Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food

by Fuchsia Dunlop

chop suey, its name derived from the Cantonese for ‘a miscellany of chopped ingredients’ (tsap sui), and chow mein (fried noodles with beansprouts).

a simplified repertoire tailored to the tastes of westerners. Even in Chinatowns, real Chinese food could be tantalizingly out of reach for customers who weren’t Chinese. Restaurants often hid their more authentic dishes on Chinese-language menus, afraid that westerners would shy away from bony poultry, shell-on prawns and bitter melon – as, indeed, many of them did.

the case against MSG has been totally debunked by scientists, its legacy remains in the widespread, but groundless, fear in the west that MSG is toxic. (Most westerners seem unaware that MSG is naturally present in Parmesan cheese and other ingredients commonly used in western cuisines.)

They also highlight the irony of how westerners, over the course of more than a century, have shown an unerring preference for cheap, deep-fried Chinese foods in sweet, sour and salty sauces and then blamed the Chinese for their ‘unhealthy’ diet.

In Chinese, the word used to describe the delicious smells of roasting is xiang, typically translated into English as ‘fragrant’ yet far richer in its connotations, because xiang also refers to incense,

Today, if you wander around the Confucius Temple in Qufu or the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, you can still find the defunct ‘spirit kitchens’ (shen chu) where the sacrificial meals were cooked.

Forks were used only for cooking, and knives likewise banished to the kitchen. The ‘roast’ (zhi) was one great delicacy in ancient China, but it was rivalled by kuai, a dish of thinly sliced meat or fish.

In many respects, the Chinese resented their foreign overlords, and the imposition of Manchu customs such as shaving the forehead and sporting a pigtail.25 But the prestige of imperial cuisine encouraged them to appreciate some Manchu foods, including roasted meats. Outside the palace, the grand roast became an unusual treat for certain Chinese rituals and special occasions, but was never prepared at home. Former palace chefs opened restaurants in Beijing specializing in a kind of roast duck that had been perfected in the kitchens of the Forbidden City and later became known as Peking duck.

Most southern Chinese dishes are designed to be shared and eaten with plain rice; they are the seasoning, the salt, the oil and the tastiness. They are relishes for the rice, not stand-alone dishes.

For most Chinese people throughout most of Chinese history, everythingelse was mainly vegetables, with only small and intermittent additions of fish and meat, which gives the word cai a certain logic. But cai really does mean everything that is not fan, including meat, poultry and fish.

But the centrality of rice and other grain foods in the idea of life and livelihood is threaded through the language. A restaurant is a place that serves fan (fan guan), to cook is to ‘make fan ’ (zuo fan) and a beggar is someone who asks for fan (yao fan). A glutton is a ‘fan-bucket’ (fantong). If you have a job, it’s a ‘ricebowl’ (fan wan); lucrative enough, it might be a ‘golden ricebowl’; if not, it might be a ricebowl of paper or clay. In Maoist times, a stable job in a state-owned factory was an ‘iron ricebowl’ (tie fan wan), which the economic reforms of the 1990s went on to ‘smash’.

Chinese scholars who prefer to use the Chinese terms, xianmi for Indica rice and jingmi for Japonica. Sticky rice, most commonly white but alternatively black in colour, is widely regarded as less digestible and mostly eaten not as a staple but in sweet dishes and dim sum, except in Yunnan, where it’s a staple of the Dai ethnic group (though it contains no gluten, it is also known as ‘glutinous rice’).

Most commonly, rice is cooked simply, either in a measured amount of water so that it parboils and then steams to make ‘dry’ fan, the classic accompaniment to a southern Chinese meal, or simmered with a greater quantity of liquid to make ‘wet’ congee, which is usually eaten for breakfast, snacks and midnight feasts.

Towards the end of the first millennium, the importance of rice grew in the country as a whole.28 From the Tang Dynasty onwards, northern China was beset by droughts and harassed by northern nomads. Meanwhile, new long-grained varieties of rice from Vietnam allowed southern farmers to plant two crops a year, while farming innovations enabled higher yields. The southern population boomed and the southern economy prospered; rice surpluses filled the coffers of the state. China’s centre of economic gravity moved southwards from the depleted north, never to return.

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.

In China, bitterness (ku) is the universal metaphor for suffering; to ‘eat bitterness’ is to endure grief and hardship.

sense. When I gave a talk to some restaurant staff in Hangzhou about Chinese and western food, they were incredulous that people in the west didn’t recognize the medicinal values of every food they ate.

