The west hasn’t got a clue about bamboo

The other day a famous British chef asked me, doubtfully, if bamboo shoots were really worth getting excited about. I was incredulous, but it was a reasonable question from someone who had clearly only tasted the tinned version. Until a couple of decades ago, hardly any fresh Chinese vegetables were available in the west. Tinned bamboo shoots were added to almost every takeaway dish, along with onions, red and green peppers and beansprouts (easily made from dried beans). For a couple of generations of British people, bamboo shoots said “Chinese food” just as poppadoms and mango chutney said “Indian”. Objectively speaking, however, tinned bamboo shoots are scarcely worth eating. With their stale flavour and limp crunch, they bear as much relation to the fresh shoots as a picture postcard does to a Tintoretto painting in a Venetian church.

Fresh bamboo shoots are one of the glories of the southern Chinese table. They have been eaten in China since written records began and praised by poets through the ages. Bamboo may be cultivated but also grows wild in forests that can resemble green cathedrals, with their straight, soaring stems and feathery leaves forming a canopy above. Numerous varieties of bamboo grow in China, and the young shoots of many of them are edible. The most widely consumed are the shoots of the downy bamboo, maozhu (Phyllostachys pubescens). In winter, dug up before they emerge from the earth, they have crisp, ivory-white flesh and a sublime umami flavour, which is why “winter bamboo shoots” (dongsun) are the most highly prized. By spring, the shoots have sprung out of the soil and their interiors have hollowed out into laddered chambers. These, also crisp and delicious, are “spring bamboo shoots”. Soon after their season is over, the plant produces “whip” shoots (biansun) that sprout horizontally underground in zigzag fashion.

Aside from the shoots of downy bamboo, there are many local varieties. One great delicacy of southern Sichuan, for example, is bitter bamboo shoot (kusun), which has a verdant, refreshing bite. All bamboo shoots must be harvested before they sprout skywards, becoming woody and inedible.

But you can’t beat the flavour of a freshly harvested winter shoot. To cook it, you must strip off its furry outer husk to reveal a horn of ivory flesh. The shoots can be sliced, diced or cut into chunks and then stir-fried, stewed, braised or simmered (but not eaten raw). Usually, the cut shoots are blanched before stir-frying to remove natural toxins.

Bamboo shoots play a starring role in Buddhist vegetarian cooking, but they also respond particularly well to being cooked with meat, fish or poultry. The shoots absorb the flavours of their accompanying ingredients, their umami savouriness amplified. Even just a hint of chicken stock, lard or chopped ham makes a spectacular ­addition to a bamboo shoot dish.

It’s hard for me to pick a favourite bamboo dish, but here are some contenders. First, the much-loved Shanghainese yan du xian (“salty and fresh stewed together”), a slow-simmered soup made with fresh pork, salt pork, spring bamboo shoots and tofu knots. Its magnificent aromas will fill your kitchen and make you sigh with pleasure. Secondly, stir-fried winter bamboo shoots with finely chopped shepherd’s purse (a brassica variety that often grows wild). The shoots are sliced, blanched and wokked, ideally with a little lard or chicken oil and a dash of stock. Then a handful of speckly greens are added. Glorious. Thirdly, another Jiangnan dish, youmen sun (“oil-stewed shoots”): chunks of shoot in a glazy sauce of rice wine, soy sauce and sugar that oozes magnificently into your rice. Finally, I can never have enough of the sliced bamboo shoots steamed with ham that they serve at the Dragon Well Manor restaurant in Hangzhou.

All these dishes tasted pretty spectacular when I’ve made them at home with imported fresh winter bamboo shoots, which I’ve found on very rare occasions in Chinese supermarkets in London. But they are 10 times better when made with shoots that have only recently been harvested, as any Chinese gourmet knows. Three centuries before Alice Waters hoisted the banner of Californian farm-to-fork dining at Chez Panisse, the literary Chinese gourmet Li Yu (1611-80) insisted that bamboo shoots were only really worth eating when gathered in the pristine countryside and devoured immediately, farm-to-chopsticks:

Only the mountain-dwelling monk and the old peasant who tends his own vegetable garden can obtain this kind of perfection. It is beyond the reach of city-dwellers who rely on vegetable vendors for their produce . . . however fragrant the bamboo shoots grown within a city may be, they are ultimately second-rate.

One can only imagine what Li Yu would have made of the tinned bamboo shoots sold in western Chinatowns.

Even in China, of course, bamboo shoots are preserved by drying, salting, pickling, smoking and canning. In Jiangnan, floppy, semi-dried shoots (bianjian) make fine soups and salads, while Sichuanese smoked shoots are heavenly when stewed with beef or belly pork. The finest dried bamboo shoot slices are known as “magnolia slices” (yulan pian) and used in many traditional banquet dishes. But while these products may have their charms, no one would dispute that fresh shoots are in their own league.

