介绍:
Cooking TCM Herbs
For two months, I’ve been cooking herbal medicines for myself, and found it far more labor-intensive than I’d expected. Closely following my doctor’s instructions, I pour 800 milliliters of tap water (two mugs and two wineglasses as I measured) into a beige ceramic pot designed for cooking porridge, stew and herbal medicine, put in the herbs, and let them soak in the water for one hour to make the ingredients soft and loose. When the timer goes off, I turn on the propane gas burner at a high power level, set another timer for 6 minutes, and wait till my babies roar in the pot.
In my early attempts, I had a good taste of the fate of seconds when I set the timer at 7 minutes and the boiling water shot out from the mouth and the lid, causing a mess on the counter. And then comes the trickiest part of the cooking. My doctor specified that the heat should be at such a level that the water is just discernibly boiling, like the motion of a lake surface under the gentlest breeze. Problem is, if the fire is too gentle, the burner dies out furtively, yet if it causes vehement boiling, I’m concerned the ingredients will be damaged and the efficacy undermined. Luckily, after many disappointing trails, I finally get the hang of it: switch the burner to when a flame at a fissure produces a regular burp/beep sound, like a bubble that forms and bursts and forms again. The simmering is supposed to keep going for 40 minutes. But since the burner cannot produce the exact gentleness my doctor dictates - it’s always more like the waves in the sea on a normal day, I cut it to 37 minutes.
Still, this isn’t secure. The fire is so low that it becomes sensitive to any drastic movement of air, so I close the window in the kitchen to leave just a 5-centimeter-wide opening, and keep the kitchen door half shut. Even so, a sneaky puff of wind or Ross’s intrusion into the kitchen can cause an abrupt die-out. I have no choice but to check the burner fire every 5 or 10 minutes.
Give a human a task, he’ll soon learn how to economize it. This is the philosophical enlightenment I come across in my herb-cooking project. Since the living room is connected, via a glass door, to the bedroom which is linked to the kitchen by a sliding door, I have learned to turn off the kitchen light to highlight the burner fire, so I only need to get off my desk seat in the living room, walk to the glass door, look into the darkness for that cute blue ring of fire (hello, Mr. Cash), and sniff at that incoming wave of herbal odor, bitter, warm, mildly repugnant with the mixture of vinegar and soy sauce. At the first nights, a non-vicious “damn it” slip off my lips, however, before long, the gas burner and I seem to have come to know and like each other, so the result of my peeks are now mostly a satisfying nasal “hmm”.
In the first month, the herb cooking is a daily ordeal, and I am amazed at the amount of time that is sucked into it. Sleep excluded, it turns out to be the biggest commitment of any of my day. Although it is no longer that troublesome now, I still have that reluctant sense of “oh, shoot, I have to cook medicine today”.
Despite all the complaints, I feel utterly assured when the liquid enters my mouth, partly because it’s the reward for my hard work and meticulous attention, more for the assumption that since I have followed doctor’s instruction to the letter, an early achievement of the goal we are working at, i.e., not seeing each other again, is more likely to occur. With these thoughts, I drink half of the extraction with a great sense of satisfaction and hopefulness.
A week ago, I got a short-term teaching job at a nearby city in Jiangsu, which means there’s no way I could cook herbs myself everyday. So I called Tong Ren Tang, the most renowned TCM pharmacy chain in China, and consulted on medicine cooking service. To my great surprise, the charge was just 2.5 kuai for one parcel of herbs.
I was rather hurt to know that 2 hours of my labor and propane is only worth that little money. Then I found that a TCM pharmacy in the city I was to stay at also provided this service, only at twice the price. I guess it’s the manifestation of the supply-and-demand theory in business: since there’s a low demand of the service, the price stays high, once it becomes massively popular, the price will be brought down significantly (Apparently, Apple regards itself as an exception to this rule).
The pharmacy was spacious yet empty with just another customer. A woman in her 50s received me. She first said she wasn’t sure the shop offered such service, then quickly modified that the concoction shall be ready next morning. After reading my incredulous look (an eye-rolling as well, probably), she corrected herself again by asking whether I really wanted it tonight. Of course. Come back in one hour then. OK.
At light speed, my brain was calculating: unpacking, blending, starting the stove, distributing to 16 small bags, and sealing. All in one hour! Certainly no soaking the herbs. Bad for extracting. Medicine quality is undermined for sure. But I can’t do it myself. Accept the fact, dude.
Just then, right there, she solved a big mystery of mine. She brought out a big yellowish rice sack, the inner side of which had a layer of brown stains, unpacked a paper-wrapped parcel of herbs, dumped the contents in the sack, and grabbed another parcel. I suddenly understood why that pharmacy cashier always asked me whether I intended to cook the medicine myself or use their cooking service.
Truth is if I give in to the latter, then after fetching the right amount of a herb on the prescription from the drawer, the girls won’t have to painstakingly divide it into 12 equal portions in small grams; instead, they would just place all the herbs into one big sack and cook them and then distribute the extracted liquid into 24 small plastic bags and seal them. (I figured out it’s a standard practice to have two servings of TCM concoction per day). Thus, instead of being 2.5 kuai for 2 hours, value of my labor, it’s 2.5 kuai multiplying 12 parcels for 1 hour, worth of pharmacy labor, not a bad deal.
The front of the concoction bag reads “Processed with Exquisite Care, Wish You Quick Recuperation”. I know better than to take it literally. It’s the standard false nicety that businesses are adept at using so as to send a subliminally comforting message to the customers that they are much cared for.
If you are reckless enough to thank the clerk for his ‘exquisite care’ in cooking the bulky sack of herbs, he will probably be embarrassed because he didn’t care exquisitely about the job he was assigned to. More likely, his mentality while performing this job was simply not to make too outrageous a mistake and be verbally assaulted by his manager.
Here, it dawned to me that even the author of these soothing lines may have regretted the warm words he lavished under the hot spirits of starting a business. With time, he now, if he’s a normal person, grows rather weary of his job and understands, with a clearer and maturer perspective thanks to experience, that naive hopes about the world die fast.
Looking at this bag of elixir that my health helplessly relies on, all I have is gratitude that it’s handed to me at the promised time and tightly sealed, and that there are visible signs of professional devotion and good wishes on the pharmacy’s side. I drink the concoction with utter satisfaction, not in the least concerned whether or not its efficacy was compromised by that speedy processing.
