Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food

by Fuchsia Dunlop

In ancient China, fish was pickled in salt and cooked rice to make a preserve called zha that is the ancestor of Japanese sushi.

This approach, of mixing and matching, of playing with complement and contrast, has been central to Chinese cooking for more than two millennia. In striking contrast to, say, traditional English cooking, in which a recognizable chunk of meat or fish is served with a couple of ‘veg’ that have been cooked separately and are sharply delineated, most Chinese dishes are blends of two or more ingredients cut into similarly shaped pieces and cooked together. An integral dish like Peking duck is a rarity, the exception rather than the rule. One of the reasons why Chinese restaurant menus are so notoriously long is that a limited set of ingredients, cut into small pieces of various possible forms, can be spun together into almost infinite combinations, like lottery numbers. As Lin Yutang, the great twentieth-century explainer of Chinese culture for western readers, once wrote: ‘The whole culinary art of China depends on the art of mixture’.

One consequence of the tendency to combine ingredients is that meat goes further, which is why, if we’re not all to become vegan, Chinese eating may be one of the solutions to the world’s environmental problems. A pork chop that would feed one westerner is, in a Chinese kitchen, typically cut into slivers, stir-fried with a complementary vegetable and shared by a family. Even a tiny amount of meat, fat or stock can be used to add flavour to a wokful of vegetables. Until recently, only at festivals would most Chinese people eat large quantities of meat. In a Chinese culinary context, meat stretches further, but, cooked with a variety of delicious vegetables, never feels mean. The minor role played by meat in the traditional Chinese diet is one reason why, in the era before chemical fertilizers, the Chinese were able to sustain such a large population with their limited arable land.

Just as English people were once suspicious of the French for ‘masking’ their ingredients with deceitful sauces, they were fearful that Chinatown cooks would try to pass off cheap and unsavoury ingredients as decent food. A roast chicken is immediately recognizable, but what is the slivered meat in that ‘chicken’ stir-fry? Is it really chicken, or could it be cat or snake? Western imaginations, faced by the unknown and coloured by ignorance and racial prejudice, ran riot.

You wouldn’t guess this after eating tinned bamboo shoots, an old signifier of Chinese food in the west, which bear as much relation to the fresh shoots as a picture postcard does to a soaring Tintoretto painting on the walls of a Venetian church.

The finest shoots have crisp, delicate, ivory-white flesh and a sublime umami flavour; if you simmer them in a soup, they will fill the whole kitchen with the gentle sumptuousness of their aroma.

Often, in the west, vegetables are either overcooked or served brutally raw as a demonstration of some strange kind of virtue (what’s the appeal of raw kale or broccoli, honestly?). They are nakedly boiled or drenched in cream and butter. But in China the cooking methods and seasonings are many and various, tailored to the specific qualities of each plant. Earthier greens like chards tend to be seasoned more boldly, with fermented black beans or chilli bean paste, while pale-flavoured Chinese cabbage is boosted by savoury stock, assertive sesame paste or fragrant vinegar. Fresh, perfectly tender greens are usually swiftly blanched or stir-fried so they are kissed by heat but still vibrant, with a sprightly hint of crispness, enhanced but not overcome by seasonings.

One of them is Mrs Chen, the inventor of the famous Sichuanese dish mapo tofu. ‘Pock-marked Mrs Chen’ (chen mapo), as she is fondly known, ran a restaurant near the Bridge of Ten Thousand Blessings in the north of Chengdu in the late nineteenth century. It was where workers carrying toasted rapeseed oil into the city’s markets stopped for a meal, and Mrs Chen would rustle up for them a hearty braised tofu, lively with ruby-red oil and zinging Sichuan pepper.

The soybean also represents a defining difference between East Asian and western culinary cultures, because, despite the prevalence of beans and lentils in the west, no one in the western world seems ever to have thought of fermenting them.

The character of a soy sauce depends partly on the relative proportions of soybeans and wheat used to make it: the soybean dominates in traditional Chinese soy sauces, giving a darker, richer result, while Japanese shoyus use roughly equal proportions of soybeans and wheat, making them lighter, sweeter and tangier.

