food cooking: Shanghai butterfly

Shanghai butterfly

Stuffed jujubes.[Photos by Pauline D. Loh / ]

Go where the locals go and you cannot go wrong. Pauline D. Loh gets invited for a true taste of Shanghai.

My colleagues by the Bund love to eat, and it was clear that the best food critics were right there in the office. They were going to buy lunch, and there was no doubt it was going to be a good meal.

Benbang cai, the genuine flavors of the Shanghainese, is down-to-earth, salty, sweet and strong. It values contrast in texture and taste and is considerably more demanding in kitchen craft.

Its signature dishes are the red-cooked braised pork with a heavy lacing of caramelized sauce, drunken crabs and drunken prawns made with sweetened yellow liqueur mixed with stronger white spirits, and it enjoys miniature vegetables like cao tou, a clover-like trifoliate herb and malan tou, a wild chamomile. These are the first spring vegetables and are often chopped fine with speckles of bamboo shoots.

Our restaurant of choice was Die Yuan, the prettily named Butterfly Garden, which shares the same street as Xintiandi, the night hub where Shanghai locals and tourists congregate.

The restaurant may be near Xintiandi, but it has none of the entertainment enclave's glitz and glamour.

Butterfly Garden is housed in a two-story shop house and if you don't look hard enough, you may walk right past the door. Enter that door, and it may seem you'd stepped back into a time warp of 30 years. Perhaps the restaurant consciously cultivates this ambience. It certainly does not recognize modern credit and it only accepts cash.

There are just a few tables downstairs, reserved for strangers who walk in. The more favored regulars are shown up a creaking flight of wooden stairs and down a narrow corridor fringed by private rooms. The cubicles are small, but then, you are here for the food.

Once we were seated, the menu was scrutinized and our orders placed. There are no surprises because we ordered all the house favorites.

Shanghai butterfly

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Shanghai butterfly

red-braised belly pork with eggs. Photos by Pauline D. Loh /

First up is the classic spring vegetable, minced malan tou garnished with three half-moons of orange. The bright green taste of the season of new growth freshens the palate and our mouths enjoy the occasional crunch of the finely diced bamboo shoots.

Our order of red-braised belly pork, hongshao rou, comes with well-marinated hard-boiled eggs that are deeply colored to the core by the rich soy sauce. The pork itself is only for the heart-healthy. It is meltingly rich, pleasingly sweet and goes with a large helping of steamed white rice.

A lighter offering is the poached Chinese river perch, or mandarin fish. Snow-white fillets are speckled with dark green minced potherb mustard, another spring vegetable that is a Shanghai favorite. The flavors here are light, but still flavorful.

No meal in a genuine Shanghainese restaurant would be complete without two more benbang dishes - the braised wheat gluten salad, kaofu and the signature soup, yanduoxian.

Yanduoxian is almost untranslatable, but the three characters simply point to the ingredients of this soup, which always includes smoked salted pork and dried tofu knots and may also include radishes, bamboo shoots or Chinese ham, according to the cook's fancy and availability of ingredients.

Kaofu is simply a sweet braised dish that uses a combination of wheat gluten cubes, black wood ear fungus, day lily buds and peanuts. To me at least, it represents Shanghai and is almost always the first cold appetizer that is placed on the table.

The Shanghainese also loves eels. Not the thick creatures so favored by the Japanese, but tiny eels that are hardly more than elvers, quickly stripped and boned with a dexterity that has to be seen to be believed. Again, the most common way of cooking them is to stir-fry them in a thick, sweet sauce, garnished with a dollop of minced garlic. Pepper is often generously added.

The result is a dish of savory strips that have plenty of bite which is as much tactile food as it is a flavorful sensation.

We ended our benbang feast with a platter of "young ladies in red", otherwise also known as "soft-hearted delights" - red Chinese jujubes stuffed with a delightfully soft, chewy glutinous center. It was the perfect bookend to a meal, and it promises to linger on in my memory - until the next time I go back for yet another sampling of classic Shanghainese.

Shanghai butterfly