Beijing Hot Pot

 All of Asia loves a good hot pot.  The Koreans have a hot pot.  The Japanese have their shabu-shabu.  The Vietnamese and the Thai have their versions of hot pot.  In China, it seems everyone loves a hot pot.  Especially in the winter time.  They say the food warms your insides on a cold winter day.  In truth, I think it is the cooking that warms their outsides.  You see, there is nothing more steamy and hot than a hot pot restaurant.  They are like saunas, with steam condensing on the windows and the floors and the chairs and any cool surface. 

Now, also consider the fact that central heating is not normally allowed in buildings in the South of China.  It is an old rule, for conservation of coal and natural gas, that only buildings to the North of the HuaiHe river can be built with central heating.  What this means in practice is that, from Nanjing to the South, public buildings are not much warmer than the outside air during the winter time.  Train stations and government offices are only about 5 degrees warmer than the outside.  Believe me, you can freeze while waiting for a train or while visiting the immigration office.  Private dwellings can get around the restriction by utilizing electric heat.  (Our apartment has a heat pump.)  But the majority of Chinese people that I know do not have any heating system at all.  As a colleague tells me, they just wear more clothes during cold weather.

 So, it's not surprise, then, that hot pot is a popular meal during the winter.  Hot pots waste a lot of heat energy and probably release 5or 10 pounds of steam during a typical meal.  In a private apartment, a meal with a hot pot is almost as good as installing central heating for the evening.  Going to a hot pot restaurant is almost like taking a trip to a tropical island.  It is refuge from the cold.

 Beijing is famous for hotpot restaurants of the Northern style....of Mongolia and Manchuria.  Theresa and I went twice to DongLai Shun, a restaurant that advertised itself as Muslim hot pot.  The style of cooking comes from, what is now, the North of Tibet and the current provinces of XinJiang and Inner Mongolia.  In those areas, they eat a lot of sheep.  One reason for this is the large Muslim population and their disdain for pork.  Another reason comes from the sad fact that the harsh landscapes there can only support hardy animals like sheep and goats.

Most hot pot restaurants have a table for four to eight people with an electric burner in the center. The burner can be precisely controlled for the cooking in the communal hot pot. The hot pot at DongLai Shun utilizes antique technology.  Each hot pot is crafted from brass and glazed with ceramic.  At the center of the pot is a combustion chamber and a chimney, in which charcoal is burned.  Surrounding this chamber is an outer ring, filled with water.  As the charcoal burns in the central chamber, it boils the water in the surrounding ring.  The hot pot experience involves lots of thin sliced meats and vegetables.  You introduce these into the boiling waters to cook them.  Then you pull them out and dip them in sauces of peanut or soy sauce base. Then you eat them.  Then you put some more meat and vegetables in the pot.  Then you pull them out and eat them.  Repeat this procedure until all meat and vegetables are consumed.

 The meat for hot pot is sliced thin and provided on plates for the customer to consume at whatever pace is desired.  As you can see in the photos, meat has a healthy proportion of fat.  The boiling waters of the hot pot render most of these fats away, enriching the broth.  You drop the red and white slivers of meat into the boiling waters.  Then, a minute or two later, you fish them out as brown curlicues of tender, cooked meat.  You dip these pieces into your peanut sauce and then eat.  Then you drop some more pieces of meat in the boiling waters to repeat the process.

 At DongLai Shun, the advertised that their meat came not just from normal sheep, but rather came from Yak and Sheep of Tibet.  Happy Yak, raised on the plateaus of the Amdo regions of Tibet, where the air and land are pure.  I can believe this. I want to believe this.  I want to believe that the meat came from happy Tibetan yak playing in the sunshine  rather than some factory farmed sheep.   Who knows what is the truth is in China.  Better to believe what you want to believe,  rather than to let your fears run away with you.