The Chrysanthemum Hotpot
Food as Community
My wife Molly and I married in 1961 and one of our first purchases was The Chinese Cookbook by Virginia Lee and Craig Claiborne. In the book’s introduction, they wrote:
“If you have the desire to ‘cook Chinese,’ to cook well and yet not to needlessly complicate your life, there are several things that can speed you on your way.”
They explained how to plan a Chinese meal, the proper ingredients to use, and how to work with these in accord with Chinese aesthetics. For example, they cautioned that the cook must strive to properly shred a chicken, making sure the result does not look wounded “if not to say, butchered.”
We learned from the book how to slice, shred, dice, cube and score food for Chinese dishes. We learned the importance of ingredients such as fish sauce, sesame oil, Shau Hsing wine, hoi sin sauce, oyster sauce, soy sauce, garlic, mushrooms, ginger and scallions. Virtually every grocery store or supermarket now has most of these ingredients. These were not easy to find in the supermarkets of Westchester in the 1960s.
To purchase authentic Chinese ingredients, we traveled from our home in Larchmont, a village in Westchester, to New York City’s Chinatown in downtown Manhattan. On one such trip, seeking the ingredients for a hot and sour soup recipe, we bought a pound of dried tiger lily stems. We found out later that the recipe required three stems. The several hundred dried flowers lasted in our cupboard for ten years.
I can’t recall exactly when we discovered the hotpot. One day we perused through The Chinese Cookbook looking for something new to cook, and we found the hotpot. It looked like a fun dinner. We learned that the hotpot is a boiling soup or broth into which one adds various vegetables, meat, seafood and noodles. These are allowed to cook for several minutes, and they are served with added sauces and spices to enhance the flavors. The diners use chopsticks to catch cooked pieces from the boiling broth and eat these with rice.
We loved to have friends and relatives to dinners. One day in 1980., Molly said, “Let’s invite a few couples next weekend and we’ll try it out.” We invited three couples for dinner the coming Saturday evening and told them what we were going to make a Chinese hotpot meal. They all said that this would be a new dining experience and asked how they could help. We had something in mind for them but kept it to ourselves at that point.
We did some research and discovered that the hotpot is believed to have first appeared in China ten centuries ago. Mongol warriors would camp outside sitting in a circle and communally eat from a pot on the fire into which they threw whatever meats and vegetables were to hand. The hotpot was a way to keep warm while eating outside.
The chrysanthemum hotpot is attributed to the Empress Dowager Cixi, the most powerful woman in the late Qing Dynasty (1644–1911). Her accomplishments included reforming China’s legal code and its education system and outlawing the binding of women’s feet and many barbaric punishments. Cixi believed that chrysanthemums could preserve her beauty. She added the flower to every hot pot. She died in 1908 at 72 and left us a great recipe.
Molly and I realized that if our guests pitched in and helped create the meal, we could have a really good time. The preparation involved making beautiful plates of shrimp, vegetables, meat, etc. We could ask our guests if they wanted to take part in arranging the food, hoping that they would say “yes!”
On Saturday morning we bought the ingredients: three raw chicken breasts; a half pound of flank steak, forty peeled and deveined raw shrimp; a pound of founder; 8 chicken livers; a bunch of scallions, tofu, twenty raw littleneck or cherrystone clams; a pound of spinach; a pound of celery cabbage, a few packages of cellophane noodles (also called bean threads;) three quarts of low salt chicken broth; eight eggs, and one large chrysanthemum flower. We also bought white rice, dry sherry, shao hsing wine, saki and beer. We already had red wine vinegar, soy sauce and sesame oil and chopsticks in our cupboard.
Although we had decided to make the dish in our electric frying pan, we also had bought an authentic coal fired hotpot that we found in Chinatown. It looked like a bronze soup pan with a chimney in the middle, which you fill with burning charcoal briquets.
We read that when all the food has been consumed, you could make egg drop soup in the hotpot broth. It was a toss-up that anybody would have room for soup after this meal.
At 6:00 PM our guests started to arrive. Mike and Miriam and Jack and Jan lived across the street so theirs was an easy walk. Rick and Gabby lived in Port Chester, two towns away, and they were a little bit late. When everyone settled in, we served a cold spicy eggplant appetizer another Chinese dish that we had been experimenting with but never made it for company until that evening.
