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Vegetarian JournalExcerptsJanuary/February 1997 |
Check out the recipes!
"This I've got to see for myself!" I said when I learned from a friend
that there are several Chinese vegetarian restaurants serving shrimp, squid,
abalone, tuna, and other varieties of seafood in New York's Chinatown.
Not
possible, I thought. They're breaking one of the most sacred menu codes
of strictly vegetarian Buddhist restaurants: "Thou shalt not serve any
kind of meat whatsoever, lest a customer chance ingesting a close relative
working out a previous life on the reincarnation cycle."
"Don't worry about it," counseled my friend Bing Lee. "This seafood is made from vegetable substitutes. What's interesting is that it's not another meat replacement."
The next day Bing--artist, vegetarian, and regular patron of Vegetarian's Shangri-La--and I went for dinner. We entered the Mott Street location in Manhattan. It was surprisingly busy, inhabited mostly by young Western couples. I was not encouraged by the fact that there were no Chinese patrons. Why? As every New Yorker knows, if the ethnics eat there it's a sign of authenticity and real home cooking.
I read Shangri-La's menu while waiting to be seated. Indeed, they're serving dishes in the traditional Chinese style with "seafood," only the seafood is made from taro powder, soybean protein, yam flour, wheat gluten powder, assorted herbs and spices, and a bit of shredded vegetables added for appropriate color.
"Why are they doing this?" I asked Bing as we sat down. "Aren't there enough Chinese vegetarian dishes to please the Buddhists without pseudo seafood?" "Sure there are," he replied. "But this place is really about our culture and identity. We Chinese love our traditional cooking so much that we had to invent seafood substitutes for the strict Buddhists, especially the ones who come from seacoast cities. The company that makes this 'seafood' is owned by a Buddhist family. So is this restaurant."
We ordered several vegetarian appetizers, "fish ball" noodle soup, and two main dishes: "squid" with green peppers and "shrimp" with cashews. They were really delicious! I hadn't had seafood in 25 years. Yet, this dinner brought back that long dormant taste memory.
"I'm convinced," I told Bing. "This is a great idea. I have to track down the supplier!"
He told the owner of the restaurant what I wanted to know. As he gave me the company's name he said, "You don't want to go there. It's very dangerous. Many gangs. Fortunately, the company delivers." Hmm.
Indeed, the address was listed in the telephone directory at the east end of Delancey Street on the Lower East Side. This is a perpetual "neighborhood in transition," a euphemism in New York for less affluent areas with many new immigrants. The word on the street around there is "get out before dark," unless you're a member of one of the gangs that hang out under the Williamsburg Bridge.
I called to set up an early meeting with Daisy, Raymond, James, and Luisa. They're the east coast area distributors for what I've come to call "virtual seafood."
"Our products come from Taiwan and Hong Kong," Daisy told me. "They are made by a master scientist who is also a faithful Buddhist. All the employees are members of our Buddhist Temple in Taiwan and here. They have never eaten meat since they took their vows to the Buddha for the love of animals and man."
Well, that summed up the theology, but what about the products? They handed me a catalog with six frozen and nine packaged seafood products, among the regular meat substitutes, made by Shin-Der Enterprises. "Shin-Der means 'Ethics of God' in Chinese," Daisy proclaimed with a glowing smile.
"You can make many different kinds of Chinese-style dishes," added James, a former waiter in a Chinese restaurant. "But, you can also make great tuna salad for sandwiches."
"Do Taiwanese eat a lot of tuna salad sandwiches?" I asked.
"We are very Western in some ways," he answered.
It was getting on towards late afternoon on this winter's day. By the time we finished talking about Buddhist vegetarians, Chinese culture, and cooking methods, I started to muse about how it wouldn't do to get mugged with a load of virtual seafood in my possession. The gangs might think this stuff is contraband in disguise. How could I explain it? Then again, maybe I could teach them about the spiritual and physical advantages of vegetarianism. How real peace begins when we stop eating animals. Yeah, right! They'd respond by throwing me in the East River. How easily transcendent fantasies and New York paranoia mingle at those dangerous dusk hours.
I warily left the warehouse, weighted down with a variety of consumer-size packages. Outside the warehouse I quickly caught a cab by the bridge exit that runs from Brooklyn. I was feeling safe, but I started worrying about the vegetarians I'd just met. Are they too peaceful and innocent for this neighborhood, I wondered? Nah, I speculated. I'm sure The Buddha protects babies and sincere veggies with his invisible hand.
