Today we begin a new series where we take look at some of China’s culinary traditions, share a few precious recipes and reflect on one of the oldest and most misunderstood cultures on earth. The country is enormous and a plethora of different climates, ethnic groups, languages and subcultures exist as they have for thousands of years. Naturally the food traditions developed around this but for ease of reference we begin by dividing it into two basic cuisines – Northern and Southern. In the North, wheat is the staple food, the dishes are more complex and spices are used often and most effectively.

In the South, rice is the staple and the cooking becomes simpler with the food itself providing the layers of flavour. The North, the so-called “cradle of Chinese culture”, has a rich agricultural heritage even though there isn’t very much rain. Winters are difficult – cold, dry and dusty and millet, rapeseed, peaches and Chinese cabbage originated here. However, today agriculture here sees domination by non-indigenous plants like wheat, corn, rice, sesame seeds and even in some cases grapes. Even though wheat didn’t originate here, it thrives and noodles, pancakes, dumplings and steamed breads or stuffed buns feature prominently on the menus in this part of the world.

CHICKEN CHOW MEIN

Ingredients

• 500 g bean sprouts
• 4 fat boneless, skinless chicken breasts

Marinade:

• 1 tablespoon oyster sauce
• 1 teaspoon soy sauce
• 1 flat tsp Maizena (corn starch)
• Salt and white pepper to taste

Sauce:

• 75 ml water (or salt free chicken stock)
• 1 tbsp oyster sauce
• 1 tbsp soy sauce
• Salt and white pepper to taste
• 1 tbsp Maizena (corn starch)
• 4 tbsp water

Other:

• 500 g dry wonton noodles
• 2 medium sticks celery (tops removed)
• 500 g bok choy (if you can’t get hold of it, use broccoli)
• 500 g fresh mushrooms
• 1 red pepper (paprika or bell pepper)
• 1/2 red onion
• 1 green spring onion
• Vegetable oil for frying
• 75 ml toasted sesame seeds

Method

• Rinse the mung bean sprouts about 2 hours before the time so that they have time to drain thoroughly.
• Slice the chicken into thin strips and cover them with the marinade but add the Maizena at the end.
• Marinate the chicken for half an hour.
• While the chicken marinates, prepare the sauce as follows:
• Dissolve 1 tablespoon of Maizena in 4 tablespoons of water and combine the water or chicken stock with the oyster sauce, soy sauce, salt and pepper, adding the Maizena and water mixture at the end – set aside.
• Put the noodles in boiling salted water to soften them and then plunge them into cold water to stop them cooking – drain immediately.
• Always wash all the vegetables as needed.
• Cut the celery and the bok choy into 1 cm pieces on the diagonal and if substituting broccoli for bok choy, peel the stalks until no more strings come out and slice thinly on the diagonal.
• Wipe the mushrooms clean with a damp cloth and slice and cut the red pepper in half, remove the seeds and slice into chunks.
• Peel and chop the red onion and dice the spring onion.
• Heat a wok or frying pan over medium-high to high heat and add 2 tablespoons oil.
• When the oil is hot, add the noodles and fry in batches until they are golden and when ready remove from the pan and set aside.
• Heat 2 tablespoons oil and then add the onion and the meat, allowing it to brown briefly and then stir-fry all of it until the meat is almost cooked – remove the cooked meat and onion from the pan.
• Cook the rest of the vegetables separately, except for the spring onion that you set aside until later – season each vegetable with a little salt while stir-frying to taste.
• When cooking the bok choy or broccoli, add about 5o ml water and cover while cooking.
• Remove each of the vegetables from the pan when finished stir-frying and add more oil if it is needed.
• Give the sauce a quick stir again and add all the ingredients back into the wok, making a “well” in the middle of the wok for the sauce – add the sauce, stirring quickly to thicken it and mix everything together briskly, finally stirring in the spring onions.
• Pour the cooked vegetable and sauce mixture on top of the noodles, garnish with the toasted sesame seeds and serve hot.

