Lesson on Chinese food culture
China Food Culture One: Chopsticks
Chopsticks are widely used in Asian cuisines. However if you have not had a chance to get acquainted to it, let’s do a little exercise here.
Chopsticks are used in pairs. The inner one which is closer to you is basically in a fixed position. All you need to do is to use your thumb, second and third finger to trigger movement of the outer one. Try it out. You won’t find it difficult.
China Food Culture Two: Chinese Tea
Tea is extremely important in China food culture. It is never absent on a Chinese dinning table. Chinese love tea and treat it as an art. However there is a practical reason to have tea with Chinese food.
Tea dilutes the fat that you taken during the meal. It helps cleansing your body and gets rid of the excess fat. So it is extremely healthy.
In a Chinese restaurant, tea is usually charged per person. However in casual dining restaurants, they are usually free.
Chinese tea has wide varieties of flavours. It is a personal preference of which one to order. Here is a list of the most popular tea available at any Chinese restaurant.
• Pu Er 普洱
• Tie Guan Yin 鐵觀音
• Xiang Pian 香片
• Shui Xian 水仙
• Shou Mei 寿眉
All these Chinese tea are extremely aromatic. Pu Er and Tie Guan Yin are both my favourites. However I would suggest you to try them all. Order a different one for each of your meal.
There is a custom of lifting the lid of the tea pot. This is a signal to tell waiters that you need a refill.
China Food Culture Three: Eating Together
Another important China food culture is that we eat together. Chinese food is meant for sharing. Don’t ever try to order a fish for yourself and a chicken for your partner. Order both and eat together. If you do not feel comfortable of sharing food, try to ask for a pair of spare chopsticks and spoon for common use.
If a particular dish is served on a one-person base, it is usually indicated in the menu.
China Food Culture Four: Do Not Ask for Split Bills
In China, each table is a chargeable unit. Waiters don’t have the concept of bill splitting. Therefore, please get one person to pay for the group and then split the bill yourself.
If you find chipping in each time inconvenient, I’ll suggest you doing it my way. When I travel with a group of friends, we usually chip in a lump sum to be used as a meal and transport fund. Assign a fund manager to pay the bills from the fund. This will save the trouble of chipping in every time.
Service Charges and Others
10% service charge is added to the bill. Casual dining might omit this. Additional tipping is up to you. You might pay a little more in appreciation of the good service.
In some restaurants, waiters might bring you non-ordered snacks which is automatically added to your bill.
Chinese cuisine has a number of different genres, but the most influential and typical known by the public are the ‘Eight Cuisines’. These are as follows: Shandong Cuisine, Guangdong Cuisine, Sichuan Cuisine, Hunan Cuisine, Jiangsu Cuisine, Zhejiang Cuisine, Fujian Cuisine and Anhui Cuisine . The essential factors that establish the form of a genre are complex and include history, cooking features, geography, climate, resources and life styles. Cuisines from different regions are so distinctive that sometimes despite the fact that two areas are geographical neighbors their styles are completely alien.
Shandong CuisineThis is the local flavor of Jinan City and Jiaodong peninsula derived from the use of shallots and garlic. Both restaurant chefs and those in families are expert in cooking seafood, soups, meat and offal. The recipes are those that once delighted the royal court and were served to the emperor. The typical menu can include many delicate dishes such as:
Braised abalone – smooth, delicate, fresh and savory
Sweet and Sour Carp – with crisp exterior and tender fish interior, a little sweet and sour
Bree with a complex – clear, mild and fresh
‘Eight Immortals Crossing Sea teasing Arhats’ – This is a starter before a celebration feast. It is luxurious and traditionally uses as its eight main ingredients: fin, sea pumpkin, abalone, asparagus, prawns and ham. The stock is flavored with fish’s swimming bladder and fish bones. These symbolize the eight immortals and the Arhats [Buddhist saints] are symbolized by the inclusion of chicken breast.
