菜籽虾油Rapeseed Oil, Shrimp Oil

Yesterday, hungry, I rummaged through the fridge and found there was still a small box of frozen shrimp — I recalled buying it more than half a month ago when stocking up, since I’d gotten a jin of fresh shrimp before and eaten the live ones first, leaving these unprocessed and, in time, forgotten. So breakfast the next morning was taken care of. I took out the box of shrimp, set it to soak and thaw, and then opened the jar of shrimp oil by the stove — already scraped to the bottom — so today I rendered some more from the peeled shells. I can’t help but praise the aroma of stir-frying in shrimp oil: the pan just warm, the cold oil going in, and without so much as Sichuan pepper or minced garlic to start it off, a thick fragrance rises up — like the warm, rich smell that hits your nose when you drink hot milk, only fresher. This flavored oil is best rendered in sunflower-seed oil, soybean oil second, because their taste is light and won’t overpower the shrimp’s fragrance; but the tin of soybean oil at home was scraped bare, and all that was left at hand was a bottle of sesame oil — and using sesame oil, of course, was out of the question. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a small tin of pitch-black rapeseed oil in the corner, and only then set to peeling the shrimp with an easy mind.

Rapeseed oil has a very particular smell — a sharp, green, raw pungency. It’s like the sensation of strong tea surging up into your nose when you rinse your mouth with it, making you can’t help but scrunch up your nose. I know this smell well, though I can’t say I love it or loathe it; it’s just that every time I eat a dish stir-fried in rapeseed oil, I react without thinking — ah, this was done in rapeseed oil — and nothing more. Back in the countryside my grandparents had a plot of land, part of which they planted for something to do in their idleness, while the other part they’d rent out in spring for someone to grow rapeseed. In spring it drew some butterflies, and a few months on, once it bloomed, it became a pond of golden flowers. You couldn’t quite call it a sea of flowers, because the plot sat by Qin Lake, and just beyond stretched the boundless lake — “sea of flowers” would be an exaggeration. And it was precisely because it bordered the great lake, the soil nourished by fish and shrimp, that the rapeseed grew especially lush. When I was very small, shorter even than the stalks, I’d often play in the field, run into the thick of the rapeseed, and no one could see me. I often used this trick to dodge my family and stay out romping a while longer, or as cover to hide inside, and then, while my grandparents weren’t looking, sneak down to the river mouth.

“There are water ghosts at the river mouth! Watch out or they’ll drag you under!” they often said.

Once the flowers fell, they became clusters of slender green pods — a curled bamboo leaf looks much like them — but wrapped inside the pods were seeds like grains of millet. Green, they couldn’t yet be harvested, holding too much water and little oil; but split a pod open and carefully crush a seed or two between your fingers, and there’s a faint, fresh scent. This smell is easy enough to tell apart: unlike the oily warmth of rapeseed oil and the volatile fierceness of plant sap, in its unripe state the water dilutes it into an easy, green fragrance — bringing to mind a dew-covered lawn at dawn, a park where the branches have just been pruned, a cup of weak tea steeped on a whim, and a camphor leaf picked on the sly — yet in the end there’s still a hint of oil to it, so it’s gentler than any of those. At times like these I’m always grateful for my sturdy nose; though I have rhinitis, it hasn’t cost me my sensitivity to smell — only, now and then, a few extra sneezes at a sharp odor or a cold wind.

Past midsummer, the rapeseed entered an autumn of its own. By the final harvest, it was left only the grey-yellow color of withered leaves. The once-sturdy stalks had become firewood-thin twigs no thicker than a little finger, and the plump green pods had gone gradually from a lean dark green to shriveled. Before the reaping, the field was still a sheet of gold, but thin and sparse now. When the west wind blew across it, you could hear a pleasant, crisp rustling — unlike the low murmur of leaves brushing together, it was sparser and brighter, and didn’t carry far. Stand at the edge of the field and you’ll hear it: the sound of dry leaves, stalks, and pods breaking and splitting apart, of seeds tearing free of their husks and stems knocking and snapping — the last splendor that the rapeseed chooses, a funeral music at the end of life, expressed in a crisp and joyful way.

The last of the ripe seeds are shaken free of their pods, roasted, and pressed into a sweet, rich oil. Under lamplight it is pure gold, like concentrated yellow dye just squeezed from a paint tube, with an obstinacy that won’t dissolve — so dishes fried in it always come out golden, a wash of bright yellow at the bottom of the plate that always leaves you feeling you haven’t eaten it clean. Its smell is as pungent as ever, and so the shrimp oil rendered with it still carries this distinctive note. Pure gold melts into the shrimp’s bright red to make a bright orange-red. The shrimp shells, once the oil is rendered, turn golden too; after straining out the oil I tasted one — the crisp texture of something wholly dried out, plus the meaty savor of shrimp oil, had much of the pleasure of chewing dry pork cracklings. I’d meant to return it to the pan and heat it until it smoked, to drive off the rapeseed-oil taste, but the flavor slowly faded in my mouth, cutting the fishy richness of the meat and the smoke of the fire, so I happily let it be.

The previous jar of shrimp oil I used for plain yangchun noodles, eating them two weeks running. This jar isn’t much, and it was fried a touch too long, but it’s richly fragrant for dressing cold dishes. I hear river shrimp have gotten cheap lately; I’ve suddenly taken a liking to shrimp — when I have time, I’ll recreate a bowl of “three-shrimp” noodles.