Taishan or Iowa or Anywhere

As a non-Chinese, white American cook who cooks a lot of Chinese and Chinese-style food, I have taken a particular interest in what happens to American ingredients when they're used in a Chinese idiom.

There's been a fair amount written about "American Chinese food," which as some of you probably know is its own culinary vernacular with its own history and traditions — see also Jennifer 8. Lee's book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, among other sources, or the neat little piece in the first issue of Lucky Peach about yatka mein — that centers around how Chinese food adapted to America and Americans adapted to Chinese food.  I don't have or pretend to any kind of encylopedic knowledge on the subject, though I find it fascinating.

Partly it interests me because it's relevant to the way I cook.  I cook a lot of Chinese and Chinese-influenced food.  In terms of ingredients, I cook what I can get that's good and fresh that I enjoy.  And, especially in summer, a lot of what meets those criteria is what grows here and what is native to the landmass that I live on.  Squash.  Beans.  Sweet corn.  Tomatoes.

Which is, in essence, also what a lot of Chinese cooks did when they came to America, and what a lot of Chinese cooks do today when originally American ingredients show up in Chinese markets.  I have never encountered a vegetable that a Chinese cook couldn't and didn't happily make use of.  Just because things like tomatoes and sweet corn aren't native to China doesn't mean they haven't become part of the Chinese food culture.  They have, with a vengeance.

One of my favorite Chinese recipes for high summer includes both corn and tomatoes, as it happens.

I first discovered the Cantonese penchant for combining corn and tomato in the form of corn soup with tomato, which is usually made with chicken broth for its base, and seasoned with ginger and a little garlic and some sesame oil and maybe some cilantro.  Sometimes it has minced velveted chicken in it, sometimes egg beaten and swirled into the boiling broth to make "egg flowers" or "egg clouds," sometimes a little soft tofu cubed and dropped in just long enough to heat all the way through.  You can also make it with a broth made from boiling corn cobs after you've sliced off the kernels, which is actually quite nice, sweet and comforting.  Or you can make the corn cob broth, then simmer chicken or pork or dried mushrooms in it.  Or more than one of those things, which takes things from merely nice to quite decadent.

This was very very good.  Then, later, I encountered stir-fried corn and tomatoes, I think in a recipe by Mary Tsui Ping Yee if I'm not mistaken, and I think my heart skipped a beat.  You need roughly equal quantities by volume of sweet corn cut off the cob and tomatoes, chunked into largish but still bite-sized pieces.  Don't waste your heirloom tomatoes on this unless you are growing them yourself and have a surplus.  You want a reasonably firm tomato for this.  Field tomatoes are fine.  Plum tomatoes are good too.  So long as the tomato has good flavor and a good amount of acid, it will be just fine.  (Don't use yellow tomatoes.  They are like a certain flavor of Regency heroine, pretty and highly-bred and anemic.)

You'll want a fairly goodly amount of green onion, diced, about half again as much by volume as either of the other vegetables.  You need a little cooking oil, like peanut or canola.  You need a little brown bean sauce, which is a concentrated semi-fermented salty paste you can get at Chinese markets.  A blob about the size of an egg yolk seems to work out OK most of the time for me. (Or you could use some dark miso, which would be different but still good.)  A skosh of Asian sesame oil.  And you'll want to have on hand a few tablespoons of cold water in which a couple teaspoons of cornstarch have been mixed.

It's a simple simple dish.  Heat the wok, swirl in a little cooking oil, add the corn, stir-fry until it's starting to brown in places, add the tomatoes, toss in the  brown bean sauce (how much depends on how salty it is, and how big a quantity of veg you are cooking — you can figure it out, it's not rocket science), stirfry as the tomatoes release some water, and to finish the dish, throw in the green onions, stir, and then add about half of the cornstarch/water and stir it well while letting it heat through to activate the thickening power of the cornstarch.  If this doesn't thicken the dish adquately — it should end up like a thick gravy — add the rest of the cornstarch/water and stir it well and let it cook for another minute or two.

Serve with rice.

If your bean paste is not super salty, you may want to add a little soy sauce or fish sauce, depending on how you roll.  Black soy is nice because it is slightly sweet, which plays well with the sweet corn and sweet tomato.  Fish sauce is funky and salty and a revelation with tomato in any capacity.  Fish sauce with sweet ingredients is definitely a South Seas sort of move.  It's delicious either way, in Taishan or Iowa or anywhere you have corn and tomatoes and an appetite.