Summer has announced itself in DC. Last week saw a string of muggy 90°F days, giving way this week to dry, cool breezes, plentiful sun, and clear skies. This took the edge off my nostalgia for Maine.

But I have another kind of homesickness. It’s been five years since I last saw China, and of everything there I miss the food the most.

My family is from Shaanxi, a province on the Yellow River plateau whose arid, hot summers and freezing dry winters seem to take their cue from the Mongolian steppes to the north. The river’s color is from loess–a mixture of silt and sand that makes up much of the arable land in the region. Loess is fertile, but erodes instantly off of farms and into waterways when it rains. Before hydroelectric dams put a stop to seasonal floods, the river would overflow with churning, opaque yellow water on a regular basis, an eerie sight that has inspired centuries’ worth of paintings and poems. There is even a “Yellow River” piano concerto.

Shaanxi’s largest city is Xi’an, the Qin imperial capital, known best to foreigners for the tomb of the Qin emperor. Powerful, paranoid, and not lacking for slave labor, he buried himself with an imposing–and impotent–entourage of 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots, 520 horses, and 150 cavalry horses, all made of terracotta clay.

Locals, however, see in Xi’an a city of extremes, crowded with 8 million sweaty (or shivering) souls, their wrinkle-tanned faces caked with smog and silt when they’re not chapped from wind and frost. Streets are lined with stands serving 羊肉泡 (“yáng ròu pào”, chunks of lamb stewed with partially baked bread), 凉皮 (“liáng pí”, a noodle made from steamed wheat flour dough whose gluten has been laboriously washed away), and my favorite: cumin-crusted deep-fried whole-quail-on-a-stick (which goes by the nondescript 炸鹌鹑, “zhá ān chún”, literally “fried quail”).

In Shaanxi, as elsewhere, the elements inspire the cuisine. Flavors are spartan, surprisingly complex, and often unforgiving.

Almost all dishes are topped with three key ingredients. Chili oil is ubiquitous. The Shaanxi variety is made by pouring hot oil over crushed sun-dried chilies. The oil is fire-orange, has a round, toasty flavor, satisfying but intense to unpracticed tastebuds.

Dishes also tend to come with a liberal dose of garlic–sliced, chopped, or crushed. Northwestern Chinese¹ also have a rustic habit of eating whole cloves of garlic, straight up or pickled in a brine of vinegar and brown sugar. Shaanxi isn’t the best place for first dates.

Black rice vinegar, the most sophisticated cousin in a family that also includes red, white, and sushi varieties, completes the triumvirate. Like its relatives, black rice vinegar is fermented from glutinous rice, using yeast that convert the rice starches to alcohol. Stopping here, the process would yield rice wine, except that in vinegar, bacteria is added in a last step to convert the alcohol to acid. Black vinegar has a smoky taste, a hint of caramel, and an acidity that dissolves bone. Whenever fish spines caught in my throat, my mom instructed me to drink straight vinegar until the spines simply melted. This is a common and necessary remedy, owing less to the acidity of the vinegar–black rice vinegar is less acidic than Western distilled white vinegar–than to the Chinese taste for spiny fish. I’m talking about those species that are avoided as inedible by most other cultures, because they sport a proliferation of tiny, needle-like bones that can’t be separated from fillets by cutting or by cooking. But the Chinese find them delicious steamed–so long as a bottle of vinegar is kept on hand.

Other classic Shaanxi flavorings include sesame (seeds or oil), green onion (chopped and thrown into soups and stir-fries), cilantro, cumin, and Szechuan peppercorns, the latter famous as perhaps the only spice that is also a local anesthetic. The peppercorns feature prominently in the cuisine of the nearby province of Sichuan, where they provide a flavor known in Chinese as 麻 (“má”)–or literally, “numb”, because of the effect it has on your tastebuds and mouth. Dishes featuring 麻辣 (“má là”, “spicy and numb”) are popular in Shaanxi, if not quite ubiquitous as they are in Sichuan. Our gustatory pain tolerance is considerable, but that of the Sichuanese is legendary.

Amidst these thoughts, I decided to cook a Shaanxi dinner tonight–spicy egg drop soup with tomato and tofu, and a tangy garlic and cucumber salad. The recipe is in the next post.