Guangdong Cuisine takes fine and rare ingredients and is cooked with polished skills and in a dainty style. It emphasizes a flavor which is clear but not light, refreshing but not common, tender but not crude. In summer and autumn it pursues clarity and in winter and spring, a little more substance. The sauteed dishes always rely upon exquisite presentat ion involving cutting and carving skills. Typical menu here can ultimately embody these characteristics:
Chrysanthemum fish – chefs with adept cutting techniques shape the fish like chrysanthemums, each individual morsel being convenient to enjoy with either chopsticks or forks.
Braised Snake porridge – choose rare meat of cobra, grimalkin, and pullet, braised elaborately, also called ‘Dragon and phoenix contending’ (Long Feng Dou).
Roast suckling pig – a famed dish with rather long history, golden and crisp exterior, and tender meat, with dense aroma.
Sichuan Cuisine
This combines the cuisines from Chengdu and Chongqing. From as early as the Qing Dynasty (1644 – 1911), books had systematically recorded a total of 38 cooking methods like to scald, wrap, bake, mix, stew, and adhere, etc. it features pungent seasonings which were famed as ‘Three Peppers’ (Chinese prickly ash, pepper and hot pepper), ‘three aroma’ (shallot, ginger, and garlic), ‘Seven Tastes’ (sweet, sour, tingling, spicy, bitter, piquant, and salty), and ‘eight flavors’ (fish-flavored, sour with spice, pepper-tingling, odd flavor, tingling with spice, red spicy oily, ginger sauce, and home cooking).
Delicious dishes menu:
Stir-fried Tofu with Minced Beef in Spicy Bean Sauce – A real feast of tender bean curd, minced beef, pepper and bean sauce. It is said that it was made by a pock-marked but ingenious woman, thus the name Ma Po Tofu (pock-marked woman’s bean curd).
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| Clear Noodles in Chili Sauce Sichuan Restaurant |
Lamp-shadow Beef – with larruping techniques, the beef is cut in very thin sheet. When a piece is carried, it looks like translucent paper, slippery and reddish. When put under the lamp or light, a red shadow will appear.
Lung Pieces by Couple – a quite popular in Chengdu. It got the name because the dish was ever sold be a couple and today it remains the original savor, tender meat, tingling and spicy.
Gong Bao Ji Ding – in Chinese it is called Gong Bao Ji Ding. This is a tender chicken dish, tender as the meat is quickly fried. Flavored with peanuts, this is tasty and very popular.
More popular Sichuan dishes:
Fried Pork with Salted Pepper, Eggplant in Sichuan Style
Tangba Town’s Stir-fried Fish, Cucumber with Mashed Garlic
Hunan cuisine lays a stress on the use of oil, dense color, and techniques that produce crispness, softness and tenderness as well as the savory flavors and spices. Stewed fins, fried fresh cabbage with chestnuts, Dong Anzi chicken, immortal chicken with five elements, are of the highest reputation. Chairman Mao, together with other leaders praised the Hunan cuisine in 1958.
Stewed fins – had been famous during the Qing Dynasty. Choice fins, chickens, pork are stewed in chicken soup and sauce, tasting really fresh and mellow.
Immortal chicken with five elements – means to put five elements, litchi, longan, red dates, lotus seeds, and medlar, into the body of a chicken, then to braise. The taste is rather peculiar but it is said to have the effect of strengthening the constitution.
Jiangsu Cuisine
Jiangsu Cuisine developed from the local recipes of Yangzhou, Suzhou and Nanjing. Its main cooking techniques are braising and stewing, thereby enhancing the original flavor and sauce. The elegant color, novel sculpts, with salt and sweet taste will soothe your stomach. The Jiangsu cuisine has several branches, including Shanghai cuisine, Nanjing cuisine is known for its duck recipes, Suxi cuisine with flowery hue, etc. the most highly recommended courses are:
Three sets of ducks – an interlinking dish, that is to put pigeon into wild duck, then put the wild duck into a fowl duck. When stewed, the fowl duck is tender, the wild one crisp, and the little pigeon delicate!
