What's Pressoir Cooking? Poon Choi for Lunar New Year
by Max Goldberg Liu
Wednesday, February 17, 2021
This is a memory from a Lunar New Year I spent a few years ago in Hong Kong with my father’s side of the family but I find it appropriate to reflect on today!
Lunar New Year is a time to return home and spend time with family. Among the many banquets and feasts we enjoyed during our two weeks in Hong Kong was a meal at home where the centerpiece was a magnificent Poon Choi.
Literally translating to “basin-vegetable,” the apocryphal story of Poon Choi is that the Emperor of China in the late Song Dynasty fled south from Mongol troops to what is now the Guangdong region.
To feed the Emperor (and in some stories his entire army), the locals gathered the most expensive ingredients they could muster and cooked them all together. This means that, despite the name, Poon Choi ironically has a very low vegetable to meat/seafood ratio, though this is not uncommon in Cantonese cuisine!
The size of the dish means that Poon Choi is usually served during special occasions where there can be a lot of people on hand to finish the copious amount of food.
Like so many of the world’s tastiest dishes, Poon Choi is not particularly attractive, and it would seem that all the ingredients put together would not be greater than the sum of their parts but somehow it works beautifully.
Manners dictate that the Poon Choi is eaten in layers, with the more delicate ingredients at the top, like prawns, abalone, poached chicken, and king mushrooms, with braised pork belly, char siu, roast duck, fish balls, rehydrated mushrooms in the middle. The prized bottom layer is the beneficiary of all the sauce and juices that slowly make their way down, with cubes of Chinese radish that absorb all the flavors being the most fought-over delicacy.
The panoply of ingredients makes this somewhat tricky for wine but for me the best pairing of the night was a Saumur Rouge whose peppery flavors and bright acidity made for a reasonably good foil.
Poon Choi is a potent symbol of the communal power of dining together at the table, and we all hope that next Lunar New Year we will be able to share one together!
Happy Year of the Ox and Gong Hei Fat Choi!
