I couldn’t quite believe my eyes. There they both were. And it was my wife who’d put them there.
Strewth. It wasn’t even that one of these dishes was left-overs from the previous day; no, she had consciously cooked both of them, set them there for the family to actually eat.
Okay, it was a long time ago that she’d delivered the warning. Maybe she’s forgotten it by now. Or maybe I’m the one who misremembered. Anyway, here goes.
Fish is not to be paired with sweet potato. Harmless individually, these two ingredients are quite the mischief when combined.
Have you heard this too? Maybe you’ve heard similar. As a young man, intrigued by this young wives’ tale, I learned from colleagues that one shouldn’t pair cucumber and peanuts; spinach and doufu; crabs and sharon-fruit/persimmon-fruit; eggs and soy-milk nor honey and spring onions. All of these are bad for the “胃” [wei] that mystical portion of the self which doesn’t equate with the anatomical stomach [肚子; duzi] so much as the “waters”, the “constitution”, the legitimate fount of all human disgruntlement.
I love the idea of these alchemical food traps lying inside innocuous ingredients. It reminds me of the Japanese Barcode-Battler craze which, arbitrarily, elevated a banal canned fruit into a child’s must-have.
It reminds me of Jack Nicholson’s Joker peddling a “health-roulette” cosmetics line in Gotham City. Most of his beauty products were safe. Only by chance would a consumer pair, say, the lipstick with the blusher, suffering instant disfigurement.
But we’re not talking about explosions with these foods, of course. And that’s precisely why the assertions go unchecked for so long. This slow feedback loop makes accurate attribution impossible. With maladies of the 胃, most of us reach for recently-consumed food as the culprit, not for, say, recently-washed hands. As with the moaning hangover, we’ll never really know if it was about the mixing of the drinks… or just the drinking of the drinks.
Whatever harm or help all my tea drinking is doing me is difficult to prove; I don’t have a rewind button or a disposable twin brother to help nail it down.
With taste, however, we know, because it’s inside the face and it’s now.
I long struggled to find a tea to meet the taste challenge of marmalade. In biluochun [碧螺春], I found it. Seriously, do try! Most of my tea discoveries have been positive , such as the double umami of green tea after soy milk.
But green tea sometimes comes close to replicating the world’s worst taste combo; apple juice and toothpaste. That effect works through the toothpaste’s tannins blocking off the sweetness which a person expects from fruit-juice. Tea has been known to behave similarly.
This will be the first time I mention the event to my wife. The fish and the sweet potato, of course, went down very well, far better than anything we cooked each other in our 20s. Oh, but just the same week, we happened to chase up century egg [松花蛋] with watermelon. That’s one janky juxtaposition. Give it a whirl, if you dare!
