Preparation and cooking time: 30 minutes
Serves: 2 adults
Ingredients
1 large or 2-3 small bok choy
140 g oyster mushrooms
handful (50 g) edamame beans
5 g dried mushrooms (eg porcini, shitake)
2 spring onions
3 cloves garlic
2 cm ginger root
2 T sesame oil
1 T dark soya sauce
1/2 t sichuan pepper
1 t black or white peppercorns
1/2 t chili flakes
3 whole star anise
1 cinnamon stick
50 g raw, hulled peanuts (omit if preferred)
1 small leek
1 L water
2 servings udon noodles
Method
30 minutes before serving. Boil 1 L of water. Roughly chop the whole leek, removing any dirt. Place it into a pot with the water, 1 peeled clove of garlic, 2 star anise and half of the cinnamon stick. Boil to make a stock.
25 minutes before serving, thinly slice oyster mushrooms lengthwise. Place into a wok or frying pan and cook on a medium heat with 1 tablespoon of sesame oil, for around 10 minutes, until softened but still with some bite.
Prepare your vegetables. Slice the spring onions and the bok choy, separating the greens and whites; finely chop 2 peeled cloves of garlic and the ginger root.
Meanwhile, make your five-spice mix. Place 1/2 teaspoon of sichuan pepper, 1 teaspoon of peppercorns, 1/2 teaspoon of chili flakes, 1 small star anise and a few fragments of the cinnamon stick in a mortar and pestle. Pound to powder. A little texture here is okay, but avoid any whole peppercorns.
15 minutes before serving. Take 50 ml of stock (avoiding any vegetables) and place in a small bowl with the dried mushrooms, so they can reconstitute.
Add the spring onions, finely chopped garlic and ginger to the wok, along with the remainder of the cinnamon stick into the wok as well. Cook for a further 2 minutes, before adding the crisp sliced whites from the bok choy stalks.
Add your five-spice mix to the wok along with the second tablespoon of sesame oil and 1 tablespoon of dark soya sauce. Stir to coat the vegetables.
10 minutes before serving, remove vegetables and spices from stock. Bring to the boil and cook the udon noodles in it. Once cooked through, drain.
5 minutes before serving, add the reconstituted dried mushrooms to the stirfry along with their liquid, the greens from the bok choy and the edamame beans. Cook until most of the liquid has evaporated.
In a frying pan, dry roast the peanuts for around 1 minute until roasted golden. Pay careful attention that they do not burn. Add roasted peanuts to the stirfry.
To serve, remove cinnamon stick from wok. Place the noodles into bowls and top with the stirfry. Garnish with the green spring onions and a sprinkle of chili flakes.
The story behind the recipe…
Nearly two weeks after first contracting Covid, I wake up at 4 o’clock in the morning. An alarm bell has gone off in my head alerting me that something is missing, but I cannot immediately figure it out. I go to the bathroom, wash my hands and sniff the soap from force of habit. There is the faintest hum of bergamot but none of the upper citrus tones I expect. My nose is clear, but my sense of smell, so familiar, so unerringly reliable, is almost entirely gone. Padding downstairs, I sniff things as I go (my underarms, a pair of shoes, a pot of peanut butter; nil, nil, a hint of something rancid). Boiling the water for tea, I see that it is snowing, heavy, sleety snow. The pot plants on our balcony are coated with white, there are dramatic flurries in the yellow light of the streetlamps. We’ve had a run of clear, almost summery weather and now there is snow and it is as if the cold has crept into my sinuses, freezing over the synapses that connect nose to brain. The teabag is wasted, I taste no peppermint, no chamomile, only hot water.
My sense of smell has been unreliable for the past few days, slipping to and fro, my sinuses blocking and then clearing suddenly. My smell never leaves entirely, but whole swathes of flavours disappear, as if half of the rainbow is gone leaving only the darkest colours, as if van Gogh had never moved to France, had never painted sunflowers. I can still taste sweet and salty and spicy, a few narrow hints of flavour, but the upper and lower registers are sliced away. It is profoundly disconcerting, as the wonderful Annie Wu talks about in her newsletter In Search of Lost Smell.
I trusted my nose. I prided myself on my nose. I would happily eat products well past their use-by date as long as they passed the sniff test. I loved to reverse engineer dishes, trying to guess the ingredients, the spices, the herbs. I once took part in a very democratic wine-tasting quiz, which relied not on obscure knowledge of French vintages, but on your ability to match the wine you were tasting to one of the multi-choice descriptions. Passionfruit, lawnmower clippings, floral honey, apricots (viognier?), the minerality of quartz river rocks drying in the sun, the industrial sharpness of rain on hot concrete. Our team took a case of champagne home along with a whole new vocabulary. I did wine-tasting courses, learned how to hold a glass like a pro, to place too-cold red wine in the microwave to bring it to the right temperature (a Master of Wine taught me that, no jokes). I had whole wheels of flavours at my disposal. And now my nose was compromised, muted, unreliable.
Your mind plays tricks with you, makes you wonder whether you have really lost anything. Perhaps your morning porridge was always this bland. It is porridge after all, almost the definition of bland. But no, your smell is really gone. Suddenly, texture feels so important, texture is all you have. The fat of the cashew nuts coating your mouth, their crunch, the soft, chewy shapes of the whole oats and the jelly-like chia seeds, the swollen balloons of dried blueberries, the crystalline teaspoon of honey, and, over all of it, a heavy blanket of cloud, blocking out the flavours.
Chinese cuisine, as I learned from reading the incredible Fuschia Dunlop’s memoir, prioritises texture as well as flavour. This is why shark fins, horrifically, are so prized in China: for their texture. At first, the idea of texture seemed an anathema to vegetarian cooking. There is no crunch of bone, no sucking of marrow, no crispy skin. But perhaps texture is still there to be played with. Perhaps texture itself could communicate flavour to my brain, help me fill in the gaps that my sinuses were blocking, cue me into taste by the sheer familiarity of its feel in my mouth. How many textures could be layered into one dish?
In conceiving this week’s recipe, I drew on Fuschia Dunlop’s cookbook Land of Plenty, about Sichuan cooking, and especially the components of her Five Spiced “Smoked” Fish (wu xiang xun yu). I wanted the slipperiness of udon noodles, the brittle crunch of peanuts, the bite of raw spring onions, the give of cooked oyster mushrooms, the denser sponge of dried porcini or shitake mushrooms when reconstituted, the satisfying mouthfeel of an edamame bean, a touch of slurpable broth, the mouth-numbing (ma) from the sichuan peppercorns (use with moderation and omit if you can’t find them), the heat from the chili (la). What is the texture of bok choy? When cooked, it is the juicy, celery-like crispness of the white ends, the melting softness of the greens as they meld with the spring onions.
Only after I have shopped for a few stray ingredients, after I have returned home, after I am in the kitchen, after darkness is already beginning to fall, only then does my smell return to itself. I taste the dish and it is incredible, the sesame and the spices are perfumed but also subtle, not overwhelming, allowing the vegetables to sing. I realise I may not be the most objective judge all things considered, but seriously, please do try it, I’m really excited about this one. Also, my heart goes out to everyone who lost their smell more permanently, I count myself lucky that I only had to contend with the strange cotton-wool land of odourless food for a few days.
Amelia.