Cha Chiang Mein
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Cha Chiang Mein
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This recipe for Cha Chiang Mein, egg noodles with stir-fried pork, is one of the simple culinary treasures I brought back with me from China. I happened upon it through one of those chains of events that often lead a traveler from one pleasant experience to another.
During my stay in Hangzhou, I took a side trip to the gently rolling hills in the countryside to visit the Lung Ching (Dragon Well) tea plantation. The journey was something of a pilgrimage for me, because Dragon Well has long been my favorite green tea.
A worker guide gave me a morning's tour of the plantation, showing me how the tea is grown, harvested, and processed. When she discovered how much I appreciated Dragon Well tea, she covertly slipped me a small packet of the commune's very best tea, the number one tea out of sixteen possible grades.
She advised me to take a half hour's ride to Running Tiger Spring. There, she explained, I could ask the attendant at the teahouse to brew this choice Dragon Well tea in water that has such high density and surface tension it seems to defy gravity. As I later saw with my own eyes, you can pour the famous Running Tiger Spring water into a glass to a level of about one third of an inch above the rim before it starts to overflow.
Next to my table at the teahouse sat an English-speaking resident of Hangzhou with whom I shared my once-in-a-lifetime pot of tea. We struck up a conversation and quickly discovered that we were both interested in Chinese gastronomy. When I told him of my interest in peasant cooking, he invited me to his house to try cha chiang mein, prepared by his cook, who came from a peasant family. "Yes," I responded without hesitation, and that evening I was in possession of the recipe for this informal yet tempting dish.
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