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CHINA

In China, mock meat preparations were developed by Buddhist vegetarians to serve to meat-hungry temple guests. Long experimentation resulted in some startlingly canny imitations, but the cooking techniques are far more difficult than for the simpler Indian dishes.

Many recipes use tempeh as the basic meaty raw material. Tempeh is the best known of several types of fermented soybean cakes. Unlike tofu, this stuff contains the whole bean (and all its nutrients), and as a cultured product it's more digestible than other soybean products. Tempeh's 33% higher in protein than soybeans, but it's quite perishable (look for black spots -- a possibly carcinogenic mold). It makes a good meat substitute: salty from fermentation -- a deeper saltiness than merely adding salt to tofu (though chefs can come close by marinating tofu) -- and also more flavorful than unfermented bean curd. There are other, less widely-known kinds of fermented bean curd (e.g. Japanese nato, and runny -- almost cheesy -- Cantonese foo yi); all lend different flavors.

Each kind of meat has its own strategies for vegetarian recreation; the following are typical -- though by no means the only -- techniques:

The main Chinese trick is to try to be faithful to the recipe you're imitating; you marinate in the same spices you'd marinate meat, and you cut, handle and cook in as similar a fashion as possible.

These dishes, at their best, taste great, and they do come close to fooling the palate. But the techniques are difficult, and it's not easy to find a chef with the knack. What's more, most Chinese restaurants offer plain old vegetarian dishes reliably prepared by most any decent chef, so unless you've found a specialist (such as Manhattan's Tang Pavillion, a Shanghai style kitchen that makes both mock and real meat, Poti and Happy Buddha), it's perhaps better to stick with Buddha's Delight.