All week, I've been travelling. On Sunday, I nibbled on samsa, cumin-scented pastries stuffed with lamb, ate baked lamb-filled pastries and slurped the slippery hand-pulled noodles traditionally eaten by Uighurs, a Chinese minority. The restaurant, Taklamakan, is named for the expansive desert in western China where the Uighurs live in a string of oases along the Silk Route.
On Tuesday, I ate shapale, fluted golden pastries, deep-fried at the back of Shangri-La Produce, a Tibetan corner store. We watched the taciturn man at the back of the shop roll out the thin dough with a wooden pin, and when we carried the paper bag of pastries outside, the minced beef fillings steamed in the cool April afternoon. We had to hold the shapale carefully, so the onion-scented juices didn't run out.
On Thursday, I found myself cross-legged on a Tibetan rug, dipping steamed beef momos into chili sauce with Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford, two veteran travellers and cookbook writers. And I hadn't even hopped on a plane.
It's easy to equate Chinese food with Cantonese cuisine in Toronto. After all, so many of our restaurants are Cantonese, often by way of Hong Kong or Taiwan. But if you know where to look, there are plenty of other Chinese cuisines to choose from in this city.
My week of culinary exploration (to Mississauga for Uighur cooking, Parkdale for Tibetan) had been prompted by Ms. Duguid's and Mr. Alford's latest book, Beyond the Great Wall, which was published last week. Filled with gorgeous photos of landscapes and tribal costumes, mini-memoirs and anecdotes, Beyond the Great Wall is a kind of Rosetta stone to the diverse cultures of China's minority peoples, who live in the geographically vast expanses beyond the Great Wall but are often relegated to the fringes of Han-dominated Chinese society.
"We've always been drawn to stateless people, to people living on the margins," Ms. Duguid explained as she adjusted a brass-buttoned jacket that Mr. Alford bought for her in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
The couple's timing couldn't have been better: As the world gears up for the Beijing Olympics, stories about Tibet and even the Uighurs (who don't have the benefit of Richard Gere or the Dalai Lama to publicize their struggle for autonomy) seem to be hitting the papers almost daily.
Ms. Duguid and Mr. Alford met at the Snowland Hotel in Tibet in the 1980s, a few years after the first foreign visitors were allowed into Tibet, and they live in a skinny Victorian semi on one of Chinatown's last leafy streets.
They were clearly in their element at Parkdale's Shangri-La restaurant (not to be confused with Shangri-La Produce, the nearby corner store selling shapale). Within minutes, Ms. Duguid was chatting with its owner, Dawa Tsering, discussing the finer points of pleating dumplings. Mr. Tsering pleated his in a more sophisticated fashion - like the crescents you'd see in the capital of Lhasa; the ones on the cover of Beyond the Great Wall were more homespun and rustic.
Mr. Tsering, like many of the thousands of Tibetans living in Parkdale, grew up in exile. He came to Toronto by way of New York, where he spent 10 years cooking Cajun food. Even so, he recognized many of the Tibetan pictures in Beyond the Great Wall. His parents both came from nomadic families who tended sheep high in the mountains and traded meat for tsampa, the staple grain of Tibetan cooking, made from ground roasted barley grown in the valleys. An ingenious solution to the challenge of cooking at high altitudes, tsampa is lightweight, keeps well and needs no further cooking to make it digestible. Mr. Tsering didn't have any tsampa soups on the menu, though. "Most people don't know what it is," he explained.
Much to Ms. Duguid's disappointment, the little convenience shop down the street, which stocks copies of the Potala Press and Tibetan beef jerky, was all out of tsampa. "A customer was making puja," the cashier said. "They took the last 10 bags."
"It's such a gorgeous grain, sprinkled on yogurt or stirred into soup. I often add a few handfuls to my bread dough," she said as we brushed past a woman in traditional Tibetan dress. "She's from Lhasa," Ms. Duguid said. "You can tell by the way she wears her apron."
Parkdale is home to one of the largest Tibetan communities outside India and Nepal, and the influence is palpable: There are restaurants and shops catering to the community; even the 1960s butcher shop, Cattleman Meat Market, has a portrait of the Dalai Lama on the wall, which serenely oversees the sale of Tibetan blood sausage in winter.
Though I used to live in Parkdale and often go back to visit friends, that Thursday lunch felt exotic. It was a reminder of the Tibetan meals I shared in Nepal and India many years ago. Even more salient, it was a reminder that travelling is as much a state of mind as it is a physical journey. Next stop: Hue Chinese buns sold out of a basement on Dundas.
Sasha Chapman's column
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