Dan Rodricks: A taste of Asia in Maryland -- touring H Mart, Great Wall | STAFF COMMENTARY

Mar. 15—By Dan Rodricks — drodricks@baltsun.com

PUBLISHED:March 15, 2024 at 12:36 p.m.| UPDATED:March 15, 2024 at 9:35 p.m.

Entering the Great Wall for the first time, your eyes need to adjust. It takes a minute, and the minute might be epiphanic, so I recommend that you stand there and regard the tableau — as long as it's a weekday and you don't hold up other customers trying to get into the place.

The same should be suggested for visitors to H Mart, another Asian supermarket, with two locations west of Baltimore along Route 40, one in Catonsville, one in Ellicott City. All three markets stimulate arriving shoppers with vast, artful displays of fruits and vegetables — piles and piles of them, a half-acre of them — and the rich scenery triggers the primal plant eater in your brain.

Great Wall is part of a chain established by a man named Lihui Zhang 20 years ago in New York City. The store sells Asian products and caters mostly to immigrants — people who know what to do with, say, tong ho. That's Chinese for chrysanthemum, and in this case, an edible chrysanthemum. There were bags of chrysanthemum leaves among the mounds of greens at Great Wall.

"Wait. You can eat chrysanthemum?" I ask out loud.

"It's from Vietnam," says my guide, Henry Wong, the proprietor of the An die Musik concert venue in Baltimore and a man of considerable expertise in Chinese cuisine. "It is in the same family of plant as the [western chrysanthemum] flower. It has a kind of wild taste."

"And it's edible?" I ask again.

"Yes," says Henry. "Technically, everything is edible."

Technically, toxicologists will disagree with that.

But, in terms of what I've found in my studies at H Mart and Great Wall, I get Henry's point.

Here, across all this extraordinary abundance, is the modern manifestation of ancient wisdom, born of necessity, in wasting nothing — certainly no part of a butchered animal; no catchable fish or crustacean or mollusk; no fruit, however prickly its skin; no leafy plant, root vegetable or fungus.

The produce section, with its valley of green vegetables, brought Michael Pollan to mind. The food guru visited Baltimore in 2008, after his book, 'The Omnivore's Dilemma," was published. We sat across from each other, and Pollan stated his first rule: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Pollan has long argued against the diet most familiar to Americans: "Populations that eat a so-called Western diet — consisting of lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of refined grains, lots of everything except vegetables, fruits and whole grains — invariably suffer from high rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer."

And so, if anything, a visit to the Great Wall will get you thinking more seriously — if you're not already there — about cooking more, about what you cook and how you cook it.

"These are seafood mushrooms," Henry says, holding up long-stemmed white mushrooms with small caps, named for the flavor they suggest. "We use them in stir fry. They are out of this world."

Indeed, most of what you can buy at Great Wall is from some other world — a gorgeous array of greens, for instance, that I've never seen anywhere else, and certainly not for such reasonable prices. Chinese broccoli, pea greens, an Asian variety of mustard greens, and baby napa cabbage for just 68 cents a pound. All of which made me hungry for plants.

I took home a large bag of Shanghai bok choy tips ($1.99 a pound) and sauteed them with a little sunflower oil, garlic and some chicken broth. They were delicate and flavorful.

Henry mentions two primary uses for all these greens: In a stir fry, with or without meat, or in Asian-style soup, with a flavorful broth and maybe some noodles.

"No cream-of-anything soup," Henry says, reminding me of the lack of dairy in the Asian diet.

The butcher's case is filled with cuts of pork and beef, an intact oxtail, and parts unknown. You can buy a fully roasted, 80-pound pig for $458, a 50-pounder for $428, or a 30-pounder for $388. Half a roasted duck at Great Wall costs $17.99.

The display of fresh seafood is at least as impressive as the one I recently surveyed at H Mart, and both reveal the large market for fresh fish here. It's one thing to love seafood, quite another to take it home and cook it well. But it's clear from the abundance on display — belt fish, sea bass, barramundi, buffalo carp, eel, clams, conch, snails, tilefish, tilapia, branzino, dorado, mackerel, cuttlefish, silver pomfret, golden pomfret, yellow scad, strawberry grouper, blue crab, king crab, tiger shrimp, halibut, geoduck — that thousands of Asian immigrants or Asian-Americans do exactly that, another measure of the beautiful diversity of the Baltimore region.

Among the hills of fruits, we come across a pile of durians. Known as "the king of fruits" in Malaysia, they are the size and shape of small footballs, with a husk of green thorns.

"Henry," I ask, "what do you do with this?"

"You cut it open and eat it," he says, "if you like that kind of stuff."

"What do you mean?"

"It's a very pungent flavor," he says. "With the smell, some people can't get it through their mouth."

I decided to experiment with "the king of fruit" another day, on a return visit to the Great Wall.

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