MARKET FORCES
I am not generally squeamish, but the offerings in the Wangfujiang Street night market in Beijing made me shudder. Seeing my reticence, the attendant behind the table grinned and picked up a centipede as if to throw it at me.
It wasn’t that bad, I suppose. He could have lobbed a scorpion, some silkworms or a snake at me. They were there for sale too, although most of them were securely threaded onto skewers ready for their appointment with the grill as soon as someone was brave enough to order them. It was quite obvious we were in the minority as everyone else was drooling at the offerings.
Trade was brisk and the others, Chinese all of them, were eagerly ordering the grisly kebabs, or some other dainty – heaps of noodles, chunks of tofu, dim sum – and something I did like the look of, slices of fruit embedded in toffee, glowing like stained glass.
Our guide had told us a joke just that day and now we really got it. ‘Were Adam and Eve Chinese?’ he’d asked, then answered it himself. ‘No, because if they had been,
they would have eaten the snake first, and then the apple.’
Markets are the core of Chinese cookery. Every region, every province, every town has its weekly, often daily market. They are constant surprises. You round a corner and there on the roadside, often spilling over onto part of the road, are barrows and stalls and baskets of produce.
In one place it was spring onions, the biggest I have ever seen, a metre or more in length, loaded onto the backs of tractors and trucks. In a dusty part of Szechuan we followed horsemen selling bushels of red chillies to a market; elsewhere it was strings of garlic slung from every wall. At Urumqi we browsed an endless selection of trays of sultanas, dried fruit and roasted salted nuts still in the shell. In the Muslim west we passed a meat market with vats of boiled sheep’s heads, whole carcasses hanging ready for dismemberment, and bowls and trays of gleaming innards. In remote Kashgar we could have bought a camel or a donkey.
Almost always close at hand to these markets is fresh and tempting street food so you can shop for dinner and pick up a pastry or a dumpling for lunch at the same time.
Duck eggs, watermelons, oranges or offal, anything’s available. Now – anyone for a grilled centipede?
