Kitchen "essentials"

Perhaps it shouldn't surprise me, but Chinese kitchens, well, homes in general, steer well clear of appliances. Washing machines are pretty normal, but as I’ve noted before, dryers are nonexistent. Crispin, a perfectly intelligent fellow, assumed yesterday that the washing machine required manual assistance to fill up, only because even washing machines are still not the norm. Back in Yantai, Andy told me that older generations in China will sometimes wash things by hand, even when they can afford not to, out of mistrust for newfangled contraptions.

Of the homes I’ve visited, none contained an oven or a refrigerator (where fridges are present freezers are often absent), to say nothing of things like mixers and blenders. Neither will one much knife diversity: a giant cleaver slivers and dices the necessary reagents. Task specific dishes, pots, and implements (for example: measuring tools, whisks, any baking related dish) are nowhere to be found. Rice is usually cooked in a separate rice cooker, not in a pot, and one or two pans suffice for the majority of dishes. The efficiency is appealing, but it’s also downright annoying if one’s trying to make western food.

The absence of a refrigerator, in particular, is vexing. I do want to cook here, but without butter, or milk, or cream, many standard western recipes are downright impossible. It is possible to obtain milk and butter, but not very practical when they can’t be kept more than a day. As for cream, I’ve never seen, or heard, of it’s sale. Bread I can still make, although perhaps a limited variety, since I won’t be finding bread flour, or even “normal” flour here. But be it the staff of life, or no, one cannot live on bread alone. Not that I need subsist on my own cooking, but you get the idea.

Butter, butter, butter, most of the “simple” things I’d make hinge on butter. Muffins, cookies, biscuits, pie-crust, donuts . . . anything like these must have butter or fail. And that’s only half the battle, cake pans, pie tins, and muffin tins are not worth purchasing myself, to say nothing of the inability to measure precisely, and the further inability to procure measuring tools!

I suppose this is turning into a rant, but I’m not really grumpy, just bemused. Lao Loa (or something like that, the owner) was saying maybe I could cook something basic for western guests, like a hamburger. Obviously I can cook hamburgers, but one doesn’t cook a hamburger without buns, ketchup, pickles, or cheese! There’s precious little staple-ingredient-overlap between our two cultures, but I suppose we’ll work around it somehow.