Painting a picture: coconuts and bird's nests

Andrew Wong: Bird’s nest is a medicinal product. It’s given value that has nothing to with flavour and purely to do with the social status and the exclusivity of the ingredient. When I first started as a chef I always thought bird’s nest was a waste of time – it just provides texture and there’s no point to it. But actually the more that I work with Mukta and the more that I cook, the more I realise that a lot of food isn’t purely experienced as flavour. Cultural relevance and cultural importance play a role in the eating experience. Culture, flavour, texture – they all go hand in hand, particularly in creating prized ingredients. There are a lot of prized ingredients in Chinese gastronomy, such as shark’s fin, dried abalone, dried scallops. Can you construct these flavours by using other ingredients? Absolutely. But does substituting the ingredient itself mean that the dish is fundamentally different?

Mukta Das: Back in imperial times, bird’s nests were harvested from sea-facing cliff faces where ocean-travelling swifts would nest and hatch their young. People used to abseil down these cliffs and harvest the abandoned nests. Now the nests are also farmed in Southeast Asia, in places like Indonesia and Malaysia. They build tall ‘bird bungalows’ and encourage migrating swifts to nest there. Harvesting the abandoned nests by climbing a ladder is a hell of a lot safer than clinging onto a rock face!

AW: After the nests are collected, you then have a team of people who will clean the bird’s nest millimetre by millimetre by hand. It takes hours to do and is a massively intricate process. It is then dried, packaged, sold and then carefully rehydrated by cooks before cooking. Generally, people know very little about Chinese ingredients, or the artisanal skills that are involved in drying, ageing and fermenting these products, and how these processes are all about improving the eating experience. Just look at red and white mulberries – they are an important part of western Chinese cuisine, but the season is actually very short. When they are dried and rehydrated, however, they take on a unique flavour that’s different from when they’re eaten fresh, so it’s more than just a preservation process; it alters the final flavour.

MD: Mulberry trees are cultivated in western China, which has the perfect climate for silkworms to flourish among its leaves. The Silk Roads (the name for the trade routes that cut through the area) identified the major commodity that the trees were associated with. But the mulberry and its leaves and bark all have important medicinal and cultural importance for the region.

AW: I’ve created this dessert to build particular interest in different parts of China and the stories I want to tell, as opposed to just coming up with a standard traditional dessert dish.

It’s a celebration of the overall idea of Chinese desserts, which is a difficult topic to tackle. To me, traditional Chinese desserts are particularly unsuitable for western diners. Desserts aren’t traditionally eaten at the end of a meal in China; instead, they are enjoyed as part of the main meal or as a communal experience outside of formal meal times. These dishes are usually soups and broths and there isn’t that resolute sweetness that you get with European desserts. And if you don’t use butter or sugar in a European dessert, then it becomes a very different thing.

MD: But sugar did arrive in China with quite the fanfare. In the eleventh and twelfth century, the night markets in the city of Kaifeng were full of varieties of candies, cakes, fruit preserves, flavoured powdered sugars, brown sugars, white sugars and sugar syrups. Martin de Rada and Miguel Lopez de Legazpi, two Augustine friars visiting Fujian in 1575, found that refined sugar was widely used to make edible sculptures, similar to those you saw in European courts around the same time. Refined sugar was still expensive enough that it was limited to the tables of elites and given as extravagant gifts. For everyone else, it was a seasoning. You have recipes from the 1700s for dumplings filled with sugar and goose fat, and biscuits made with walnuts and melon seeds coated with sugar.

AW: This idea of sugar as a seasoning is still reflected in the way that bird’s nest is typically cooked in China: in a pumpkin broth and seasoned with a little bit of rock sugar. It’s a dish that straddles the sweet-savoury divide, although it falls a little more on the sweet side. So with this dessert dish, I’ve kept things within the realm of desserts in a format I hope people will try. It’s a vegetarian product the way that milk or cream is, and because it is so important to Chinese gastronomy I wanted diners in the UK to have a chance to experience it.

MD: Bringing the granita together with the coconut ice cream and the mulberries is a celebration of places such as Hainan in the southern coastal region of China. Hainan is very much a beach resort (similar to places in Thailand) and is a place to bury your toes in the sand. People don’t necessarily equate tropical climates and tastes with a place like China, but in truth China is vast and straddles many different climate zones. It isn’t just a place full of skyscrapers and hutongs.