Boiled dry thread of Tofu – thanks to the exquisite skill of the chefs, the Tofu can be cut into very thin threads which have chances to absorb the savor of soup. When chicken pieces added to the soup, the dish is called ‘chicken dry thread’; likewise, when shrimp added, it makes ‘shrimp dry thread’.
Lion’s head braised with crab-powder – there is a metaphor in the dish name. In actual fact the Lion’s head is a conglomeration of meat that is shaped like a sunflower and resembles a lion’s head. It can be braised in a clear soup, or be red-cooked in a dense soup. A seasoning of crab powder enhances the flavor.
Popular Jiangsu Dish: Stewed Chicken with Mushroom
As Zhejiang cuisine consists of hundreds of small delicacies from its main cities, it takes in Hangzhou’s fineness and diversification, Ningbo’s softness and originality, and Shaoxing’s pastoral interests. Hangzhou, once the capital of the Southern Song Dynasty (1127 – 1279), it is customary to endow cuisine with dainty place-names. The chief techniques of cooking lie in the methods used such as frying, quick-fry, stir-fry, braising, and steaming thus rendering the dishes both salubrious and savory.
West-lake braised fish in vinegar – is a traditional delicacy in Hangzhou. It is said that there was once a boy who made his living by fishing. When he fell ill, his sister-in-law fished for him and braised the fish she caught with a marinade of vinegar and sugar. He was said to have made an immediate recovery after eating it. The boy’s story aroused the attention of the emperor and the recipe has been used ever since.
Popular Zhejiang Dishes: Sweet and Sour Pork Fillet, West Lake Beef Soup
Fujian Cuisine
Fujian cuisine has four distinctive features, that is, fine cutting techniques, alternative soups, unique seasonings, and exquisite cooking. Chefs can always cut the thin jellyfish into three pieces and into very thin thread. And thanks to the abundant resources of marine products, the soup of this cuisine genre has its freshness and keeps its own savor with ease. The seasonings add sweet and sour flavors to the dishes. To add to its appeal the food is served in or on elegant bowls or plates.
Appealing dishes are countless, so we can only exemplify some of them:
Fried golden bamboo shoot with chicken mince – every 100g of winter bamboo shoots will be cut into 500 – 600 strips with the same length and breadth. Then they can blend with the very small pieces of chicken.
Buddha jumping over the wall – the most famous and classical dish, which has a long history since the Qing Dynasty.
Dongbi dragon pearl – it chooses materials from the rare longan trees of thousand year’s history in Kaiyuan Temple in Quanzhou, the delicate scent is rather catching.
‘Fried Xi Shi’s tongue’is made from the locally produced Fujian mussel. According to legend the concubine Xi Shi of the king of Wu state was thrown in the sea tied to a huge stone by the wife of Gou Jian, the king of Yue who destroyed Wu, to prevent her husband being seduced by her beauty. In the area of the sea where she sank, a special breed of mussel appeared and this was said to be Xi Shi’s tongue.
Popular Fujian Dish: Green Vegetable with Black Mushroom
It is mainly composed of local flavors of Huizhou and other areas along the Yangtze River and the Huai River. Among the dishes on the Ahhui cuisine menu, you will find less fried or quick-fried dishes than those that are braised. People here are inclined to add ham as seasoning and sugar candy to enrich the freshness and are quite accomplished in the art of cooking.
Among these delicacies, some of the traditional ones are outstanding:
‘Braised turtle with ham’ – the oldest dish using the special ‘Mati turtle’. The delightful taste of this dish has inspired poets.
‘Fuliji Grilled chicken’ – the cooking technique was derived from Dezhou braised chicken of Shandong Province, with improvement of the technique by the Fuliji chef. The grilled chicken is golden and tempting, and the meat is so well cooked that it falls easily from the bone.
Other Cuisines
In other places there are also great tastes such as Beijing cuisine, Dongbei cuisine , Uygur cuisine and Huibei cuisine. As the capital of China, Beijing has always enjoyed a selection of delectable cuisines and offers a vast variety of dishes from all over the country. Consequently, no matter where you visit, there will be fascinating food that you can enjoy.
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Culture Expert 