I got to talking to a guy in the lineup for the Star Ferry on Kowloon peninsula, on a pleasantly warm winter day in Hong Kong. Turned out the guy was from Toronto. We chatted about the pros and cons of Hong Kong, and he said the most interesting thing: “Seeing Hong Kong, I finally understand Spadina.”
He meant, of course, the food markets, and how they compare with those on Spadina Avenue, in Toronto’s biggest Chinatown. These markets are my favourite aspect of Hong Kong, not simply for their crazy-quilt panoply of foods, but for what they explain about real Cantonese cooking. With due respect to the Chinese Canadians who are doing their level best to cook the food of their homeland in Canada, it can’t ever be the same. Maybe not even close.
The fault doesn’t lie in the quality of the cooks in Chinese kitchens in Canada, where the all-Chinese teams of cooks have both the background and the will to cook proper Chinese food.
The problem is the ingredients; and one need only visit Hong Kong to know it. I love the Chinese food stores of Toronto and Vancouver’s several Chinatowns, but even a brief tour of a food market in Hong Kong reveals the sad truth: Ours are but a pale imitation.
In Hong Kong – the inspiration for Canada’s Chinatowns – entire streets dedicate themselves to the sale of dried seafood and its concentrated flavours. There are stores that sell only live crabs. Butchers cut up whole pigs in open stalls. On vegetable stands peppers shine, spinach and cress are so fresh their spines stand tall, bok choy and a multiplicity of Chinese greens boast moisture beads on their leaves. Big fat knobs of ginger are so young their skin is pale yellow, their scent new. There are newborn fennel bulbs the size of a golf ball, and great glistening piles of star fruit, dragon fruit, longans and mangosteen – all fresh and in season in midwinter.
And there’s the rub: A Canadian cook doesn’t have such fresh ingredients. The cooked food looks pretty much the same as in Hong Kong, but at first bite you taste the difference.
It is most obvious at the fish stands in the markets. In the wet markets on Peel Street, row upon row of open foam boxes hold live (live!) fish and shellfish. Geoducks, razor clams, shrimp and clams, snails, spiny lobsters, flounder, grouper, pompano, scallops and more. A fishmonger hacks up a big grouper for a customer,and the fish’s heart is still beating when the money changes hands.