Dogs and pigs were the first animals domesticated in China, during the Neolithic era. Probably both were initially reared for meat, but by the Han Dynasty people recognized the merits of dogs for guarding and hunting and largely stopped considering them as food.

So integral was the pig to the Chinese domestic economy that the character for ‘home’ 家 signifies a pig beneath a roof.

One reference work on Chinese gastronomy, the Classic of Food (shi jing), claims that ‘according to incomplete statistics, Chinese cuisine uses over ten thousand ingredients, with around three thousand in common use, the greatest number of ingredients used in any country in the world’.

Before MSG swept the Chinese culinary scene, chefs relied on stocks to flavour their dishes. An everyday stock might be made of pork bones; a more opulent broth or ‘superior stock’ (shangtang or gaotang) would be simmered from whole chickens and pork bones, with duck, Jinhua ham or dried seafood added for extra savouriness. The precise combination of ingredients would be the chef’s secret signature. So important was stock to the quality and character of a chef’s cooking that they said it was the equivalent of the voice of an opera singer (chushi de tang, changxi de qiang): the means by which he expressed his art. One elderly chef in Shandong told me that in the old days, he would not cook if there was no stock in the kitchen (meiyou tang, bu zuo cai). In Republican-era Kaifeng, according to local food writer Sun Runtian, a banquet always began with a bowlful of soup, and you could accurately predict the quality of the entire meal by assessing it; moreover, if a serious restaurant ran out of stock, they would shut up shop for the rest of the day, hanging up a sign that said: ‘Stock finished; we decline to receive guests’ (tang bi xie ke).

In a traditional Chinese kitchen, there are a few key categories of stock. Most importantly, there is the ‘clear stock’, qing tang, a transparent broth typically made from chicken and pork, with other ingredients added to amplify their savoury tastes. The ingredients are usually first parboiled and rinsed to remove any bloody juices, covered with water and then simmered for many hours over a very low flame. Later, the liquid is strained and clarified through a two-stage process. Firstly, a ‘red paste’ (hong rong) of blended pork is added to the soup; it rises to the surface of the liquid like a raft and collects impurities, which can then be removed. Secondly, the process is repeated with a ‘white paste’ (bai rong) of puréed chicken breast. An exemplary clear stock should be a pale gold in colour, perfectly pellucid, intensely delicious and unsullied by a single speck of scum or drop of oil.

The other crucial stock is ‘milky stock’ (nai tang), made by fast-boiling ingredients so that their fats emulsify to yield a pale, silken liquid with a milk-like opacity.

For even greater luxury, the liquid is further reduced over high heat for a concentrated stock (nong tang), a dense, creamy liquid with a golden hue that sticks voluptuously to your lips.

His classic superior stock was made with a mature hen, pork ribs and dried scallops, with a hint of ginger and spring onion, all slowly simmered in water. Sometimes, however, he began by deep-frying chicken, pork ribs and ham before the simmering, to yield a broth that was particularly xiang (fragrant).

There was another unique stock of his own invention, dark and jellied, that he used for cooking giant carp tails: it was made with the bones of the fish, boiled up and simmered with spring onion, ginger, garlic, Shaoxing wine, soy sauce and a murmur of chilli.

And then there were the special stocks made on the spot for particular dishes, like one of the restaurant’s signatures, ‘Nameless heroes’ (wuming yingxiong). Here, little crucian carp, the most flavourful of freshwater fish, were fried in lard to make them fragrant and then boiled in hot water with a dash of Shaoxing wine, ginger and spring onion until the fats and liquid had emulsified to make a white, silky and magnificently savoury broth. The fish were strained out and discarded, after which a plump carp was added to the soup along with lacy drapes of bamboo pith fungus. When the carp was done, it was transferred to a grand tureen, the soup was poured over and finally scarlet wolfberries and sliced spring onion were scattered over, like jewels on pale flesh. The ‘Nameless heroes’ of the title were the crucian carp that had so generously given up their essences before being banished from the final dish. (The same name could apply to the chickens, ducks and pigs that give their identities to other stocks.)

Steaming still seems, in its blurred humidity, more aesthetically Chinese than roasting. It’s like the difference between the misty scenes of Chinese ink-and-water paintings and the sharp chiaroscuro of European landscapes; the modest gleam of mutton fat jade and the spiky brilliance of diamonds; the winding paths and obscured vistas of a Chinese classical garden and the angular geometry of a French parterre.

