Sydney Suburbia and the Imperial Cookery School
Chinese food in Sydney used to be weird.
You know what I’m talking about, even if you grew up in another city. Or country even. Remember chowsamsee? Chop suey, lemonchicken, honeykingprawns, beefinblackbeansauce? Odd dishes. Not bad necessarily. Just odd.Don’t get me wrong; I think Australian Chinese food is a genuine cuisine in and of itself, a mélange, a bizarre blend of food from Hong Kong, combined with dishes from Singapore and California, all filtered through Australian ingredients, tastes, and food trends. It’s been growing for years too; the Lone Hand magazine had a story about Chinese food in Sydney, written in 1907! But unfortunately, most of these dishes (which, apart from the chop suey, were basically good) were cooked appallingly.
Now of course, Chinese food in Australia is getting scary-good. It’s still a separate cuisine to traditional Chinese food, but it’s shucking off a lot of its take-away roots. From my house, I can get the bus up to Rockdale and buy a box of siumei (mixed barbecued meat). I can get the train to Hurstville and sit down to a bowl of conjee with rousing (meat wool) and xuèguǒdòng (blood jelly). I can get a bus to Glebe and choose between two great Sichuan restaurants, where they serve a mean huíguōròu (twice-cooked pork) and fuqifeipian (spiced beef and tongue), which is amazing. (They serve duck tongues too!). And I can get the train from Rockdale station to Central, walk to Dixon St and get a dish of loumei (red-cooked offal), which is also pretty good.
Additionally, a lot of Modern Australian cuisine dishes use Chinese ingredients, cooking methods, and flavour combinations; I had a dish at a Modern Australian cuisine restaurant, in South King Street, in Newtown, some years ago, which was amazing. It was Spanish-style poached and roasted pork belly, served on a bed of stir-fried wom-bok, with hoisin sauce, crisp-fried jamón ibérico, and chicken jus. It was glorious!
Anyhoo. You might be wondering what I’m getting at in this post. I make a dish called Rusty Nails
(生鏽的釘子, shēng xiù de dīngzǐ), which is my take on a proper Chinese dish called Imperial Beef, a registered recipe of the Beijing Cooking Academy. It’s been changed a bit (tomato ketchup instead of cooked tomato sauce and tamarind, etc), but it’s still good. The original is very good. Really good. Well, some might call it staggeringly good. And here it is. My recipe for…
Rusty Nails
Ingredients.
* 500g lean steak, salt, pepper, 1 tsp grated ginger, 1 tsp crushed garlic, sesame oil, dry sherry, MSG, 1 egg-white, 1 tsp sodium bi-carbonate, 1 cup seasoned cornflour, peanut oil
* 2 tbsp tomato ketchup, 1 tbsp Worcester sauce, 2 tbsp hoi sin sauce, 1 cup brown bean sauce, ¼ cup sugar, chilli oil
* 1 sliced onion, 1 cup julienned carrot, 1 cup julienned bamboo shoots
Slice the steak into strips. Transfer it to a plastic container with a lid. Add a pinch of salt, some pepper, the ginger and garlic, a good few splashes of sesame oil, a shot or so of sherry, a pinch of MSG, the egg-white and the sodium
bi-carbonate, dissolved in a little warm water. Mix the steak around with your hands, until the meat is all coated with the marinade mixture. Put the meat in the fridge and marinate it overnight.
Drain the meat from the marinade. Dredge the meat pieces in the cornflour and fry them in hot peanut oil, in two or three batches, for a minute or so. Drain the pieces and put them aside.
In a bowl, combine the ketchup, the Worcester sauce, the hoi sin sauce, the bean sauce, the sugar, a few splashes of sesame oil, the chilli oil, and some salt and pepper. Put it aside.
Gently fry the onion in a wok with the carrots and bamboo shoots for five minutes. Remove them to a bowl. Add another a tablespoon of oil to the wok and heat it well. Add the fried meat and toss it around for a minute or two. Quickly pour in the sauce and toss it around for a couple of minutes. Return the vegetables and toss them all together.
Serves four.
There! If you want to make Imperial Beef instead, don’t put the carrot or bamboo in and fry some dried chillies in the oil with the onion. My brother, who taught me to cook it, uses fresh pineapple pieces too, but let’s not get carried away.
