The pig – lovable primarily to followers of “Babe,”
Piglet in “Winnie the Pooh,” or Miss Piggy from the
Muppets – doesn’t get much respect beyond its place in the food chain.
But our porcine friend comes into its own in less than a week, when the Chinese New Year of 4705 ushers in the Year of the Boar.
The New Year, also known as the Spring Festival, is the most important of Chinese festivals. It begins Sunday and
continues through March 5. The 15-day celebration launches Sunday with
megameals in restaurants and private homes through the metropolitan area.
One such home belongs to retired surgeon LeRoy Stahlgren and his wife, Diana Y. Lee. Lee was born in China and grew up in a household where the preparation of meals was always taken seriously, using the freshest of ingredients.
Their New Year’s meal, which will feature 10 courses and two desserts, has been assembled in stages, starting as far out as a month.
“In my family we made our own Peking Duck,” she says.
Lee and her husband are in the breakfast room of their Denver home, amid large vases she has filled with red, gold and silver flowers.
“Food is prepared with love, as a gift to those who eat it. It’s easy to say ‘I love you’ but an elaborate meal, shows ‘this is how much you mean to me,”‘ says Lee. “The New Year’s eve meal is like Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter all rolled into one. Completely over the top.”
Exotic mushrooms
She is putting finishing touches on two of the courses she will serve at her New Year’s dinner.
She places a colorful assortment of vegetables to be stir-fried in a wide shallow bowl. Called “Twelve Guards of the Buddha,” it is better known to Westerners as
“Buddha’s Delight.”
It includes broccoli florets, fresh water chestnuts, tiger lily buds, gingko nuts and four kinds of mushrooms – some rather exotic.
The cloud’s ear and black mushrooms are familiar, but the more exotic ones, the “dry hair” and “white bamboo grove” varieties are not.
“You must taste them to fully appreciate the delicate flavor,” Lee says. “They must be cooked quickly at a very hot temperature so that they don’t lose color and texture. There should be no liquid left in the wok when they are done.”
Easy for her to say. Lee has a six-burner Viking stove installed to a height suitable for wok cookery.
“You need hot, hot, hot, for authentic wok cooking,” she says. “The reason most people can’t make good stir fries is because the wok doesn’t get hot enough.”
As she talks, Lee puts the finishing touches on potstickers. With impressive speed she deftly places a circle of dough on her granite-topped counter and, with chopsticks and a small wooden spatula, lowers her meat mixture into the center, dampens the outer rim with water and folds it over, crimping the edges with her thumb and index fingers as she speaks.
“These are the shape of gold bouillon in the old days,” she says, crimping one and moving to the next. “You have to do this seven times to make the half-moon shape that creates a flat bottom.”
In no time she has filled a deep frying pan with dumplings. The bottom already has been coated with canola oil and before long they are sizzling.
As though endowed with a built-in timer, Lee returns to the pan, checks the dumplings and they are perfectly golden brown on the bottom.
“To the Chinese, there is no danger of having too much of a good thing,” Lee says. “We believe more is better, but much more is even much better.
“The grand-celebration dinner features vegetable, meat and fish courses that repeat the recurring themes of prosperity. Dishes include whole duck and chicken, both of which symbolize wealth; fish, to symbolize plenty; and shrimp for career and/or academic advancements are mainstays, as are vegetarian dishes, which symbolize homage to one’s ancestors.”
The elaborate effort that goes into food preparation is a time-honored way to demonstrate the fond regard family members have for one another, she says.
Lee has two older brothers, both of whom are good cooks too. Not only did her father have discerning tastes, she says, her mother came from a family of gourmets who even made their own soy sauce.
Lee learned from recipes that belonged to her mother and grandmother. The idea was not so much to memorize the recipes but to make the dish a little better with each preparation. To this day she measures by intuition, not with spoons and cups.
Month of cooking
In between traveling for business, fly fishing, arranging flowers and climbing mountains – she is a mechanical engineer and president of Lee & Associates, a division of Lee Energy Associates, Inc., – she cooks.
In fact, Lee began preparing for her New Year’s dinner more than a month ago, which includes, yes, making her own Lotus Buns and Peking Duck, a process that takes days to just get started.
She also decorates in the spirit of the season.
As she pours jasmine tea into traditional tiny Chinese tea cups, Lee describes the New Year traditions she grew up with, including an explanation of why some call the holiday the Year of the Boar, while others call it the Year of the Pig.
“In the West, ‘boar’ sounds better than ‘pig’ because pigs are associated with filth and things like that, but in fact pigs are very smart,” she says. “They hold a different place in Eastern culture.”
On New Year’s Eve, gate posts, door frames,panels, kitchen, stove, bedside tables and halls are adorned colored papers decorated with calligraphic representations – red for happiness, gold, for wealth. Blessings of good fortune, prosperity, longevity, peace and harmony are dominant themes. But all of the decorative motifs are essentially a backdrop for the food.
Suddenly Lee remembers she hasn’t made a salad to accompany the dumplings and vegetables. She takes a mallet into her perfectly manicured hands, whacks the daylights out of a few cucumbers, then breaks them into pieces. With a dash of sugar, and a few splashes of rice vinegar, sesame oil and soy sauce, she adds the resulting cucumber salad to the table.
Her guests, all wielding red chopsticks, dig in to the prelude of what promises to be a true New Year’s feast.
Staff writer Ellen Sweets can be reached at 303-954-1284 or esweets@denverpost.com.
Lunar-year lore
The 360-day lunar year is divided into 12 days of 30 days each, with full moons falling on the 15th day of each month. Don’t try to figure this out based on the Gregorian calendar.
Or, if you insist, read on: To calibrate the orbital cycles between the moon and the Earth, a leap month of 30 days is added every four years.
Now, the Chinese New Year is always on the first day of the first moon, which explains why the Chinese New Year Day falls on a different date each year during the months of January and February in the Gregorian calendar.
So going back to 2698 B.C., the lunar calendar predated the Gregorian one by a mere 4,280 years.
– Ellen Sweets
