Day one On Chinese soil at last. For the last 35 years, I’ve revered Chinese food: what will the real thing be like? I resolve, in best Star Trek spirit, to boldly eat what no Jefford family member has ever eaten before, but am nonetheless taken aback by my first lunchtime mouthful in a busy three-floor restaurant in Xiamen: fresh corn juice, served in a glass. The primrose emulsion slides down like liquid linen: sweetly starchy. As I set about the fried shrimps, razor clams with chilli and hunks of chestnut-like taro with pork, it dawns on me that my unorthodox chopstick technique is capable of provoking tittering (especially female) at up to 30 feet. It does this throughout my stay, so that by the end I camp it up with gratuitous winks and baroque hand gestures. Initially, though, I am chastened: I try holding my chopsticks the proper way. Messy humiliation results.
Day two A ‘farmer’s lunch’ near Jinxi in Fujian. Our hosts serve tepid beer with little formality: mine is poured into a soup bowl. The food lurches from the sublime (a dish of baby crayfish) to the challenging: tightly rolled intestines with what looks like softened toenail, but turns out to be boiled muttonskin. The intestines taste bitter: I wish my own innards luck as I swallow. Little fishes float in a murky broth as if on a creek after dynamite fishing, but the poultry stew looks more promising. Mr Wang’s palmtop dictionary tells us the bird is francolin. My fellow traveller Ed Eisler of Jing Tea, a near-vegetarian, tentatively reaches for the topmost morsel. As he turns it in his chopsticks, he meets the glum stare of a dead, boiled francolin, complete with beak. Ed smiles, wanly.
Dinner in the Great World Seafood Restaurant in Fuzhou is more of a success. Our hosts are the charming Zhang Zhang and her Dad, a jasmine tea producer. We tour the tanks first. It’s like a Seaworld Aquarium; the only difference is that they kill whatever you point at and it’s on your plate 10 minutes later. I haven’t got the heart to order the execution of little turtles and don’t fancy whelks the size of pig’s trotters. We settle for spiny rock fish (deliciously delicate), giant clams (served in a fragrant chicken broth), more razor clams cooked in salt this time, and tender beef rolls with white mushrooms. These are dipped in the ubiquitous little dish of black vinegar which is every diner’s condiment.
Day three Into Wuyi Mountains: a chain of densely wooded, mist-draped, river-cut sandstone peaks. Each has its own name: Jade Maiden, Two Breast Peak, Tiger Roaring Rock ... We travel up the Floating Dragon Gorge to the village of Tongmu, where tea from wild bushes is smoked at Bohea Farm to provide the sublime progenitor of all Lapsangs. The highlight of dinner is mountain frog soup, in which whole chopped frogs (still attached to their mottled black-and-white skin) are served in a nutritious broth. The flesh proves succulent, but the mass of fine bones is like dried vermicelli in the mouth. (You spit them out. Hacking and spitting are still enthusiastically practiced in China: the louder, the better.) There’s braised aubergines; flavoury, close-textured potatoes; squelchy, fat-dribbling belly pork; omelette; greens. There is also a chilli-strewn stew out of which I pick a head. Is it a bird? It seems to have a beak. Yet the rest of the body looks more fishlike. No one seems sure what it is.
Day four Still at Tongmu. Very good smoked tofu for lunch, and the forested hills have provided a wild boar stew this time, served with cinnamon and chilli. There’s another stew with heads in, but this time it’s definitely a fish, dentally well-endowed, like baby pike.
Supper back at the Haisheng Hotel in Wuyi City brings us our first fresh bamboo shoots, red-cooked pork with a brightly glazed skin and a dish of reconstituted dried baby carp (better than you’d think) with fresh green soya beans (chewy). There are also two local specialities: smoked goose and a stew of ten different mushrooms.
Day five Down to Guangzhou and lovely steamy dim sum for lunch in a hotel overlooking the Pearl River, which is in fact muddy hazel rather than nacreous. It’s back to a still bigger Aquarium restaurant for dinner, where tanks full of writhing sea snakes, miserable alligators with their jaws clamped tight and a tray of squirming grubs do little to quicken the appetite. We are guests of the mysterious Miss Zhiang, though, who looks like a Chinese Cleopatra and dominates the market in fine pu erh tea, so we shut our eyes and think of …. well, bitter melon with black bean sauce, roast duck, and sweet fleshed soft-shell crab in an orange-coloured curry. We are given whole green coconuts with their tops sliced off, and sip the milk through straws. As is customary, the large-screen, well-mounted television blares throughout dinner in this private room, bringing news footage of baton-wielding police breaking up a demonstration under a bright Middle Eastern sun. Blows rain down on hapless Muslim women. The appetite fades again.
Day six To Hangzhou, and the best meal of the trip which, almost unbelievably, is in the staff canteen of a university science park. Highlights of the dozen-dish meal are yellow eel with a dark, sweet sauce, a scallop shell of cabbage with stir-fried vegetables and gingko seeds in, cotton-wool-soft white dumplings with pork and a giant fish from Thousand Island Lake. As guest of honour, I am given the choicest part: the creature’s cheek. All watch expectantly as I swallow the tepid, jellied morsel.
There’s still, of course, room for a final dinner. Mr Li takes us to a Szechuan-style restaurant run by his old college friends. The food arrives; my jaw drops. Each dish contains a good 60 or 70 bird’s-eye chillies. You can hear them hum like a poked beehive. We leave China with a bang.