In the 1950s that place was the be-all and end-all. He was amazing. Even my father said that of the three of them, he was the best.”
    He put down a plate of pink shrimp under a clear glaze. No additions or ingredients could be seen, though she had watched him add many things. The aroma seemed to be sweet shrimp, nothing more.
    He took one and held it in his mouth, dark eyes flying through calculations.
    Her turn. She put one in her mouth and bit; it burst with a big, popping crunch. Inside there was the soft, yielding essence of shrimp. “How do you make it pop like that?”
    “Soak it in cold salt water first. That’s what I was doing when you first came in.”
    “It’s great,” she said.
    “Good,” he corrected. “Not great. I can still detect the presence of sugar.”
    “I can’t.”
    He smiled. “Remember I told you we strove for formal ideals of flavor and texture? This dish is a perfect example. One of the most important peaks of flavor is xian. Xian means the sweet, natural flavor — like butter, fresh fish, luscious clear chicken broth. Then we have xiang, the fragrant flavor — think frying onions, roasted meat. Nong is the concentrated flavor, the deep, complex taste you get from meat stews or dark sauces or fermented things. Then there is the rich flavor, the flavor of fat. This is called you er bu ni, which means to taste of fat without being oily. We love this one. Fat is very important to us. Fat is not something