The Food of Asia. Kong Foong Ling
meal in the courtyard of an old house in Fujian province, in Southern China.
CHINA
An ancient and inventive cuisine, known and loved all over the world.
Steamed dumplings are popular in most regions of China and connoisseurs can recognize their provincial origin by their stuffing and accompanying sauces.
From a country whose usual greeting is "Chi fan le mei you?"-Have you eaten?-you can expect nothing less than a passionate devotion to food. Chinese food is known the world over, thanks to the peripatetic nature of its people, but the success of its food hinges on much the same things: fresh ingredients and the balance of flavors. The next time you go to an Asian market, observe: the Chinese shoppers are likely to be the ones who prod the fish, inspect entire bunches of vegetables, and accept and reject a batch of shrimp based on the kick in their legs.
While the array of seasonings and sauces used by Chinese cooks is not vast, every dish must meet three major criteria: appearance, fragrance, and flavor. The Chinese also prize texture and the health-giving properties of food.
An old Chinese proverb says, "To the ruler, people are heaven; to the people, food is heaven." This is no truer than in China, where gastronomy is a part of everyday life.
The Making of a Cuisine
So large is China, and the geographic and climatic variations so diverse, that you can travel through the country and never have the same dish served in exactly the same way twice. The paradox of Chinese food is that it is one borne of hardship and frequent poverty: this is, after all, a country that houses 22 percent of the world's population and has only seven percent of the world's arable land.
There is much debate and confusion about how many regional cuisines there are, but most gourmets agree that at least four major Chinese regional styles exist: Cantonese, centered on southern Guangdong province and Hong Kong; Sichuan, based on the cooking of this western province's two largest cities, Chengdu and Chongqing; Hunan, the cooking of eastern China-Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai; and Beijing or 'Northern' food, with its major inspiration from the coastal province of Shandong. Some would add a fifth cuisine from the southeastern coastal province of Fujian.
All regions use various forms of ginger, garlic, scallions, soy sauce, vinegar, sugar, sesame oil, and bean paste, but combine them in highly distinctive ways. What distinguishes these regional styles is not only their cooking methods but also the particular types and combinations of basic ingredients.
The southern school of cooking was the cuisine taken to the West by Chinese migrants-egg rolls, dim sum, chow mein, sweet and sour pork, chop suey, and fortune cookies. With the exception of the last two, which were American inventions, the other dishes are orthodox Cantonese creations.
Cantonese food is characterized by its extraordinary range and the freshness of its ingredients, a light touch with sauces, and the readiness of its cooks to incorporate "exotic" imported flavorings such as lemon, curry, and Worcester shire sauce. Cantonese chefs excel in preparing roasted and barbecued meats (duck, goose, chicken, and pork), and dim sum, snacks taken with tea for either breakfast or lunch. Dim sum can be sweet, salty, steamed, fried, baked, boiled or stewed, each served in their own individual bamboo steamer or plate. To eat dim sum is to "yum cha" or drink tea. In traditional yum cha establishments, restaurant staff walk around the room pushing a cart or carrying a tray offering their tasty morsels. Dim sum restaurants are important institutions where the locals go to discuss business, read newspapers and socialize.
Smiling Shanghai children enjoying a snack. Each region has its own special array of morsels for when the next meal is just too far away.
The home of spicy food, Sichuan, is a landlocked province with remarkably fertile soil and a population of over 100 million. The taste for piquant food is sometimes explained by Sichuan's climate. The fertile agricultural basin is covered with clouds much of the year and there is enough rain to permit two crops of rice in many places. Strong spices provide a pick-me-up in cold and humid weather, and make a useful preservative. The most popular spices are chilies and Sichuan peppercorns (prickly ash), tempered with sugar, salt, and vinegar. Despite the province's incendiary reputation, many of the famous dishes are not spicy at all, for example, the famous camphorand tea-smoked duck, made by smoking a steamed duck over a mixture of tea and camphor leaves. But it is the mouth burners that have made Sichuan's name known all over the world, dishes like ma po doufu-stewed bean curd and ground meat in a hot sauce; hui guo rou-twice-cooked (boiled and stir-fried) pork with cabbage in a piquant bean sauce; yu xiang qiezi, eggplant in "fish flavor" sauce; and dou ban yu-fish in hot bean sauce.
When the Grand Canal was built in the Sui dynasty AD 581-618, it gave rise to several great commercial cities at its southern terminus, including Huaian and Yangzhou, after which this regional cuisine (Hunan) is named. Its location on the lower reaches of the Yangtze River in China's "land of fish and rice" gave it an advantage in terms of agricultural products, and it was renowned for seafood such as fish, shrimp, eel, and crab, which were shipped up the canal to the imperial court in Beijing. Hunan cuisine is not well known outside of China, perhaps because it rejects all extremes and strives for the "Middle Way". Freshness (xian) is a very important concept in the food of this region, but xian means more than just fresh. For a dish of steamed fish to be described as xian, the fish must have been swimming in the tank one hour ago, it must exude its own natural flavor, and must be tender yet slightly chewy. Xian also implies that the natural flavor of the original ingredients should always take precedence over the sauce. Some of the best known dishes from this region are steamed or stewed and require less heat and a longer cooking time, for instance chicken with chestnuts, the glorious pork steamed in lotus leaves, duck with a stuffing made from eight ingredients, and the evocatively named "lion head" meatballs.
The cuisine of Beijing has perhaps been subjected to more outside influences than any other major cuisine in China. First came the once-nomadic Mongols, who made Beijing their capital during the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368). They brought with them mutton, the chief ingredient in Mongolian hot pot, one of Beijing's most popular dishes in the autumn and winter. The Manchus, as the rulers of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), introduced numerous ways of cooking pork. As the capital of China for the last eight centuries, Beijing became the home of government officials who brought their chefs with them when they came from the wealthy southern provinces. But the most important influence comes from nearby Shandong province, which has a pedigree that goes back to the days of Confucius C. 550 Be. Shandong cuisine features the seafood found along China's eastern seaboard: scallops and squid, both dry and fresh, sea cucumber, conch, crabs, and shark's fins, often teamed with the flavors of raw leek and garlic.
Beijing's most famous dish, Peking duck, owes as much to the culinary traditions of other parts of China as to the capital itself. The method of roasting the duck is drawn from Hunan cuisine, while the pancakes, raw leek, and salty sauce that accompany the meat are typical of Shandong.
Beijing is also famous for its steamed and boiled dumplings (jiaozi), which are filled with a mixture of pork and cabbage or leeks, or a combination of eggs and vegetables.
The Food of the People
The proliferation of refrigerators in China today is making inroads on an institution that for centuries has been an essential part of daily life: shopping in the local food market. Many housewives and househusbands go to the market two or three times a day. In some state-run offices in Beijing, half-hour rest periods are allotted to enable its employees to shop for fresh produce.
In addition to fresh food markets, there are shops selling a huge variety of prepared and packaged food. Along with food markets, most cities have areas where snack foods are sold in stand-up or sit-down stalls. Breakfast may be a fried egg wrapped in a pancake; an "elephant ear" plate-sized piece of fried bread; noodles; con gee (rice gruel) or bean curd jelly accompanied by a deep-fried cruller (you tiao); or a slice of cake and a jar of milk. Lunch or dinner could be noodles from a food stall or careful preparation of the just-bought