Yang Sing's Utter Tripe

In Rochdale on the moor in the howling gale we ate tripe cold with lashings of malt vinegar. There were other recipes but that was my mum's way. My mother could have probably should have written the definitive Lancashire cookbook. She knew all the recipes.  

She was a bit Chinese in her approach to food. Loads of Brits were. After war and rationing there was a waste-not-want-not attitude. If you could cook bits of animal, any bits, you did, if you couldn't eat it solid then you made a stock from it or a gravy.  

We had a big pantry in the old house and there were eight of us including a grumpy grandmother and the dog and the cat. The waste from that pantry at the end of the week would have filled a small matchbox but not stretched to a Swan Vesta.  

I sometimes look at the bin bags I lug out to the wheelie bins and colour with shame. 

A recent trip to the Yang Sing returned me to tripe.

This version wasn't as inelegant as those brutally pale stomach linings of the Pennine lands, in fact it was entry level tripe - see the picture at the top of the page. The honeycomb came with satay sauce and chilli and was refined indeed. The dandies need not worry about this version even without celeb endorsement. The satay soaks the tripe and takes away the offally edge that puts the fear of God in food cowards.

Like the ones around me. 

My lunchtime dining companions Gordo and Georgina, his long-suffering daughter, screamed, lifted their skirts and ran a mile. 

But I was enraptured by the far reaches of food now, so I dived into the 'jelly fish 'head' dressed with spring onion oil'. Loved this again. Fishy, slimy, lubricious, delicious. weird. Again terror gripped the two Gs. Babies the pair of them.

Just in case you get the wrong idea about Lancashire cooking, jelly fish is something my mother never cooked. Even the deepest moorland reservoirs in Rochdale - Watergrove perhaps - are hostile to jelly fish whatever the season.   

Going for the krill

I then went in for the krill - I think this is what they were, there was some debate.

Krill are tiny sea creatures, dried and transformed into something akin to whitebait seen through the wrong end of a telescope. They are moreish. On this occasion they were excellent too, salty snaps to add bite to the food. 

Krill are the favourite snack of baleen whales - ones with filters in their mouths rather than teeth - such as the Blue Whale and the Humpback Whale. The average Blue Whale can hoover up an astonishing 3,600 kilograms (7,900 lb) of krill everyday. It's surprising Gordo didn't like krill, they'd suit his appetite. 

What he did like, what we all liked, what passers-by liked, what astronauts on satellite links liked, was the steamed lobster with its delicate flesh, all aromatic and enriched with lemongrass, spice and more of the brill krill. 

Superb.

Lobster heaven

There were sundry dim sum with this meal - created round a business meeting - with the steamed coriander beef balls, little beauts, as were the minced pork, crab and chive pastries. Mains of steamed sea bass with bamboo shoots and the flambéed cubed rib eye should be mentioned in dispatches as excellent.

Seabass with bamboo shoots

But it was the tripe, jellyfish, krill and lobster that stick in the memory - 8/10 dishes all.

Lots of people have read Marcel Proust's Rembrance of Things Past (although not me yet - a bit French, a bit introverted for my taste) in which nostalgia for that lost golden world of youth is triggered by a small detail, a taste, a smell.

That was me in the Yang Sing: nostalgic for that lost golden world of tripe consumption.

Tripe.

Beautiful don't you think?

Coriander beef balls

Shanghai style pan fried pork buns