Pork, long the pulse of Chinese cookery, meets the crackle of modern heat; this dish bridges the ancestral and the immediate, with chili oil as both homage and rupture.

A small fried strip of fish, yes—but the goujon is also a lesson in elegance, timing, and the French art of elevating the ordinary. Its crispness is fleeting, its pleasures deliberate, its history embedded in the margins of refinement.

More ledger than cookbook, De Re Coquinaria preserves the fevered hungers of late imperial Rome, where flavor was both excess and empire. This modern Crispy Parthian Chicken, with its spiced wine broth and crackling flour crust, channels that legacy with a sharpened edge.