The Dim Sum Field Guide!

Good news to all of you out there who liked “The Beginner’s Field Guide to Dim Sum” and reprint I did for the Lucky Peach Chinatown issue: Ten Speed Press is going to publish an expanded version in August 2016 that should help you to satisfy all your cravings for this delicious way with brunch. Called THE DIM SUM FIELD GUIDE: A TAXONOMY OF DUMPLINGS, BUNS, MEATS, SWEETS, AND OTHER SPECIALTIES OF THE CHINESE TEAHOUSE, this fully illustrated handbook will include 80 entries on the many delights to be found in a dim sum restaurant and make you an expert on what to order, how to eat it, and everything in between.

My idea of brunch

Separated into the two main branches -- savory and sweet -- this guide will cover everything from steamed like Jiaozi and Siu Mai, to deep-fried dim sum such as Honeycomb Taro-Wrapped Pork and Coffee Pork Ribs, and all the many roast and braised meats you can expect to find wheeled past you in the dining room, like Char Siu, Roast Duck, Black Bean Chicken Feet, and Stuffed Bean Curd. 

Those who have a highly refined sweet tooth will not feel left out, either, for this guide will introduce you to such traditional wonders as Raised Fermented Rice Cakes and Fried Water Chestnut Pudding, as well as more familiar treats such as Custard Tarts, Fried Sesame Balls, and Malay Cake. 

Char Siu

Each entry will start out with the name in Chinese, as well as its pronunciation in Mandarin and Cantonese (with the correct tones, too!) so that you can learn to order fearlessly. The accompanying drawing will give you an idea of what to expect it to look like, but then the Guide will describe in detail how it was made, its regular ingredients, and how both the exterior and interior tastes and feels.

You will be shown what sauces to expect, what dips ought to be considered, and the related dim sum in that particular family. For example, steamed Char Siu Bun are tea house standards, but you should also consider the baked version in a puff pastry that crumbles satisfyingly with each bite. 

Siu Mai

The origins of each dim sum are also introduced to give you a sense of how this particular morsel developed. Many items trundled around on a cart, for example, originated in the seaport called Chaozhou in northeastern Guangdong, while others found their way from Yangtze River kitchens or Muslim diners in the cold north to the tropical teahouses of Guangzhou and Hong Kong. Some even have interesting asides, such as the urban legend that Char Siu Buns are like hot dogs, in that they are repositories for any sort of mysterious ingredients, including even human flesh. (Again, that's a legend -- the contents of these are probably more appetizing that a hot dog could ever lay claim to.)

Order slip with "arrived" chops

You'll also receive advice on how to order from a cart and menu, the correct way to balance a dim sum meal, the various types of tea you should expect to choose from, and how to decipher the bill. There even is a short section planned on teahouse etiquette to get you looking like a seasoned pro in no time flat. 

THE DIM SUM FIELD GUIDE:

A TAXONOMY OF DUMPLINGS, BUNS, MEATS, SWEETS, AND OTHER SPECIALTIES OF THE CHINESE TEAHOUSE

Ten Speed Press, forthcoming in August 2016

176 pages, 80 illustrations

ISBN: 978-60774-956-1

Dim Sum Field Guide! It's Back!

Back by popular demand (I guess) is my "Dim Sum Field Guide" in this month's online Lucky Peach. Hurray for snacking!

Buzzfeed reprints my Lucky Peach dim sum guide

Last month the great food magazine Lucky Peach published a history of dim sum I had written for its Chinatown issue, as well as a field guide to the 24 most popular things you can get at a Cantonese-style teahouse. 

And now, the equally great Buzzfeed has reprinted that field guide (and a bit of that background history as a teaser) on its website here. 

Instead of the line drawings I made for Lucky Peach, this time around there's actual photographs of the actual dishes, which gives my peek into traditional South Chinese brunch a whole new look. 

You can almost smell the chicken feet, and that's a very good thing. Check it out...

The Essential Guide To Dim Sum

Know exactly how to order thanks to this breakdown of 24 dishes, including photos and Chinese pronunciation.

FIRST, A QUICK HISTORY LESSON.

