The Wok and Coal

The wok (guo in Mandarin, wok in Cantonese) is a round-bottomed pan of cast iron or rolled carbon steel, and it belongs to the household stove of southern and northern China alike. Grace Young's The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen, which rests on the kitchens of Cantonese families and their descendants, treats it as the single tool around which the everyday cooking of her family was built. Its partner for most of its history was the fuel of the stove: wood, charcoal, straw and coal, burned in a brick or clay range with a mouth shaped to hold the pan's curve.

The shape of the wok answers the fuel. A coal or charcoal fire burns hot at one point beneath the pan, and the round base gathers that heat at the centre while the sloping sides stay cooler. A cook can therefore push food up the side to rest, and draw it back to the heat in a moment. The same pan serves for stir-frying, deep-frying, braising, steaming on a rack beneath a lid, boiling soup and smoking, and in a household with one stove and little fuel that range of use was a matter of economy as much as of skill. Young writes of the wok as the tool by which a family fed itself from a single fire. The cooking that grew around it prizes what Cantonese cooks call wok hei, the breath of the wok: the scorched, smoky fragrance that a very hot pan gives to food tossed quickly in a little oil. It depends on a pan heated until it smokes, on ingredients cut small and to a similar size, and on batches kept small enough that the pan does not cool. Young describes the seasoned carbon-steel wok, blackened with use and never scrubbed bare, as the pan that holds this quality, and she is firm that a well-kept wok improves with every year of cooking. The coal stove and the gas ring made different cooks. Where the fire is large and the flame rises around the pan, the work is done in seconds and the cook stands ready with every ingredient cut and every sauce measured. A domestic stove of lower output asks for smaller quantities, a longer preheating and more patience. Much of what is written in English about stir-frying at home is in effect an adaptation of a restaurant technique, born of the coal and later the gas burner, to a weaker flame, and Young's recipes for the home cook are written with that adaptation in view. The tool travelled with the people who used it. Cantonese emigrants carried the wok to the Americas, to Southeast Asia and to Europe, and in the kitchens of the diaspora it often outlived the stove it was made for, cooking on electric rings and gas burners that its round base fits poorly. Young's accounts of her own family's cooking in San Francisco show the wok kept in daily use, seasoned and handed on, as one of the plainest continuities between the village kitchen and the kitchen overseas.

At the table the wok shows itself in the smoky edge of a plate of stir-fried greens or beef with rice noodles, in vegetables that stay bright and crisp, and in a thin glaze of sauce that coats rather than pools. Cantonese cooks serve such dishes straight from the pan, because the fragrance fades as the food cools, and Young presents them as the daily food of the family table, eaten with steamed rice.