Cornmeal Cakes with Braised Small Fish

Tianjin sits where the Hai River and its tributaries meet the sea, and the marshy waters of the surrounding plain once teemed with small fish — crucian carp, mudfish and the like — that cost almost nothing. Cornmeal, ground from the maize that grew across the northern plain, was the everyday grain of the poor. Country and dock households put the two together in a single pot to save fuel and feed a family cheaply: fish below, cornmeal cakes stuck to the wall above. The dish has no recorded inventor — it is folk cooking born of thrift — but it became so identified with the city that it stands today as a classic of the wei pai, the native Tianjin home style, and is the city's emblem of plain, satisfying eating.

Two textures, one pot. The cake's underside is a crisp golden crust, brittle as a cracker where it sat against the iron; bite up and it turns soft, dense and faintly sweet from the corn, with a grainy bite that mainstream wheat bread doesn't have. The fish are small and tender, stewed soft enough that even the bones go yielding, in a brown gravy that is salty-savory with a whisper of sugar and vinegar. You drag the cornmeal crust through that gravy — the sweet grain against the savory sauce — and that contrast is the whole pleasure of the dish.

The dish works because the pot does two jobs at once. The fish braise in liquid at the bottom; the cakes are pressed onto the dry, fire-hot iron just above the waterline, where two things happen — the steam rising off the gravy cooks the dough from above, and direct contact with the metal griddle-fries the underside into a hard crust. ("Tie," to stick, names exactly this.) Cornmeal has no gluten, so the dough is shaped while warm and pressed firmly or it slides; the crust forms only on dry iron, which is why the cakes ride above the liquid, not in it. The fish are first shallow-fried or seared to firm the flesh so they hold shape through the long stew, then braised down with soy, sugar, vinegar and aromatics until the gravy thickens and the small bones soften.