Morning (08:30) — the market
The day starts where a Beijing weekend starts, at a covered neighbourhood market rather than a street of stalls. Vegetables come in from Hebei and Shandong before dawn, tofu and fresh noodles are sold by the jin, fish still move in the tanks, and one counter has sold nothing but dumpling wrappers for twenty years. You shop with a home cook rather than a guide, so the questions that get asked are the ones a cook asks: which cabbage for filling, why this cut of pork, how much chive is too much. Breakfast is taken standing up, from the queue that forms before the vegetable stalls open — soy milk, a fried dough stick, a jianbing folded around an egg.
Late morning (10:30) — dough, filling, pleats
Back in a courtyard kitchen, lunch is made from what you carried. The dough is mixed and rested, then rolled into small rounds and pleated by hand, thin at the rim and thick at the centre so the base holds and the top closes. Hand-pleating takes most visitors about thirty attempts to become competent at, which is the useful discovery of the morning about a cuisine that is often described abroad as fast food. The filling is mixed to taste rather than to a recipe, and the first batch is boiled while the second is still being folded.
Lunch (12:30) — the table
Lunch is the dumplings you made, with two or three cold dishes and a soup from the same stove. The kitchen is small, the flame is fierce, and the cook keeps adding dishes until told firmly to stop, because feeding a guest generously is the hospitality rule that matters most here.
Afternoon (14:30) — the lanes
The afternoon is slow on purpose. Walk off lunch through the hutong grid around the kitchen, past courtyard gates and the small shops that serve them, and take tea in a courtyard tea room. There is time to sit, which is what the middle of a Beijing day is for, before the evening shift.
Evening (17:30) — the oven
The last stop is a duck kitchen, for the two stages guests almost never see. The birds hang in a drying room for at least a day, because the skin has to be dry before it can crisp, and they are then roasted over fruit wood in a closed oven rather than an open flame. At the table the duck arrives in three services: the skin dipped in sugar, the slices rolled in a thin pancake with scallion and sweet bean sauce, and the carcass taken back to the kitchen for soup. Dinner ends with the table still full, which is the correct outcome.
Meals
Lunch and dinner.
