Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food

by Fuchsia Dunlop

Eventually, with rude amusement, one of them exploded: ‘If I eat any more salad, I’ll turn into a savage!’

So important were the sacrifices that the Book of Rites advised that preparing meals for spirits, whatever it cost, should take priority over feeding mortals.

Later, in the first century BC, twelve thousand specialists were charged with preparing sacrificial foods for three hundred temples across the empire, each with its own staff of priests, musicians and cooks.14 The scale of these operations dwindled in subsequent dynasties, but the principle and practice of sacrifice lasted throughout the imperial era.

Forks were used only for cooking, and knives likewise banished to the kitchen.

evidence suggests that the use of forks is closely correlated with the consumption of meat.

China divides into two very different natural environments: the wet south, where rice grows readily, and the arid north, where people have for centuries relied on wheat and other dry-land grains.

The adoption of rice, along with the growing popularity of noodles, may have encouraged the Chinese to set aside their old habit of using spoons to eat fan (with chopsticks only for accompanying dishes), and instead apply chopsticks to almost everything, because rice, unlike millet, was clumpable and could be picked up in tufts.

Rice is the most calorific of cereals, producing more food energy and protein per acre than wheat and maize.32 It provided the bulk of a traditional diet that was largely vegetarian. There was never much pastureland in China, far fewer flocks and herds than in Europe.

During the Maoist era, people ate millet to ‘remember bitterness’ at dinners commemorating the hardships of the revolutionary struggle.

After the archaic roast, cooked over the fire in primitive fashion, came boiled dishes, following the invention of pottery in the Neolithic age. Millet, rice and other grains were boiled in pots to make congee, and then, when a perforated dish was laid over the cauldron, also steamed to make fan. Most other ingredients were cut up and cooked in water and whatever they were – meat, fish or vegetables – the resulting soup stews came to be known as a geng.

The habit of cutting food into slices, slivers or dice was, of course, inseparable from the habit of eating with chopsticks, and the two evolved together. The ancient affection for soupy geng may have been partly why the Chinese adopted chopsticks as their main eating tool in the first place, because they were so suitable for fishing morsels of food out of a potful of scalding-hot liquid.

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.

The habit of cutting food into small pieces has played into broader stereotypes of the inscrutable Chinese and their unfathomable diet.

banishes the violence and savagery of knives to the kitchen so that diners may eat in peace, their chopsticks silently caressing the food, their ears untroubled by the sounds of metal clashing with china.

They spoon oily food into their ricebowls rather than picking up pieces of food with their chopsticks and leaving the oil in the serving dish – thus consuming more oil than was ever intended. (One Chinese chef I know was appalled to see an American chef stirring sticks of butter into his mashed potatoes – ‘they call our food greasy, but the fat in their own food, while less visible, is all going to be eaten!’ she said.) Westerners guzzle boldly seasoned dishes while neglecting the neutral fan, and then brand Chinese food as ‘salty’.

Dongpo pork, for example, a gloriously rich dish made of belly pork (the fatter the better) slow-cooked with rice wine, soy sauce and sugar. In China, no one would ever eat a whole bowlful of Dongpo pork; instead, one opulent chunk, accompanied by plain rice, some greens and some broth, is actually more satisfying than three chunks, and the fatty pork, eaten like this, is probably healthier than a grilled chicken breast served with nothing but mashed potatoes and ketchup.

‘restaurant’ comes from the French for ‘restore’ and is derived from the establishments that sprang up in eighteenth-century Paris offering healthful broths or ‘restaurants’ to weak and debilitated guests,

I cannot think of another cuisine in which discernment, technique, variety and sheer dedication to pleasure are so inseparably knit with the principles of health and balance. Good food, in China, is never just about the immediate physical and intellectual pleasure: it is also about how it makes you feel during dinner, after dinner, the following day and for the rest of your life.

while the economic reforms that began in the 1980s succeeded in dramatically raising living standards across the country, they also brought new problems in terms of grave pollution, extensive food fraud and the loss of agricultural land to development.

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.’

(Refrigerated barges, upon which choice delicacies from the Jiangnan region were chilled on ice gathered in midwinter, had been routinely used to transport food to the capital since at least the Ming Dynasty.

the Chinese long ago perfected methods for growing a variety of vegetables through the winter so that they could have fresh produce regularly: ‘They found varieties that resisted the cold, and they found ways of protecting the intensive truck gardens from frost, by covering them with straw mats that could be rolled back on warm, sunny days, by planting over beds of manure, and by other such means.’

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.

in China the soybean was central to a traditional diet that was largely devoid of dairy foods and thin on meat yet nutritionally balanced, and helps explain why the Chinese system of farming, before the advent of chemical fertilizers, was able to support more people per unit of land than any other.

