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China's capital, Beijing, is not generally known for its food. Maybe it's because of the dry countryside around the capital that is whipped into desolation by the wind that blows in from the Gobi Desert to the west, making good local produce hard to come by. Or maybe it's the sometimes humorless rulers who gave the city its Stalinist architecture and a dowdy ambience that also has made the food fairly grim.
China is shaking off its shroud of communism, however. The capital is blossoming with life, and its restaurants are being swept by food fads. One favorite that now recurs each winter is the Mongolian hot pot.
The fad is not new. Hot pots first appeared in Beijing as early as the 13th century, when the Mongols swarmed in from the same direction as the Gobi winds, conquering China and ruling most of the country for more than a century. As all conquerors do, they brought their cooking techniques with them, and Beijing, then called Dadu, might have been the first metropolis to experience the dish.
Traditionally, the hot pot is a copper kettle shaped rather like a Bundt mold, with a hollow pedestal for coals that heat a moatlike trough full of broth. In the center is a little chimney that lets out smoke and conducts heat through the broth.
Wang-Sheng Li, chef at Evergreen in Manhattan, says the hot pot was originally a one-dish meal, made mostly of meat, "because in winter [in Northern China] apart from cabbage there were really no green vegetables except for those that were very expensive."The meat typically used is shuan yang rou. Yang rou is any kind of mutton, lamb or goat meat. Shuan means to shake something in water. "If you wash your T-shirt in a stream and shake it back and forth, that's shuan," Li says. That's how the thinly sliced meat is cooked: Using chopsticks, it is dipped in the boiling water and stirred briefly back and forth until it is done.Then it is...