Once safely home I looked up recipes that I've always wanted to try with seafood. Why? Because I wanted to show my friends that now I could make the same seafood dishes at home that they always did. Because now there is a way to eat everything they eat so they don't have to treat me differently. Because they need to know that besides tofu, tempeh, and gluten meat substitutes, now there are fish and seafood substitutes that will change the way vegetarians eat and entertain.
Go ahead, I mused, invite me to your barbecues. Not only will I bring the veggie burgers, but from now on I'll arrive with a few skewers of virtual shrimp-ball kebabs. Then I'll throw a few shrimp on the barbee, as they say Down Under. Yes, of course I'll let you try them. But only once, because next time, you buy!
The most difficult part of testing virtual seafood is comparing the taste to real seafood. For this I enlisted the aid of my housemate Elner, who is a mari-vegetarian: I call her that because she's a "vegetarian" who doesn't eat land-based animals, yet eats fish and seafood.
Philosophically she says, "I won't eat the flesh of any animal that knows its own mother. Fish and other sea animals don't seem to have any relationship to a maternal entity in any way, shape, or form--at least, none that I can see."
This may be her definition, but what it really means is she can go out with her friends to almost any restaurant and enjoy something other than salad with side vegetables. I asked her to help in judging the verisimilitude of the virtual.
I served up the "squid" in fresh tomato sauce first. "It almost tastes like squid," Elner said. "Certainly the texture is there. I can actually feel the squid more than I can taste it."
Texture, texture, all is texture. The look is almost there. The color is almost there. But, ah, the feel of virtual seafood in the mouth, that's where the processor has succeeded. Is texture the secret of virtuality? She told me that what we were eating had exactly the same texture as calamares, the smallest, tenderest variety of squids. The shallow, crosshatched interiors of squid, the resistance to the bite, the chew and roll on the tongue--these were as close to squid as one could get without a forbidden food entering the lips.
The shrimp, on the other hand, were curled, tailless, shelless, legless, headless; in a perfectly cleaned and washed state, ready to be added to the garlic sauce. I tasted one of them straight from the package. Well, almost tasteless. I hoped Irish rock sea salt, ground to a fine powder, sprinkled over the shrimp and allowed to soak in for an hour in the refrigerator would help. When I sampled them again I could taste a bit of the oceans from whence they didn't come.
Several days later I made a tuna salad with Dijon mustard-tofu mayonnaise from one package of frozen tuna. Elner and I devoured the spicy tuna salad on toasted French bread. She had eaten real tuna salad sandwiches for many years before she met me. "Tastes more like lumpy Dijon mayonnaise than tuna salad to me," she repeated between bites, "but the texture is right."
I pan fried the second tuna steak package in a flour and garlic powder coating, serving it on rice with a scallion-lemon mayonnaise. First though, I tried a bit of the tuna after it defrosted. It didn't need salting. In fact, I washed off the liquid it came in. That made it a little less salty.
On the plate, the sauce once again dominated the substance. "Yes, it flakes on the fork like tuna," said Elner, "but it's just not."
The real point and purpose of all this virtual seafood texturing, flavoring, manufacturing, packaging, recipe writing, and business is to keep Chinese culinary traditions alive while not forsaking Buddhist doctrines. If you're a strict vegetarian, Buddhist and all other beliefs included, you know how it feels to go out with a group of people who order everything you can't eat. Chances are that won't change--unless you introduce the products of Shin-Der to your favorite Chinese restaurant. Go ahead, tell the owners about virtual seafood. What do you have to lose? Tell them the company packages the same products in restaurant sizes. The cooks know what it's all about. They just don't know you want ituntil you tell them.
-- The importer of Shin-Der products is Good Taste Vegetarian Food Imports located at 204 Delancey Street, New York, NY 10002. Drop them a SASE for a catalog.
SQUID IN FRESH TOMATO SAUCE
(Serves 4)
Sample this pseudo squid.
The Vegetarian Journal published here is not the complete issue, but these are excerpts from the published magazine. Anyone wanting to see everything should subscribe to the magazine.
Thanks to volunteer Jeanie Freeman for converting this article to HTML
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