Chinese culinary strategy in which strongly flavoured, salt-fermented foods are cooked with mild, fresh ingredients to make them more appetizing, or, as they say in Chinese, xianxian heyi, ‘salty and fresh combined’.

In the sixth century, Jia Sixie’s treatise on food and agriculture (qimin yaoshu) had a whole section on keeping cows and sheep and transforming their milk into various foods such as fresh and smoked yoghurt, cheese and butter

Non-Han minority groups within China’s borders, especially those of nomadic origins, have always eaten dairy foods, including yoghurts and simple lactic cheeses.

Instead of cultivating acres of soybeans to feed to herds of pasturing cows to produce milk for human consumption, as we do in the modern west, they cut out the bovine middleman, transforming the bean itself into milk and cheese-like tofu.

There were no meadows with grazing sheep or cows as there were in Europe. Only under the great skies of the Tibetan plateau, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, with their sparse populations and vast terrains, did one see herds of yak and flocks of sheep.

Through most of Chinese history, the main purpose of farming was the production of grain, followed by vegetables.

is the most delicious among meats, but is neither rare like venison, expensive like seafood nor exotic like bear’s paw. You can buy it in every neighbourhood market. You wouldn’t serve it to a high-ranking official or an important business contact

pork was never served at banquets.

The Han Dynasty, some two thousand years ago, also saw the arrival of many other new ingredients from Central Asia that were to become entrenched in the Chinese diet, including black pepper, cucumber, sesame and carrot, some supposedly imported by Zhang Qian, an imperial envoy to the western lands.

at Chinese banquets, grain foods are never served until the end of the meal, when all the toasts have been drunk and the cai, the dishes, enjoyed. If you accept an offer of rice or noodles towards the conclusion of a formal Chinese dinner, this will be interpreted as a signal that you have had enough to drink.

The question, for a Chinese chef, is not ‘is this edible?’, but ‘how can I make this edible?’ An improbable ingredient such as pomelo pith is like a gauntlet tossed upon the kitchen table.

Chinese people take enormous pleasure in the physicality of what they eat – another reason for their adventurous approach to ingredients. Good food, in a Chinese context, is about tactility as much as flavour. It is a lively dialogue between the food and the lips, teeth and tongue.

there may also be a spoon on the side for soup, but you can sip directly from the bowl if you like.

many other delicacies that seem pointless to westerners but are delightful to a Chinese palate for mainly tactile reasons.

In contemporary China, food is used strategically to cultivate relationships with business contacts and powerful officials. Around the time of the Mid-Autumn Festival, boxes of mooncakes in ostentatious packaging are gifted and regifted across society. I was once given some flashy boxes of cakes by a wealthy businessman, which I later found to be stale and mouldy. They might have been circulating for years: they were food tokens, not food.

taste and even the medicinal qualities of a display box of dried Tibetan caterpillar fungus or birds’ nests are less important than their price and symbolism.

China now has the ignominious distinction of being the world’s largest market for trafficked wildlife products.

Obsessive passion for food could drive people to appalling behaviour, as with the sons of Duke Ling of Zheng, who murdered their father in a fit of pique after he refused to give them a taste of a soft-shelled turtle he’d been given.

One intriguing detail from the trial on corruption charges of the high-ranking Chinese Communist Party official Bo Xilai in 2013 was that his son, Bo Guagua, had brought him a piece of meat from some (unidentified) rare wild animal after a trip to Africa.

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.

Chinese food snobs have tended to regard it as a lowbrow or even peasant style – the kind of food desired by people who have nothing much with which to ‘send their rice down’, so have to rely on punchy seasonings.

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.

In all but the finest restaurants, relying on stocks that were laborious and expensive to make seemed pointless. Why go to all that trouble when your customers will be satisfied with a golden broth made with chicken essence and MSG? Within a generation, the secrets of making a fine stock seemed all but lost.

I’d be unlikely to make such a soup for western visitors. While I’m sure they would find it pleasant, I doubt that a clear liquid would please them more than Gong Bao chicken or fish-fragrant aubergines, in all their blazing materiality. Most

The chef as a kind of martial artist, doing incredible things with his cleaver, is a trope of modern Chinese films like Cook up a Storm, a tale of rivalry between a popular neighbourhood chef and a snooty competitor trained in a Michelin-starred restaurant in France.

I’m not sure the sashimi shown in the glossy photographs is really available, because I’ve never dined with anyone Chinese who has ordered it. It doesn’t fit in with a normal Chinese meal, and most modern Chinese people dislike eating raw fish.