Life and Leisure

Eileen's world of food

By Mike Peters (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-09-13 15:44

Eileen Wen Mooney is passionate about food in print and in person. Mike Peters follows her on the foodie trail.

Veteran food writer Eileen Wen Mooney walks along Xin Yuan Nan Lu at a sedate pace. But something happens when she steps into Beijing's San Yuan Li market.

"Can you keep up with a hummingbird?" laughs her friend Mary Peng, as Mooney zooms past the first two stalls to settle in front of the fruit boxes arrayed at No. 16.

"Look at the produce here, just marvelous," Mooney says, poking her finger into a bin of green-purple fruits about the size of nubbly golf balls. "Know what these are?"

The smiling vendor obliging plucks three perfectly ripe lychees, pinching open the leathery peel as she hands them around.

We slurp the sweet, juicy flesh like oysters off the half shell. We smile. We'll take some. And we're off again, snatching chrysanthemum leaves for hot pot at one stall, a huge bag of fresh mint at another, hefty Chinese green onions at yet another.

"They are not leeks," Mooney says, "more like big scallions - softer than leeks, and so good!" The words are barely out of her mouth before she's gone again.

"Is she at the tofu lady?" Peng asks, before she spots her friend chatting with "her mushroom lady" and loading up on long, meaty fungi the shape and size of small water bottles.

An hour later, Mooney would be speaking to expatriates at an International Newcomers Network meeting, unloading her shopping bag for a tabletop tour: bitter melon ("stir-fry it with black bean paste"), silk melon ("it's loofah - stir fry it, too"), aged vinegar from Shaanxi province ("popular in Beijing with dumplings") and rice-based black vinegar ("it cuts the greasiness of braised meats").

"This place is a treasure," Mooney says of the tunnel-like San Yuan Li market near the Capital Mansion. "Come here early in the morning and you can see the tops chefs in Beijing checking out what's fresh today."

Mooney knows the secrets of Beijing chefs because she's been tracking them for years. A long-time dining-out columnist, her 2008 book includes her "140 favorite restaurants" in China's culinary capital.

She fell into "being a foodie" when she and journalist husband Paul Mooney moved to Beijing about 15 years ago and began exploring the city's food culture. Growing up in a Hakka Chinese family in Bali, she moved to Taiwan as a teen and experienced a panorama of Chinese food.

"It was remarkable to me that the preparation of food was treated as a science," she says, "whether at a fancy hotel or a hawker's stand."

But when she got to Beijing, "it just made me mad to see all the people coming to the capital and all they knew to look for was Peking duck, Peking duck, Peking duck!" She knew there had to be a food culture here, and one day she set out on her bicycle to find it.

"Of course, it's here if you look for it," she says, her eyes brightening as she remembers finding Feng and his baodu (flash-braised tripe) as she pedaled along one hutong. Another day, in a Muslim district, she discovered shao yang rou, lamb that's braised and then deep-fried crispy, to be sliced as snacks or served with noodles.

But as development decimates hutong communities, she says, "many traditional foods are going away, and family-run restaurants are being replaced by franchises."

The fact that all styles of cooking have converged on the capital is both good and bad, she says.

"On the one hand, the best of China has been brought here. On the other, if it all gets blended together, the individual character is lost." For instance, she says, it's hard to find a "Beijing restaurant" without some Sichuan dishes scattered through the menu.

She said in an online interview earlier this year:"In 2004 I started my hunt for Beijing snack foods. And then in 2005, 2006, Qianmen was demolished. The laozi hao (old-timer) vendors around Qianmen closed down and moved to the little hutong in the Houhai area (Jiumen Xiaochi at Xiaoyou Hutong). In that tiny little courtyard place, there are 12 to 15 of them." You can still find them, she promises.

It was that sense of potential loss that inspired Mooney's inner writer: Soon she was writing a "find of the month" column for That's Beijing, and her exploration of restaurants culminated in her 2008 book Beijing Eats: A Food Lover's Companion to China's Culinary Capital.

That done, she shifted food gears, focusing more on cooking at home, developing her cooking school and reviving her blog, eileeneats.com.

"I'm so grateful to have grown up in Bali, in a place where there was no processed food. People went door-to-door selling food hanging from two poles, with live chickens balanced on their heads. That's fresh, seasonal food - and that's still what good cooking and eating should be."