The Michelin-starred Sichuan chef Lan Guijun told me once that China had such serious issues of food safety and authenticity that one needed years of experience to shop well: ‘You have to be like an antique collector who can sniff out genuine articles among all the fakes.’

The Great White, of which there are numerous local varieties, some short and squat, some huge and elongated, is just one of a vast clan of cabbages, all members of the Brassicaceae or mustard family. There are ‘small white cabbages’ (xiao baicai) or bok choys with their spoon-like leaves, some a vivid green, others with pure white stalks and darker frills; sleek choy sums; blowsy mustard greens; pointy ‘chicken heart’ cabbages; round ‘wrapped’ cabbages; emerald gai lan or Chinese broccoli; hot mustard sprouts. Tiny bok choy leaves are adored in Shanghai, where they are known as ‘chicken feather greens’ (jimao cai), as are the diminutive leaves of shepherd’s purse, a Brassica that grows wild like a rosette upon the ground and has been eaten in China for thousands of years. Many local Brassica cultivars, plucked from the earth when young and tender, are known simply as ‘green vegetables’ (qingcai). Few, in my opinion, are more exquisite than the juicy rape shoots (caitai), purple or green, that the people of Sichuan and Hunan enjoy in their brief winter season. When picked after a frost, they have a delectable, buttery sweetness, set off by an irresistible hint of bitterness.

In my own country, many people, even the wealthy and highly educated, struggle to eat the government’s recommended ‘five a day’ of fruit and vegetables. But in China, people don’t just eat vegetables out of duty; they eat them because they are delicious.

The Chinese have a special category for freshwater creatures that does not exist in English: hexian (‘river delicacies’), the freshwater equivalent of the category of seafood, haixian (‘sea delicacies’). Perhaps none among them is so adored as the mitten or hairy crab eulogized so memorably by the playwright Li Yu. Fish and seafood are also dried, salted and, in some places, made into fermented condiments. The dried salted seafish of Zhejiang (xiang) lends its assertively pungent aroma and profound savouriness to stews and steamed dishes. Other umami seasonings include dried shrimp eggs and punchy sauces made from fermented fish and shrimp.

The Chinese eat various types of bean, but none is more significant than soy. The soybean offers the same sort of nutrition as dairy products, but more economically: it contains twice the protein of any other legume and all the amino acids essential for human health, in the right proportions for absorption by our bodies.

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 soybean first came to western notice in the form of soy sauce, which was brought by Dutch traders from Japan to India during that century (the Japanese obtained soy-sauce-making technology from China, but the names for soybean in all European languages are derived from the Japanese word for soy sauce, shoyu). In the early nineteenth century, the plant itself arrived in Europe, but only as a horticultural curiosity in a few botanical gardens. Later, from the early twentieth century onwards, it was grown as a crop in the west – mainly for oil and animal feed, as it still is today.

The first certain mention of tofu in Chinese literature is in a tenth-century AD text by a northern official,

Some scholars think the Han Chinese avoided dairy foods because they wanted to draw a cultural line between themselves and the nomads to the north: not eating animal milk was a conceptual Great Wall to echo the ramparts of the physical one.

It’s just that all animal ingredients, to a Chinese palate, have their flaws, whether it’s a general ‘off taste’ (yiwei); a ‘fishy taste’ (xingwei) with various fish and meats; a muttony taste (shanwei) with mutton and goat; or a ‘foul taste’ (saowei) with offal.

More than half of the world’s pigs are now in China. The price of pork is so politically sensitive that the Chinese government has a strategic pork reserve.

Hui food, as you might expect, given the inheritance of those who make it, is a fascinating agglomeration of cultural influences from the Middle East, Central Asia and China. All over China, Hui people cook up halal versions of local regional cuisines.

Hand-pulled noodles served in a stewed beef broth – a classic Hui dish – is the pride of Lanzhou and now famous all over China and abroad, bringing together the nomadic love of boiled meat and Chinese pasta.

Over the past centuries, many Hui have worked in the catering trade in the capital. Aside from special-occasion dishes like mutton hotpot, roast meat and honeyed lamb, many of Beijing’s most essential and best-loved street foods are either Hui inventions or typically made by Hui cooks and artisans.

