Combine raw shelled shrimp, green onions and salt, Szechuan pepper, and a small amount of sweet wine. Add water and flour, then sear in sesame oil until done.
蝦餅
生蝦肉，蔥鹽、花椒、甜酒腳少許，加水和面，香油灼透。
Note:
*What is a “Bing” (餅)? It’s been translated variously as cookie, biscuit, cake, bread, etc., but this Chinese term does not really have a good English equivalent. Basically a bing could be any flattened, disk-like starchy food that is typically dry and crisp, though not exclusively so. The French word galette is actually pretty good translation, but I don’t think it has been well adopted enough into English to use it here. As such, I’ve decided to use it as the transliterate word here and for the rest of this chapter.
Hi Sean! I wonder if 香油 refers to sesame oil here, or more literally some kind of “fragrant” oil–maybe a euphemism for clean oil? The reason I ask is that it’s hard to imagine actually cooking in sesame oil, which scorches quickly.
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It could be and I debated on how to translate this term (I think I discussed this in the book). For sesame oil, if you use a light one, which has been pressed without roasting, it is a really good frying and cooking oil. In Japan, I think unroasted sesame oil is actually the traditional oil used for tempura! At the end, I decide to translate it as simply “sesame oil” since it seems the most likely candidate.
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Challenge accepted! I just ordered a couple of bottles of unroasted sesame oil and will report back on how things turn out!
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I had the sesame fried kind a very long time ago and don’t remember it being super different. Interesting in hearing about what you think!
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