January’s toe-numbingly cold weather in New York discouraged long walks to our favorite farmers’ market, and for days on end my wife and I didn’t feel like looking much beyond the refrigerator for ingredients. This was a challenge one evening when we needed a dish to share the menu with Chinese-style red-cooked pork belly drawn from Fuchsia Dunlop’s book Land of Plenty (published in the U.K. as Sichuan Cookery).The least unlikely vegetable in the fridge was a celery root (celeriac). True, it is not commonly used in Chinese cooking, yet it has a fine flavor and, when shredded and eaten raw or cooked as in this recipe, an appealing crunchy texture. Its spheroid form and solidity reminded me of potatoes, which in turn evoked an excellent stir-fry that a Chinese friend used to cook for us: julienned potatoes with chiles (I think she used poblanos, but I could be wrong). The potatoes were left slightly al dente; though underdone potatoes are taboo in most cooking traditions, the thin shreds were delightful to eat, and the potato flavor was somehow heightened by quick cooking.Using celery root in the same way was an experiment that succeeded; absent any fresh chiles, I used a sweet pepper and infused the frying oil with Sichuan peppercorns to add heat and tie the dish to the regional origin of Ms. Dunlop’s red-cooked pork. This worked well in a subtle but palpable way, and the simple, clear-flavored dish provided just what we needed: a contrast with the intense, fat-heavy pork belly.
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