Our friends quickly finished the eggplant appetizer. Fortunately, we had made two portions. We drank some wine and chatted and after a while they wanted to know about the dinner.
Molly said, “It’s called a chrysanthemum hotpot.” We showed them a photograph of the setup from The Chinese Cookbook. “What’s that?” asked Miriam. Molly explained the dish. Then she added, “We hope that you would like to arrange the food. We have a dozen ingredients, and they have to be assembled on small plates. We expect that your arrangements will be beautiful.” I added, “Let’s make the dishes look like the ones on the photograph.”
In a half hour, we had beautiful displays of the ingredients. We filled small cups with sauces: sesame oil, soy sauce, Hoising sauce and spicy chili garlic sauce. I tuned on the electric cooker and poured in the chicken broth, adding a few drops of sesame oil. It smelled great. We opened a few bottles of wine and saki.
Fortunately, everyone was comfortable using chopsticks., which we needed to add to and retrieve ingredients from the boiling broth. In a few minutes, we saw the clams open up. “We are ready to eat!” Molly exclaimed.
I had forgotten to mention to our guests that there was no way to find the specific ingredients that each of us had added to the broth. I said, “Just grab whatever you can snare with your chopsticks.” There was a lot of bickering: “That clam’s mine!” “Don’t touch my shrimp!” and so on. “Have some Saki and shut up!” I smiled and said, “Calm down. There is more than enough for everyone.”
Ten minutes into the meal, the electricity went off in our neighborhood.
“No problem,” I said, as I picked up a flashlight and walked through the kitchen to the cellar stairs. I found a small bag of charcoal briquettes and a tin chimney to quickly get them burning. I went into the garden, doused the charcoal with lighter fluid and in ten minutes had white-hot glowing coals. I went back upstairs and poured the coals into the hotpot basin and transferred the broth into this hotpot. We opened the windows to let the fumes escape and resumed eating.
Someone joked that we had been transported back to an age before electricity. When the plates were empty, I broke two eggs into the broth together with a little sesame oil to make egg drop soup. Everyone was too full to try the soup, so we put it into the refrigerator for another meal. Our guests stayed for desert and left around 10PM, thanking us for an unusual and delicious dinner.
Fast forward forty-three years to 2023. Peter, my 36-year-old ping pong partner, friend and one-time sushi chef, suggested that we have dinner at Shabu Ro in Palisade Park, a few miles from our apartment complex in Fort Lee, NJ. Established in 2016. Shabu Ro opened in December 2016. Its owner describes it as “the FIRST All You Can Eat shabu-shabu restaurant in New Jersey,” designed to offer a unique cooking experience to customers.
It had been decades since I had made a hotpot meal, and never had one in a restaurant. I hadn’t realized that there were many such restaurants in Fort Lee and its environs. About 42% of the town’s population was Asian, but the shabu-shabu restaurants attracted patrons of all ethnicities. ShabuRo was Peter’s first choice.
Early one evening, after an hour of ping pong, we grabbed a few bottles of cold beer and drove to Palisades Park. ShabuRo was already half full at 5PM. Peter walked me around the display of meats, poultry, seafood, vegetables and sauces. Everything looked fresh. There were ten different broths, ranging from mild to spicy, five types of mushrooms, twenty-seven kinds of vegetables, fifteen kinds of noodles and rice cakes, fish cakes and dumplings, fifteen types of meats and a half dozen varieties of seafood.
I thought about the hotpots that my wife and I made decades ago, which usually had no more than a dozen ingredients and paled in comparison to this dish in a professional shabu-shabu restaurant. Then I stopped ruminating, took a plate and went to work.
Two hours later, after consuming three refills of broth, several beers and dozens of ingredients, we paid the bill and staggered out to my car. It took me a day to want to eat again. I kept flashing back to the clams that popped open, which I ate with a mild sesame-peanut sauce. Delicious. I also revisited the thin-sliced and marbled steak that cooked in seconds. Amazing. Can’t wait for my next meal there.
