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January 13 - January 20, 2024
In French cookery, there is time to taste and recalibrate a hollandaise sauce; an oil painting may be adjusted with further layers of paint. But a stir-fry, like a calligraphic work, must be executed perfectly the first time: once the food is in the wok or the ink is on the paper there is no going back, no second chance.
And in China too, hotpot restaurants multiply, along with big chains where chefs cook a limited repertoire of dishes rather than learning the whole art of cooking, from ingredient to dish. It’s not hard to see why. To open a hotpot restaurant, all you need is a good master broth that can be produced in large quantities and reheated as required; after that, you need only casual labourers for slicing up ingredients, and your customers will cook their own food! Even wrapping dim sum, which may also appear to be as delicate a matter as cooking small fish, is child’s play compared with stir-frying
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As in other parts of northern China, in Shanxi there seems to be a gender divide when it comes to pasta-making. Women specialize in the quiet, patient jobs, rolling out doughs by hand and wrapping buns and dumplings or grating soft doughs into pots of water, while men carry out the dramatic tasks, playing their dough ‘violins’, pulling skeins of dough into hundreds of strandy noodles and catapulting squares and snippets of dough through the air.
‘Everyone wants to know which country is producing the best food today,’ he said. ‘Some say Spain, others France, Italy or California. But these places are only competing for the top spot because Mao destroyed the pre-eminence of Chinese cooking by sending China’s chefs to work in the fields and factories. If he hadn’t done this, all the other countries and all the other chefs, myself included, would still be chasing the Chinese dragon.’
A typical Chinese province is equivalent in size and stature to a European country; China, with its vast geographical diversity, is more like a continent than a nation.
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. One
in many ways modern China can seem sameish. 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. Even after the destruction of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese food bounced back in a glittering kaleidoscope of colours.
The term that now means ‘vegetarian’, su, originally referred to raw white silk cloth; later it came to mean anything that was plain and unadorned.4 In a gastronomic context, su first signified uncooked food or a diet of wild vegetables, then any food that was simple, coarse and unrefined, contrasting with the luxury of meals in which meat played an important part.5 Eventually it came to mean eating only plant foods.
As more Indian Buddhist texts were translated into Chinese, some believers took a more hard-line stance against meat-eating. Some scriptures argued that Buddha himself had espoused total abstention from meat on the grounds that it was tainted by the ‘smell of murder’; others claimed that if you ate the flesh of a slaughtered animal, it might turn out to have been your reincarnated relative.8 Stirred up by such scriptures and scary folk tales about the risks of eating flesh, zealous lay Buddhists in China started to insist that acolytes should adopt a strictly meat-free diet.
Emperor Wu, who ruled from 502 to 549 AD from his capital near Nanjing, became a devout Buddhist early in his reign. He renounced eating all meat and fish, forbade animal sacrifices in imperial family temples and banned hunting in some areas near the capital. He even wrote an ‘Essay for the renunciation of meat’ and held conferences to discuss Buddhism and the vegetarian diet.
While the concept of vegetarian eating is familiar, many people in China understand it as something that need not be absolute. Some draw a distinction between Chinese ‘vegetarian eating’ (su shi), understood as pragmatic and flexible, and western ‘vegetarian-ism’ (su shi zhuyi), which is viewed as more ideological and hard line. Many lay Buddhists abstain from meat only on certain days, or are content to eat vegetables that have been cooked in the same pot as meat. I once met an elderly Buddhist monk, normally a vegetarian, who told me he would eat meat whenever he felt physically weak.
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‘Before China’s reform and opening up, people couldn’t even eat their fill, so of course when meat became more widely available we wanted to gorge on it. But after this period of indulging in rich food, China has reached a new level of culture and development. People want to eat more healthily and prolong their lives, so vegetarian eating is becoming more popular.’
Lu told me that they wanted to make their customers respect vegetarian food and take it more seriously. ‘We wanted to show that you don’t have to eat vegetarian food only for religious reasons, because there are so many other reasons for reducing consumption of meat,’ he said.
The intention, said Mr Sung, was to show people that vegetarian food did not have to be bland, and that avoiding meat could be a positive, fashionable life choice rather than one born of poverty.
Chinese gentlemen often expressed distaste for the crass excesses of less cultivated people.
(Despite professing himself to be a ‘mountain hermit’, Gao Lian, it should be noted, lived in a luxurious house in Hangzhou with his own library, art collection and study.
He turned to me. ‘As far as they are concerned, this is just the stuff they feed to their animals! They are just too polite to say so – they don’t want to admit that they are serving pig food to their honoured foreign guest.’ He turned to Bao and his wife and asked, ‘Isn’t that true?’
It took me a while to become used to this way of expressing affection. At first I found it brusque and bossy: ‘Have some congee! Drink some soup! Put on some more clothes!’ But over time I came to understand what it meant. I can always tell, now, when someone Chinese is becoming fond of me because they start to cluck over my physical needs, urging me to eat or drink, to wrap up warm, to rest. When a stern-faced chef barks at me to have some more baozi for breakfast or Li Shurong presses me to have another mouthful of her red-braised pork, I know they are offering me the edible equivalent of a
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Food in China can mean many things. It can be a solemn sacrifice to gods and ancestors, the offering that links us with the spirit world. It can be a symbol of rank and political authority, a metaphor for the art of government. Food is the medicine that nourishes body and mind, that cures maladies. It is the expression of terroir and season, of the unceasing ebb and flow of yin and yang, of our connection with the cosmos. Food marks the boundaries between regions and cultures, between the civilized world and the barbarian periphery. The provision of food is the main business of the ruler and
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Since the beginnings of history, people in China have recognized that an unbridled obsession for food, like an unbridled obsession for sex, our other great appetite, can be destructive. A person’s approach to eating has always been seen as a reflection of moral character, revealing piety or depravity, frugality or extravagance, self-cultivation or recklessness. The debate over where to draw the line winds like silk through the fabric of history, from the time of Confucius to the present day. But attempts to deny the joy of eating are futile.