What is ‘Chinese food’ anyway? It’s too often conflated with the culture and character of the country’s majority ethnic group, the Han Chinese, especially in an age of Han Chinese nationalism. But China has always been a palimpsest of peoples, languages and flavours. In ancient times, the cultures of the north and northwest were already infused with foreign influences, while the south was inhabited by a variety of different tribes. The great empires of the Qing Dynasty and its republican successors have encompassed not only the old Han Chinese heartlands of the Yellow River Valley but also the vast regions of Tibet, Xinjiang and Mongolia. In contemporary China, the southwestern province of Yunnan is an elaborate patchwork of different cultures and cuisines, many of which have more in common with those of people across the borders of neighbouring Vietnam, Laos and Burma than they do with the people of, say, northern Xi’an. And the Hui, of course, live, work and eat all over China.

The Chinese have always had a remarkably open-minded attitude to what they eat. Aside from certain minority religious groups (such as Muslims who shun pork and strict Buddhists who avoid meat), they are unfettered by food taboos.

In the past, a classic banquet was often named after the main ingredient of the principal dish, regardless of the number of other plates: so you might be invited to a ‘sea cucumber feast’ (haishen xi) or a ‘bear’s paw feast’ (xiongzhang xi).

Bear’s paw was the food of the elite in ancient China and more modern times. Shark’s fin became popular during the Song Dynasty, when people in China’s sophisticated southern cities were probably the best-fed populations the world had ever seen.

Mr Crab’s soup is an old Jiangnan dish known as yipin guo or ‘top-ranking pot’. The ideogram for ‘rank’ (pin) is made up of a stack of three ‘mouths’ that once represented dishes filled with sacrificial food and here refers to the three ingredients of the broth. The same word pin, appropriately enough, also means ‘to taste’ in modern Chinese. The broth is a particularly lavish example of a whole genre of Chinese dishes that attempts to present, without interference, the ‘root tastes’ of fine ingredients. Such dishes are the progeny of the old sacrificial soups, those flavourless geng in which prized animals were cut into pieces and simmered until their qi rose up to tempt the spirits, but now refined to suit the palates of corporeal beings.

In the southern Chinese countryside, people traditionally serve the silky liquid left after parboiling rice, mitang (‘rice soup’), as a simple soup, sometimes with a few added vegetables. In the north, people may chase their boiled dumplings down with a bowlful of miantang (‘flour soup’), the water used to cook them. Practically anyone Chinese needs and desires soup more than almost every westerner.

In 1908, a Japanese chemist made a discovery that was to have profound ramifications for the future of Chinese cuisine. Kikunae Ikeda became fascinated by the deliciousness of broths made from kelp seaweed, and sought to establish its chemical source. The delectable compound he isolated from the stock was monosodium glutamate, or MSG. His findings were developed by the Japanese company Ajinomoto, which began manufacturing MSG in industrial quantities, as it still does today. MSG seems to have become popular in China in the 1960s and 70s, a time of hardship and rationing when meat was scarce. Sourcing the ingredients for a proper stock was prohibitively expensive for most people, but the fine white powder the Chinese named weijing, ‘the essence of taste’, offered a shortcut to flavour.

The usual Chinese word for ‘sweet-and-sour’ literally means ‘sugar-vinegar’ (tang cu).

The art of the knife came with a whole vocabulary of shapes. Depending on the dish, one might need to cut ginger into ‘thumbnail slices’, ‘silken threads’ or ‘rice grains’. Tofu could be transformed into cubes, strips or ‘domino slices’. One could shave ‘ox-tongue’ slices from a block of white radish, so thin that the veins were visible in the translucent flesh. A pig’s kidney might end up as frilly ‘flowers’, ‘eyebrows’ or ‘phoenix tails’. The shape into which food was cut was part of the character of a dish: Gong Bao chicken (gong bao ji ding) was made with chicken ding or cubes, fish-fragrant pork slivers (yuxiang rou si) with long strandy si or silken threads of meat, wood ear mushroom and celtuce.

After the Song Dynasty, the Chinese appetite for raw sliced fish and other flesh dwindled, eventually disappearing almost completely. But the exquisite art of cutting that it represented became a permanent part of Chinese cuisine.

‘Barbarian’ foods such as black pepper, cucumber, walnut and sesame arrive in China from Central Asia, along with sesame flatbreads – many are given names prefixed by hu, meaning ‘barbarian’ or ‘foreign’ (black pepper is still known as ‘barbarian pepper’, hujiao)