If cooked correctly, every component of the dish should be on the absolute fulcrum between undercooking and overcooking, just as a perfectly ripe peach is poised at the optimum moment between unripeness and decay.

When I was a student at cooking school in Sichuan, we learned a total of fifty-six different methods, and since then I’ve come across many more. Steaming and stir-frying, those quintessentially Chinese methods, both have many permutations, and they are only two among innumerable others, historical and contemporary, some in general use, others specifically local and regional. At school, we learned that steaming was not just steaming. There were different expressions for steaming ingredients coated in rice crumbs (‘powder steaming’, fenzheng), steaming ingredients rather plainly (‘clear steaming’, qingzheng), steaming ingredients in a sealed vessel (‘dry steaming’, hanzheng), steaming ingredients after a preliminary braising (‘braise steaming’, shaozheng), steaming before or after deep-frying the ingredients (‘deep-fry steaming’, zhazheng), steaming an ingredient in a pasty or puddingy form (‘paste steaming’, gaozheng) and steaming a whole ingredient with a stuffing inside it (‘interior steaming’, rangzheng). Another word, kou, was used to describe dishes made by packing ingredients into a bowl and, after steaming, inverting them on a serving dish.

There is little appreciation in the western world for the technical complexity of Chinese cuisine, and one reason for this may be the linguistic challenges. Many Chinese cooking terms are untranslatable, without direct equivalents in English or probably any other language.

What is most stunning about Chinese cuisine is the simplicity of the equipment used to generate this complex and extraordinary range of techniques. Even in professional kitchens, most food is prepared using little more than a Chinese cleaver and a wooden board (with a heavier cleaver for chopping through bones), a wok, a scoop or ladle, a strainer and a steamer. Each tool has multiple uses: the chef’s ladle, for example, is used for transferring oil or liquid, for stir-frying, for mixing sauces and, in Shanghai, as a mould for making tiny omelettes that will later serve as dumpling wrappers. It’s a striking contrast to French cookery, with its hefty batterie de cuisine, encompassing multiple knives, moulds and pans.

烤 kao – roast (in an oven, usually) 燔 fan – roast a large chunk of meat or a whole small animal over fire (archaic) 炙 zhi – roast skewered meats over a charcoal fire, like kebabs 炮 pao – wrap in leaves or clay and bake directly in embers 烧 shao – barbecue, braise in liquid 焗 ju – bake 烙lao – griddle in a dry pan 煮zhu – boil 蒸 zheng – steam 焐 wu – steam food directly on top of rice hing – steam food in a bowl placed on top of rice (Shaoxing local term) 扣 kou – steam food in a bowl 熬 ao – simmer, decoct or infuse (contemporary) or dry-fry, parch (archaic) 汆 cuan – fast-boil food that cooks quickly 濯 zhuo – poach 涮 shuan – scald or rinse 焯 chao – blanch in boiling water 炖 dun – stew or double-boil 烩 hui – cook in liquid (often a mixture of cut ingredients) 卤 lu – cook in a spiced broth or oil 炊 chui – general term for cooking du – simmer in a sauce (an onomatopoeic Sichuan local term) ta – drape food in beaten egg, pan-fry without stirring until golden on both sides, then add sauce (Shandong local term) kao – stew until a sauce becomes thick wen – simmer, cook over a slow fire (Cantonese local term) 焖 men – ‘smother’, cook in a liquid, usually with a lid 煨 wei – cook over very slow heat, often in the embers of a fire 扒 pa – simmer ingredients in a sauce and then turn on to a serving dish, or steam and then cover in sauce 瓤 rang or 釀 niang – stuff food with another ingredient before cooking, or coat one ingredient in another 炒 chao – stir-fry (cook food by moving it around in ...

As it happens, Adrià is one of the few western chefs who has publicly acknowledged the extreme technical sophistication of Chinese cuisine.