Gastronomy has always gone hand in hand with Chinese tourism. When people visit a bamboo forest, sampling the local terroir is de rigueur. In the Bamboo Sea of southern Sichuan, you can feast on fresh, bitter, dried, pickled and smoked shoots, and bacon that has been smoked over bamboo leaves. The bamboo forest is, furthermore, an entire ecosystem that produces many other exciting ingredients, particularly mushrooms. The “empress of all the fungi” is the bamboo pith fungus, which starts its visible life as a brownish volva or “egg” on the ground, from which sprouts a phallic stem that opens into a lacy white parasol topped with a pungent cap. The dried stems and parasols can be found in most Chinese supermarkets, but if you visit the Bamboo Sea you can also eat the amazing volvae and the patterned caps, known as “vegetarian tripe” because of their resemblance to honeycomb tripe. Other local treats include bamboo flower lichen, bamboo frogs and a frondy fungus dubbed “vegetarian bird’s nest”.

Bamboo is one of the ‘three friends of winter’, hardy plants that are symbols of resilience and noble character

Bamboo is a recurrent motif in Chinese art, craft and poetry. Along with the pine and Chinese plum tree, it is one of the “three friends of winter”, hardy plants that are symbols of resilience and noble character. The Song dynasty poet Su Dongpo famously loved pork, but claimed he would rather renounce it than live in a home without bamboo. “A man may become thin without pork,” he wrote, “but without bamboo, he will become vulgar; and while a thin man may regain his plumpness, there is no cure for the scholar who has lost his refinement.” For literary types, while the plant itself represented moral virtue, bamboo shoots were associated with nature, rusticity and wholesomeness, like organic and free-range foods today. In the 13th century, the poet Lin Hong included recipes for shoots in his cookbook, Pure Offerings of a Mountain Hermit, a work focused on vegetables and wild, foraged foods. He recommended cooking bamboo shoots al fresco, by the side of the forest; their flavour was superbly fresh and umami, he said, and only vulgar modern chefs would jumble them with meat.

Aside from its moral and aesthetic value, bamboo is of vast practical significance. It is probably the only plant not only eaten as a vegetable but also used as fuel, cooking vessel, dining table and eating implement. The author Christopher Isherwood, writing of his visit to the war-ravaged China of 1938, described stopping at a restaurant “where they were cooking bamboo in all its forms — including the strips used for making chairs. That, I thought, is so typical of this country. Nothing is specifically either eatable or uneatable. You could begin by munching a hat, or bite a mouthful out of a wall; equally, you could build a hut with the food provided at lunch. Everything is everything.” Isherwood might have been making a broader philosophical point about the adventurousness of Chinese eating, but in the case of bamboo it was almost literally true.

In southern China, you can sit in a bamboo house on a bamboo chair at a bamboo table, your bamboo hat and raincoat hanging by the door, a sheaf of bamboo paper and a bamboo ink-brush nearby, and use your bamboo chopsticks to eat your bamboo shoot dumplings from a bamboo steamer, while your child plays with a bamboo toy. If you really want to push the (bamboo) boat out, you can ask someone to play music on a bamboo instrument as you eat, or light some bamboo fireworks outside.

The specific delights of bamboo shoots aside, it’s worth pointing out that the Chinese eat a vast range of vegetables, cultivated and wild, most of which are unknown in the west. Typical Chinatown restaurant menus, at least the old-school Cantonese kind, usually include a section titled “seasonal vegetable”, which is presumably just a stylistic hangover from a Hong Kong original, because the vegetables listed there are almost never seasonal and rarely change. But in southern China, every region has its local greens, its roots and shoots, its fungi and its tubers, not to mention flowers, tree sprouts, water vegetables and nostoc. As the French scholar Françoise Sabban has said, the Chinese collectively eat a far wider range of ingredients than are eaten in the whole of Europe, and the number of vegetable species cultivated and consumed in China “greatly exceeds the entirety of all the vegetables and fruits known in the west”.

People often ask me what foods I miss most when I’m not in China. And while I do sometimes long for the autumn crabs, the stir-fried river shrimp and the roast ducks, what I crave incessantly are the vegetables. I miss fresh bamboo shoots, crisp lotus stems, purple amaranth, slippery mallows and shepherd’s purse, to name a few. While in Britain many people struggle to eat their government-ordained “five a day”, in southern China it’s easy because vegetables are so fresh, varied and beautifully cooked. Workers on construction sites and truck drivers at motorway cafés often eat more healthy vegetables than some middle-class families do in London.

One day, I would like to transport that famous British chef into a bamboo forest and feed him stir-fried bamboo shoots and bamboo shoot soup. I have no doubt that the question he asked me would evaporate like the morning mist.

Fuchsia Dunlop is the winner of the 2022 Guild of Food Writers’ Food Writing Award

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