(Drivebycuriosity) - It seems that almost everybody in the US or in Western Europe knows Chinese food, thanks to the sheer ubiquitous China restaurants everywhere. But the real Chinese cuisine is very different. Fuchsia Dunlop describes in her monumental work "Invitation to a Banquet" the real thing (460 pages amazon ).
Mrs. Dunlop is the perfect ambassador for China´s cuisine. In the 1990s she studied at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine and became a Sichuan chef herself, later she extended her knowledge by traveling all over the country, meeting chefs and tasted sheer countless meals. Dunlop`s "Invitation" is not a cook book, she describes the various incarnations of China´s delights, narrates their history, explains the chemistry and the preparing techniques.
China´s cuisine is far more complex and diversified than most Westerners are aware. It represents a huge country that stretches over many climate zones, from a dry and chilly north to a humid tropical south; and covers mountains and vast coastal areas. China`s art of preparing food developed over at least two thousand years and it is shaped by very different local and regional traditions.
A Kind Of Alchemy
In spite all the differences there are some commonalities: the Chinese use chopsticks and their cooks cut food into small pieces, so their customers don`t have to use knives. Chinese rarely eat dairy foods, they prefer rice, fermented legumes and tofu and they like food that is sliced, diced and slivered, often prepared by steaming and stir-frying.
I learned that Chinese
cuisine is fundamentally about creating harmony, by transforming, mixing and
matching very different ingredients. Mrs. Dunlop writes: "The
job of the Chinese cook is to create an almost magical harmony out of
contrasting ingredients. Cooking became a consummate skill,
even a kind of alchemy". And virtually no ingredient is too humble or too unlikely to resist transformation in the hands of a skilled Chinese chef.
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Art, Craft & Magic
She claims that Chinese
food is art and craft and magic. It is the harnessing of armies of
microorganisms; the conjuring of a hundred flavors in a tiny kitchen, the
transformation of crude raw materials into myriad forms. It is one of
the supreme expressions of human ingenuity.
The Chinese tend to believe that the success of a dish depends less on the nature of the base ingredients than the ability and human knowledge employed in their transformation. For "the rich" intense variety was part of the delight of eating, and the more surprising and unexpected the ingredients, the merrier.
Westeners
see the Chinese as rice eaters, but that is only true for the
southerners, while northerners prefer wheat in the form of dumplings,
noodles, pancakes and breads. The preferences mirror the geographic
conditions: While the north is too cold & dry for rice growing, the humid heat in the south supports its growth. Many westeners know the many variations of Italian pasta, but they might not be aware that the northern Chinese have a highly developed culture of pasta-making which is significantly older than the Italian tradition.
The Chinese like soups and sauces, which reminds me of the meals my parents in Southern Germany prepared where I grew up. Mrs. Dunlop believes that the ancient affection for soupy food 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 famous Peking duck - referring the old-fashioned spelling of the capital - is made by a complex process designed to maximize the glossy crispness of the skin and the tender succulence of the flesh, involving inflation with a pump, wind-drying, lacquering with a maltose solution, adding moisture and roasting while hanging in the fierce heat of a domed oven fuelled by a fruitwood fire.
Oral Pleasures
According to Mrs. Dunlop the Chinese care about the texture of the food as much as they care about the taste. The introductions to professional recipes typically specify the precise mouthfeel a dish should have, as well as its flavor. For instance fox nuts (an aquatic plant, also known as Prickly Water Lily) have gorgeously crisp, slippery or chewy textures: a whole genre of "beauty in the mouth".
She describes poetically the oral pleasures of some fish dish: "Pale slices of fish mingle in the broth with tiny, grey-green quills of leaf. Pluck up a leaf with your chopsticks and you will find it coated with a layer of totally transparent jelly. Put it into your mouth, and it will feel shiny and slippery, a perfect match for the silkiness of the fish".
Also: The taste of drunken crab "will be impressed on my tongue for ever. Ice-cold and vividly slimy, with a scintillating kick of liquor, the flesh and ovaries of the crab made me shiver with pleasure. They were as creamily voluptuous as foie gras, yet simultaneously as brisk and arresting as a raw oyster".
Cascade Of Chemical Reactions
I learned a lot about the chemistry of food & drink preparing. Soy sauce - the archetypal Chinese seasoning - is made by soaking and steaming yellow or black soybeans, mixing them with wheat flour and then leaving them in dark, warm, humid conditions to be colonized by Aspergillus Oryzae molds. The molded beans are combined with salt and water in clay jars and left to ferment and mature; the molds then produce enzymes that break the beany proteins down into delicious amino acids, their oils into fatty acids and their starches into sugars. As the sauce matures, a cascade of further chemical reactions produces a whole array of delicious tastes.
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 use roughly equal proportions of soybeans and wheat, making them lighter, sweeter and tangier.
Health & Happiness
Mrs. Dunlop also explains that transforming cereals into wines, ales and other types of liquor presents particular challenges because, unlike grapes and other fruits, they lack accessible sugars that yeasts can devour and turn into alcohol. Before they can be fermented, the starches in the grains have to undergo saccharification, a process of hydrolysis that breaks them up into sugars that yeasts can digest.
Making alcohol from grains is always a multi-stage process, more complicated than fermenting wine from grapes – which, is spontaneous and ‘practically unavoidable’ because of the sugars in the fruit and the yeasts on their skins. Since grains, unlike grapes, have no natural enthusiasm for fermentation, they need encouragement. In northern Europe, malted grains are used to coax cereals into beer
Mrs. Dunlop`s resume:
The key principles of ordering a Chinese meal are balance on the one hand and variety on the other, with the strenuous avoidance of repetition.
The subtlety of Chinese gastronomy, with its minute discernment in matters of cutting, cooking, flavor and mouthfeel, is unparalleled anywhere.
"Perhaps the greatest lesson I’ve learned from China is how to eat simultaneously for health and happiness".
PS I used images from a tasting menu by Cantonese chef Chef Qiu Xiaogui that I had enjoyed at Bangkok`s Yu Ting Yuan restaurant.
