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Enriching the Flavour of Vegetables
Bamboo Sauté
Appears in
By Hsiang Ju Lin and Tsuifeng Lin
Published 1957
The gastronome is perhaps a kind of fool, getting excited about things of no importance. Why not just eat and be done with it? Life would be so simple if we tasted nothing. But this is impossible. Tastes good and bad are long-drawn-out things, like sights and sounds. How can one taste vegetables and not find them sweet, bland, acerbic, thin or acrid? Simply cooked vegetables come only as a relief, like a drink of water. But, as someone said, there are twenty kinds of water.
Sights and sounds have depth, and so should taste. It is not enough to eat sweets as children do, to be swallowed and forgotten. The palate likes convoluted tastes, one leading to another in unexpected paths. In short, the flavour should be nung, rich. This does not usually exist in nature (though ripe bananas are nung) and the natural taste must be rounded out by supporting seasoning to give it the necessary depth of flavour. The object of the seasoning is not to mask the natural taste, but to enhance it. The flavour should be very distinct, not necessarily simple.