Food Topic

[Sir Tokyo Sexwale]

Haven't had one of these in a week, at least!

 

Tofu/trampshyte

 

[abridged]

 

Tofu is vile on its own. If the test of a food is its ability to stand up for itself, bean curd fails pathetically: it can't even hold its shape on the plate. I've got some "silken" tofu in front of me, and never was an adjective so misused. On its own, without the zip and shimmy of ginger, garlic and Cantonese whatnot, it tastes of mulched loo roll or a slime of dead skin, with a texture both firm and somehow unpleasantly brittle. Bean curd, whatever else you can say for it, is best mixed with other ingredients.

 

Why did this bland and naturally unappealing food become one of the most important elements of Asian cuisine, eaten and seemingly enjoyed by billions of people every day? The bean itself is of course soy, the most cultivated vegetable in the world. Soy is exceptionally nutritious: according to the World Health Organisation, 140g of soy flour is enough to provide an adult with his or her daily protein requirements, compared to 410g beef or 3.5kg of potatoes. The bean has an almost perfect balance of amino acids, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins and mineral salts. You could live off soy and water for a long time: in the second world war, the standard ration for Japanese soldiers was just a bag of soy flour.

 

But soy beans don't taste very nice. They're rubbish if you boil them, according to Harold McGee, with overtones of "grass, paint, cardboard and rancid fat". And if you cook them whole, they don't go pleasantly creamy like other beans: their lack of starch means they stay hard and pellety.

 

The Chinese – and later the copycat Japanese – found two main ways of making the legume palatable. In the first, microbes ferment the beans: the basis of soy sauce and miso. In the second, people make a "milk" from the beans by soaking, then grinding them, sieving off the solids and cooking the resulting liquid. Bean curd is this soy milk coagulated, often by bittern or gypsum. The Chinese first developed it around 2,000 years ago, and it has been an essential part of their diet for 700 years.

 

With such longevity, tofu now masquerades under a number of guises, and its versatility is one of the main reasons its supporters are so fond of it. Lizzie Mabbott's food blog has a healthy focus on Chinese cuisine. She wrote to me, "Classic Chinese dishes often include tofu as a textural contrast. In Ma Po tofu, for example, nuggets of minced beef swim in a tongue-blisteringly fiery sauce alongside wibbly, wobbly chunks of tofu." Mabbott further praises "tofu fa", a "custard-like dessert, often adorned with a sweet syrup such as ginger".

 

One of the great gross-out gastronomic trials for westerners is "stinky tofu", fermented bean curd aged in what food writer Fuchsia Dunlop calls "a liquid made of putrefying vegetation". "It smells disgusting but tastes delicious," she assured me. Dunlop is working with Bar Shu restaurant in London's Chinatown to develop authentic Sichuan dishes that carry an understanding of western palates. If you've never tried fermented tofu, that might be a good place to sample it.

 

In the general absence of meat, and with so nutritious a legume before them, Asian people seem to have grasped instinctively that soy – made palatable as bean curd – was worth keeping. Equally, natural selection might have favoured those with a taste for soy. Europeans and North Americans took their dietary protein from elsewhere, which is perhaps why tofu remains a niche product in the west. A taste for bean curd therefore seems stitched into the hereditary profile of many Chinese and Japanese people, just as a fondness for foods made from rotten milk is in mine.

 

I'd bet that it'll be some time before tofu loses its dull and sanctimonious image, and before questionable fusions like this become mainstays in British restaurants. But what do you think of tofu?

[Gerry]

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