I don't remember the whys and wherefores; I just knew that he was going to cook on the television! I don't know if there was a brief, but my pa decided that Al should cook a fish dish: namely golden pan-fried fish with ginger and spring onions. The Chinese characters for this dish translate literally as fried, sealed fish, which loses all of its poetry, but what it lacks in translation, it makes up for in flavour.
The ginger was too fine, then not fine enough. The spring onions were cut unevenly. The fish was cooked, but not golden—the heat was too low; the fish was golden but not cooked—the heat was too high. I remember the focus, the concentration, the single-mindedness of those cooking sessions, and it felt as if we were having to eat 5,000 fishes in a month.
This method of cooking produces food that evokes an oral sensation that the Chinese call mouth fragrant—that is, literally something that smells good in your mouth. Fish with a slightly firmer flesh produces the best results, because it can withstand all the swirling around in the pan; thanks to its meatier texture, my kids call this chicken fish.
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