I Like Chinese

Ah, Christmas shopping; a fine institution, guaranteed to blow even the cheeriest of individuals out of the doldrums of early winter, and into the choppy straits of full-blown Seasonal Affective Disorder.

The trouble with Christmas shopping is that I don't do it - at least not in the sense that most 21st century people understand the concept. During the year I don't 'go shopping' and buy whatever looks nice; instead, when I need something I usually wait for a while to see if the need evaporates. Most of the time it does. It's a strategy that seems to work well for me, but it means that when I finally brave the shops at Yule I'm in severe danger of being afflicted with 'mission creep' – which is how I came to be staring into the deep freeze compartment of a Chinese supermarket trying to identify the contents of a package marked 'Big Pig Fat End' (on the pack) and 'Pork Large Intestine' (on the box).

I love Chinese supermarkets. I encountered my first one as a student, and having previously lived in 1980s Belfast where 'cosmopolitan' meant a mixture of strawberry, chocolate and vanilla ice cream, it was unthinkably exotic. Of particular interest were the pressed whole ducks, completely flat and almost perfect discs of unlovely fried poultry. I thought very hard about how such a thing could be accomplished, and eventually decided that you had to persuade the duck to examine its own foot and then drop an extremely hot truck on it.

Foodstuff, living creature, or kite? You decide.

Authentic Chinese food is a riot of flavours and textures, but I quickly learned that not all of them are palatable to westerners. Not without a bit of a run-up, anyway. One notable experience of my first attempts was an encounter with a tinned 'Chinese radish', which looked like a small brain rolled in chilli and tasted like distilled socks. I can taste it in some Szechuan dishes even today; but that's with the tiniest sliver in a sauce for thirty diners and not, as I first attempted, half a tin in a pot of soup for four. It's a mistake any drunken half-wit could make.

These days the Chinese supermarket is my port of call for herbs and spices that aren't grown locally, but which make a big difference to the range of dishes we can make with what the garden gives us. Chunky cinnamon bark for spiced apple juice, whole coriander seeds for truly epic roast potatoes, cloves for mulling elderberry wine or studding into pork – and generally sold for 69p per 100g, against the £1.80 the supermarkets like to charge for a little glass pot holding a miserly 10g. Admittedly some of the niceties of western retail are left out – such as fancy packaging, clear labelling and, er, expiry dates – but it all adds to the sense of adventure. And anyway, where else can you have the fun of trying to work out what you're buying when you pick up a bottle of 'seafood (squid) sauce for cook with the gluten fly'?

Actually, that's a little worrying. I mean, I'm a cook – but do I have gluten fly? (scurries off for medical books)



* Asides from a vague sense of impending doom, but I have that all the time I'm out of the garden anyway.