Unusual suspects for a great meal

Nowadays, the term "dim sum" (點心 in written Chinese, and pronounced dian xin in Mandarin) is a meal—usually taken on a weekend morning—that encompasses a vast roster of small dishes selected from carts.

In the beginning, dim sum was a verb that merely meant “to eat a little something.” Cantonese dim sum culture began in tearooms in the latter half of the nineteenth century in the city of Guangzou, possibly because of the recent ban of opium dens. It spread and gained popularity—especially in nearby Hong Kong...

Read the rest on Buzzfeed!

Photos from Buzzfeed's website.

The history of dim sum as told to Lucky Peach

The "Chinatown" issue of hipster food magazine Lucky Peach just hit the stands, and a combo article by moi is in there.

Called "The Beginner's Field Guide to Dim Sum," this introduces the history behind one of China's most gracious contributions to human civilization. This elegant definition of afternoon sloth around the dining table is none other than the glorious Cantonese tradition of enjoying a dim sum meal in an endless relay of tiny dishes. 

The article then breaks form and segues into an actual field guide replete with detailed line drawings on the best of the best dim sum, replete with their backgrounds and contents and the occasional weird story. The featured 24 delectable culprits have contributed to the delinquency of many a food tourist who wandered into a Hong Kong or Chinatown teahouse one day and was never quite the same again. 

If you relied only on the cover, you would never know that I was in there in a spread that stretches across eleven pages. No, I am not famous enough for that. 

I sob quietly as the likes of Anthony Bourdain, Fuchsia Dunlop, Martin Yan, and Danny Bowein bask in the limelight. But to be fair, a tiny slice of "Dim Sum" can be seen to the immediate left of the Lucky in Lucky Peach, so I guess I qualify as sort of a walk-on role here in a major crowd scene.

Chicken buns, or jibaozi

Be that as it may, I feel just like a small-town girl who landed a bit part in a major motion picture. I even got to draw everything here, and that was loads of fun. (Be on the lookout for a goldfish jiaozi with green eyes.)

If you do get your hands on a copy, please check out the article by the brilliant Harold McGee on "酒餅," which means jiubing, or Homemade Fermented Rice. Highly recommended.  

Lucky Peach is not yet available online, so you'll have to read it while you're standing in line at Whole Foods. When you do, turn to the blushing pink pages that run from 114 to 124, the ones that are bedecked with ink drawings that garnish "The Beginner's Field Guide to Dim Sum," which starts out like this...

"Nowadays, the terms "dim sum" (點心 in written Chinese and pronounced dianxin in Mandarin) encompasses a vast roster of small dishes selected from carts (rather than ordered from menus) in Hong Kong-style restaurants that serve little else during the daylight hours.

My drawing of Taotaoju
teahouse in Guangzhou

"In the beginning, dianxin was a verb that merely meant 'to eat a little something.' The first recorded use of the term dianxin comes from about 1,000 years ago. In the Tang shu 唐書 (History of the Tang), the wife of a man called Zheng Can said, 'I haven't finished putting on my makeup and so cannot eat yet, so you should first have a little something to eat (dianxin).'

"Around the year 1300, dianxin turned into a noun that referred to snacks and very light meals, a definition that has more or less remained unchanged to this day. In the entry for dianxin in every authoritative Chinese dictionary, this always appears as a complete term that cannot be reduced and thus defined according to its individual characters. What this means is that rather than translating to 'dot heart' or 'touching the heart' or 'a little bit of heart' -- which is what these characters mean separately -- the term dianxin refers solely to snacks and so has nothing to do with the heart at all, much in the same way that in English a 'cocktail' has no feathers..."

When you get to the actual field guide, be sure and read about Steamed Pork Buns, aka char siu bao, for "in Hong Kong, char siu bao suffers a reputation like that of hot dogs in the U.S. -- it's thought that any mystery meat could end up inside, even human. This urban legend was memorialized in a bloody 1993 Hong Kong movie called The Eight Immortals Restaurant: The Untold Story...."

Bon appetit!

Both ink drawings by Carolyn Phillips,copyright (c) 2012; all rights reserved.