There’s also the supposed favourite of the Qianlong Emperor, who visited Yangzhou in the late eighteenth century: the ‘five-cube bun’ (wu ding bao) stuffed with a delectable selection of ingredients. According to a local tale, the gourmet emperor issued the most exacting demands to the chefs charged with preparing his breakfast snacks: they should, he ordered, be ‘nourishing, but not too strengthening; delicious, but not too savoury; oil-fragrant, but not in the least greasy; crisp, but not too stiff; and fine and tender while not being too soft.’ The chefs, so the story goes, were dumbfounded by the complexity of his requirements, until one of them came up with the idea of stuffing a steamed bun with small cubes of sea cucumber (nourishing, and not too strong in moderation), chicken (delicious, but not in an excessive way), pork (lusciously oily, but not greasy when cooked correctly), winter bamboo shoot (crisp, but not stiff), and freshwater shrimps (fine and tender, with a bit of spring to them). The emperor praised the resulting ‘five-cube’ buns (wu ding bao), and before long these entered the regular banquet repertoire of the wealthy denizens of Yangzhou.

Many of Sichuan’s most famous products are the creations of outsiders, including chilli bean paste (invented by a migrant from coastal Fujian) and Baoning vinegar (first made by a man from northern Shanxi). And of course the chilli, now the absolute emblem of the local cuisine along with native Sichuan pepper, is a Mexican import that only became established a couple of hundred years ago.

Trying to categorize Chinese regional cuisines makes me dizzy. You can travel and travel and travel around China and taste new foods every single day, which is pretty much what I have been doing for the last thirty years. And after all this time, I still find myself in the same state of wonder and bewilderment. Chinese cuisine is like a fractal pattern that becomes more and more intricate the more closely you examine it, to a seemingly infinite degree. The more I know, the less I feel I know. When it comes to Chinese food, I see myself increasingly as a small insect scaling a great mountain of human ingenuity.

All over the country, the same identikit modern buildings, the same brands, the same clothes. But as Chen Xiaoqing, the director of the smash hit TV series A Bite of China, once said to me, while regional diversity in Chinese attire, handicrafts, architecture, folk music and even dialects diminishes daily, the same quality lives on, vibrantly, in the food.

As my friend the restaurateur A Dai once said to me, outsiders making judgements about Chinese cuisine are like the blind men and the elephant in the old Indian religious parable.

The most famous producer of imitation meats in Shanghai is the Gongdelin restaurant, which was opened in 1922 by a lay Buddhist, Zhao Yunshao, and is now a local institution. One of its signature dishes is a vegetarian version of Jinhua ham made by pressing leather-thick sheets of spiced, soy-darkened tofu into ham-shaped moulds; sliced, the ‘ham’ has a convincing grain and chewiness. Another is an extraordinarily accurate replica of the famous autumn delicacy stir-fried hairy crab meat, made from mashed potato and carrot. The ‘crab meat’ is threaded with wisps of egg white and shiitake mushroom that mimic the membranes of the meat; the carrot, glossy with cooking oil, recalls the golden hue of the crab coral; and the whole dish is infused with the scent of ginger and rice vinegar, like the real thing. Outside

Lin Hong even took his pursuit of the esoteric to the extent of including in his book a ‘recipe’ for ‘stone soup’ (shizi geng): he advised boiling pebbles, perhaps those covered in lichen, in spring water, to give a flavour ‘sweeter than snails’ (consuming ‘stone soup’ was thought to allow the drinker to absorb the qi of the stones).

‘The formal study of food and cooking was centred,’ Freeman says, ‘not in restaurants or in the kitchens of great households, but in the quasi-philosophical-medical meditations of intellectuals, and the most elaborate cooking was in the hands of cooks who, for the most part, lacked the ability to set down their secrets in writing.

The tensions between luxury and simplicity, urbanity and rusticity, gluttony and restraint, still reverberate in Chinese gastronomic and intellectual life. Vulgar tycoons might like to wallow in sharks’ fins and sea cucumbers, but men and women of taste prefer, like Li Yu, to eat fresh bamboo shoots in the forest or sip farmhouse chicken soup.

As humans, we all play with our food. We adopt and adapt. There is no pure ‘Chinese cuisine’ any more than there is pure ‘English food’. The politics may be different depending on who is doing it, the colonizer or the colonized, the rich or the poor, but appropriation is an inescapable human activity.