My Favorite Cantonese Dishes of My Mother's | Food & Drink

One of the few things that I miss about NYC is the food.

You just can't compare it to anywhere else in the world. NYC is home to every culture and ethnicity there is, you don't even need to know how to speak English because you can always be certain that you will find a community from " back home" somewhere in NYC.

What I love the most about going home is having REAL Chinese food! I love all of the Chinese vegetables that aren't available in Iowa, and I especially love the fresh seafood that's caught right from the Atlantic Ocean.  

When I am coming home, my mother always knows to get a fish to cook for my first night's dinner. 

One thing I love doing with my mother is going to Chinatown with her to buy groceries.

She's most comfortable in Chinatown because there she can find people from the same village as her from China, or from nearby villages. It's that feeling of cultural communion with another person in a faraway land that makes my mother take a train ride into Manhattan instead of just walking a few blocks to the grocery markets near her.

When my mother buys groceries, she takes the M train into Chinatown and buys from the vendors who have their fruits and vegetables displayed in barrels and bins outside. I guess it's like the Midwest's version of a farmer's market, only it's year-round, and no one selling it grew it themselves. 

My favorite thing about dinner shopping with my mom in Chinatown is going to the fish markets, I LOVE seeing all of the freshly caught seafood. I can't even describe the vibrancy of it, compared to frozen fish-in-a-bag when I'm in Iowa.

I remembered when I was little and we would get crabs.

I'd play with them, I'd tried picking them up and poking at them to see if they'd snap their claws at me; sometimes I'd even get them out of the kitchen sink and put them on the counter to see them walk.  

If I was with her when she was in Chinatown to buy them, I choose one myself and it would go into the big, brown paper bag (one of the rare occasions that you don't get a red plastic bag); during the train ride home, I'd peek into the bag to see what they were doing because I just liked watching them snap their claws and move their legs. 

You can't do that with a bag of frozen, processed crab in a supermarket! 

Another seafood I loved that my mother made was spicy sea snails with a black bean sauce. Europeans call them periwinkles, but I think most Americans are just familiar with them as sea snails. 

As a kid, I thought they were the French delicacy, escargot!

Before you say you would NEVER try it; it is widely eaten as a seafood in many Mediterranean, Caribbean, European, Asian and African countries. 

There are many different methods of cooking them, with Europeans favoring a cooking method usually involving butter. Most Asians do not traditionally have cuisines that favored using diary products like butter, and instead their preferred method is usually steamed or boiled, and then a quick stirred-fry to finish. It's cooked very similar in Chinese cuisine the same way as clams are (which is another favorite shellfish of mine).

Periwinkles and escargot are both snails, but they're different species, live in different environments, and are prepared differently.

Periwinkles are small sea snails that live in saltwater along rocky coastlines. They're common seafood in many parts of the world that borders a coast. Their shells are tiny and dark, and the meat is usually extracted with a pin or toothpick, or by sucking out the snail. Periwinkles have a briny, ocean-like flavor similar to clams or mussels.

Escargot refers to edible land snails, most famously prepared in French cuisine. The snails are much larger than periwinkles and are often baked in their shells with garlic butter, parsley, and herbs. The flavor is mild and earthy, and many people say the garlic butter contributes more flavor than the snail itself.

Historically, periwinkles were a very common street food in parts of England, especially in working-class neighborhoods of London and other coastal cities. Vendors would sell them from carts or market stalls, often served in a paper bag or cup with a pin for picking the meat out of the shells. They were a cheap snack somewhat analogous to how New Yorkers once bought roasted peanuts, chestnuts, or hot dogs from street vendors.

When I mentioned it to my pen-pal of over a decade now, who lives in London, that these were one of my favorite Chinese cuisines; he surprised me by saying that it's a common street food in London that the English eat out of a paper bag and usually boiled with butter on it! (I had always thought it was considered something "exotic" that Chinese people ate instead.)

Today, you can still find winkles at some fish markets, seafood shops, and traditional seaside food stalls in England, but they're much less common than they were 50 years ago; just like how the food carts in NYC don't sell roasted chestnuts or peanuts in a bag anymore either. 

Sea snails are very popular in Cantonese cooking. In Guangdong, the region of China where the natives speak Cantonese or a local dialect of Cantonese, sea snails are as popular as clams, mussels, and other shellfish. 

A common Cantonese cooking approach is:

• Rinse them several times in cold water.
• Soak them in clean salted water for at least 30 minutes. 
• Rinse again before cooking.
• Boil or blanch the snails first, drain.
• Stir-fry them in oil with garlic, ginger, scallions, and any type of chili pepper.
• Rinse fermented black beans; smash them, add to wok.
• Add soy sauce, oyster sauce, and a little bit of water to create the sauce; some people also add a cube or two of a Chinese brand chicken bouillon. 

The flavor is savory, aromatic, and seafood-forward rather than rich and buttery like how the Europeans styles are.

It's a very different flavor profile from French escargot, where the garlic-herb butter is the star of the show. You'll definitely have to try it if you're ever in a big Chinese community population in the US, like Chinatown in NYC.

However, my ultimate favorite Chinese seafood dish is so simple and so effortless and affordable to cook — it's a whole steamed fish.

I love my mother's whole steamed fish dish.

You need a medium fish, ideally a white saltwater fish like branzino because it's easily available and it's basically foolproof. 

The ingredients are simple and inexpensive, including the fish itself. It cooks fast because fish do not take long to cook, no matter what method you use.

You steam the fish whole, leaving the head and tail intact; ideally your fish should have been scaled and gutted already at the market you bought it from. Make diagonal slits across the body of the fish. The most important part of this is to pour out the excess water that has accumulated on the plate from steaming. Then in a little sauté pan, heat up oil, ginger, scallions and cilantro and pour it over the fish. Add soy sauce on the fish too.

I know there will be people who are grossed out by this part, but my favorite part of eating a whole steamed fish is the fish eyes! I don't know why, but I just loved it as a kid, and so it stuck with me as an adult. 

Since I no longer live in NYC though, it's very hard to get that home-cooked quality, authentic Cantonese cooking that I've realized as an adult I took for granted. It's why I'm a frequent flyer — besides from visiting my family in NYC, who ALL absolutely refuses to leave it no matter how ridiculously unaffordable the cost of living is there — I really do love my mother's ethnic cooking, and it's probably the only thing I miss about "home". ♡