Cross-cultural braised fish

When I first arrived in England, I lived temporarily with an English family. Both my hosts, Mike and Sheila, were kind and hospitable Catholics; they made me feel at home during my "shock" in Britain. Usually, besides reading and sports, I have a special hobby, that is cooking. At Mike's house, I would occasionally show off my skills in the kitchen to show off the beauty of Chinese cooking. My favorite was braised fish with marco. Mike ate my braised fish.

After that, his eyes widened."My God, this is the best fish I've ever eaten!" Ask me how I burned it. Later, we had several occasions to dine together, either at his house or at his daughter's house. The last time I had dinner was before I returned home; and it was Mike's birthday. He made an appointment a few days ago and asked me to cook fish for him again, and asked his wife to buy the best fish in the supermarket. The last time I cooked fish for Mike, I was somewhat sad, and naturally cooked it more seriously and successfully than usual. Dinner was served in the garden. The sun sets very late in English summer, and at nine o'clock at night the sun is still in the sky. The afterglow of the setting sun sprinkled on the garden, on each of our faces, and on the plate of braised fish with "Chinese characteristics." After dinner, Mike looked at the fish bones on his plate and asked me to keep the recipe for braised fish so his wife could watch over it for him later. He had asked me for a "recipe" before, but every time I hesitated; I am not conservative, as you know, we Chinese generally do not have any recipe. Cooking well depends entirely on one feeling or experience; only the layman can cook while reading the recipe. In fact, the fish I cooked for Mike was cooked in the usual way: fry the fish in an oil pan until it was 70%, add onions, ginger, wine, water, sugar and soy sauce, and add a little Sichuan black bean sauce I brought from China, and cook slowly until all the seasonings were fully absorbed by the fish: thus, a plate of thick, golden, salty, sweet and spicy braised fish was cooked.

For all these reasons, I ended up failing to give Mike a real recipe. I knew Mike wanted a formula with certain numbers. For example, how many grams of fish, ginger, onion, salt, sugar, and so on. And I never thought about that when I was cooking. How much salt we put in, how much sugar we put in, we rely on experience, our eyesight, even our sixth sense. From this small braised fish, we can also see the huge differences between East and West in cultural traditions. Western culture, since ancient Greece, has shown the characteristics of its scientific tradition. In the eyes of Westerners, everything can be explored, from macrocosmic bodies and universes to microscopic cells and atoms; at the same time, everything can be said. They believe that the senses are sometimes unreliable, and believe in quantification, believe in scales. Chinese culture has lacked such a scientific tradition since ancient times. We seem to believe more in perception, in impressions. Chinese culture believes that all beautiful things are difficult to say; good poetry lies in its "no word, all romantic". We have the best lyric poetry in the world in ancient times, but we have few systematic poetry creation theories, only critical "poetry".

The different concepts of time between the East and the West are also concrete manifestations of their different cultural traditions. Westerners stress precision, emphasize strict scheduling, emphasize planning, and oppose "change." On the first day of the new year, many westerners will set down the important activities of the year, even to which day. Once, an English teacher invited me to dinner. She held her schedule book and asked me if she was free at 12:15 noon on the 23rd of next month. I invited you to dinner. And when we express distance and time, the ancients also have such statements: a bag of smoke time, sailing takes five days, riding three days, and so on. In shopping, Westerners like to go to the supermarket before, make a good list, to the supermarket, according to the items listed on the list, one by one to buy; and we (especially women), love "shopping", may buy a lot, sometimes shopping for a long time do not buy a thing. Of course, with the continuous deepening of cultural exchanges between the East and the West, the mutual understanding and integration of Eastern and Western cultures has become increasingly prominent. We absorb more scientific factors into our work and daily life. However, culture is culture because it has strong continuity and resistance to foreign cultures. I believe that the next time Mike sees me, he will ask me for the recipe for braised fish, and I will not be able to give him a satisfactory answer.