A focus on the delicacy of sour

One of the cuisines on my hit list for this week of eating is that from the Guizhou province, in China's southwest. It is a hilly place, home to a large number of minority groups, most prominently the Miao people. The cuisine is demarcated by an intense fondness for sour. This is taken to such an extent that at the Flower Mountain Festival, a traditional song extols the virtues of sour. They also have a saying that translates as: "Go three days without a sour dish, and you'll stagger around and around." They are renowned for a sour fish hot pot and have an entire lexicon to describe different types of sour.

The place where I'll encounter this cuisine for the first time is Da Gui, recommended by Candice. It is a neat place, with an unmarked front door bedecked with red lanterns.

I make my way in. The place is surprisingly empty, though it is Sunday night. I grab a table and whip out Beijing Eats, making sure I go for the classics of this cuisine. The menu is a joy to read and I wish I was dining with eight. As I'm solo, however, I limit myself to three dishes.

The first is cow stomach dry pot. In a nicely sized wok, many, many pieces of cow stomach (or tripe) are stewing in a broth of celery, red chillies, green chillies, yellow chillies, and chilli oil. Did I mention there were some chillies? The tripe ranged from thin dark grey cuts to thick, whitish ones covered in half centimeter long stalagmites. I dug in with my chopsticks, fished out a piece of tripe or two, and swirled it in the chilli broth. It was delicious! Much of the fun of tripe comes in the texture, which is crunchy yet yielding. This hit that spot on, and added spicy flavor and spicy heat that built over time. I went back and back to this pot, fishing and fishing until there was nary a stomach lining remaining. I think I may be acquiring a taste for stomach...

The second dish was a classic, called liangban zhe'er gen, which translates as smelly fish grass salad. According to my book, the herb in this dish smells like smelly fish. It was described as a love it or hate it proposition. I landed firmly on the love it side (though perhaps a whole order for one person is overdoing it a bit). The leaves were great, like a sour, fishy spinach. The pieces that looked like bean sprouts proved resiliently hard and chewy, a bit like good-flavored branches. Definitely an array of flavors and a cumulative taste I had not experienced before.

The final dish was one of the very few desserts I have had in China, Da Gui specialty black sticky rice. The presentation was superb, with the cylinder of black sticky rice coming atop a silver platform, with crushed peanuts below. This was heavenly, a melt-in-your-mouth delight that made me pause with each bite. It tasted, incredibly, of rich chocolate even though there is not a drop of cocoa in the rice. Mixed with the peanuts, it attained a careful balance of sweetness and saltiness, softness and firmness. Excellent, delicious, wow.

So my first trip through Guizhou cuisine was a success. Not sure when the next chance will come - anybody heard of Guizhou food in the States?