Beijing – the city of the Olympic games, Tianjin and Shandong share culinary traditions with their Northern neighbors because of proximity and similar ancient history, but their cuisines developed because of wealth and natural resources and are in contrast to the rest of the North, which is poor. Beijing, the capital of China gave birth to some Imperial dishes that have become famous the world over. Queen Mother’s Cakes are tiny cakes made from white flour, seasoned with cinnamon and star anise and then pan-fried. They originated 2,000 years ago when the Queen traveled to the country and her loyal serfs made them for her – she was thrilled and named them after herself. All imperial food was symbolic and had meaning – something carried over into all food in China. Art in the presentation was the norm and the ingredients were luxurious in the extreme. As with all Chinese dishes in this category, no effort was spared. In Beijing, mutton – used traditionally in Mongolian and Muslim cooking has become a firm favourite and the famous Sesame Seed Mutton combines combines minced mutton with green onion, salt, ginger, rice wine and lotus root powder. It is shaped into a cake, dipped into an egg batter, deep-fried, rolled in toasted sesame seeds, and served. Seasonings in Beijing are strong with the use of vinegar, garlic, coriander, leeks, and salt prevalent. Peking Duck – featured elsewhere in today’s edition, has become world famous.

MONGOLIAN LAMB

Ingredients

• 500 g meat from a leg of lamb, fat removed, cut across the grain into thin 4 cm strips

Marinade:

• 1 tbsp oyster sauce
• 1 tbsp dark soy sauce
• 1 tsp hot sweet chili sauce
• 1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
• 1 tbsp water
• 1 tsp brown sugar
• 1 tsp sesame oil
• 4 green spring onions, washed, rinsed and cut into 2 cm lengths
• 2 tbsp peanut oil, for stir-frying
• 2 garlic cloves, peeled, crushed and finely chopped
• 1 tsp chili paste
• Salt to taste

Method

• Combine the lamb with the marinade and marinate for about half an hour.
• While the meat is marinating cut the spring onions into 1cm strips and put the garlic to one side.
• Preheat a wok until hot and then add the oil.
• As  soon as it is hot, add the garlic and chili paste and stir-fry for 30 seconds at which point you must add the lamb and allow the lamb sear for about 30 seconds, then stir-fry it for about 2 minutes.
• Add the spring onions and salt to taste and stir-fry for another minute and serve hot.

Tianjin has incorporated loads of famous Muslim and vegetarian dishes in it’s repertoire and the protein ingredients are mainly soybean products like dried soybean curd, bean curd sheet or wheat gluten. The dishes made with these ingredients look like chickens, ducks, fish or meat and tastes curiously like the images they resemble. Stuffed Whole Duck is actually made from bean curd sheets that are shaped to taste and look like a stuffed duck, complete with the head! Fried Twist of Eighteenth Street is a deep-fried wheat bread that is served as a snack and Goubuli Bread Dumplings are steamed wheat dough with spicy meat fillings, typical of Tianjin.

Yin and Yang play an important role in the food of Northern China and affects the choice of food, the combinations of ingredients and the timing and order of each dish prepared. In this case Yin and Yang refer to an interplay between the “dark, cool, soft and feminine form of energy with the white, hot, rough and masculine source of energy in the universe“. In the cuisines of the North, four major parts of cooking are equally important when preparing any dish and the colour, aroma, flavour and nutrition aspects are given equal effort.  The colour has an important aesthetic purpose and it has to stimulate the appetite and bring calm and peace and the choosing of the colour is hellishly complicated. Very basically, each dish is made up of a chief colour combination and everything served with it has the opposite colour. Remember that they calculate what the colour will be after it has been cooked and after spices have been added. I’m deadly serious here – to help you understand, have a look at this description: ”White Fungus Stew, an example from the Beijing cuisine of the Official Family, combines white tree fungus with black sea cucumber, orange mushrooms, a green vegetable, and white lotus seeds. A beautiful contrast in colors, this dish also expresses two yin and yang opposites, black and white, and orange and green; both keep the dish in balance“.

We all know that aroma in any dish will give even the most fanatical dieter an appetite but here it is used so cleverly that it seems almost bewitching. Spring onions, fresh ginger root, garlic and chili peppers or good wine, star anise, cinnamon, pepper, sesame oil and dried Chinese black mushrooms are chosen so that when they are heated the aromas marry to create an irresistible aroma that would leave a monk weak at the knees. For some reason,  as much as the Chinese like to preserve fresh flavours, they also seek to remove what they “undesirable fishy or gamey ones“. The Northern Chinese taste creations are legendary and we all know the taste of the sour-and-hot dishes, made by adding black pepper and vinegar or the salty and hot ones made by adding sugar and a soybean chili sauce.

NORTHERN CHINESE SWEET AND SOUR PORK WITH BLACK RICE VINEGAR

Ingredients

• 500 g boneless pork, leg of pork cut into 2 cm cubes
• Salt to taste
• 2 tbsp black rice vinegar
• 75 ml white rice vinegar
• 175 ml sugar
• 2 tsps Maizena dissolved in 2 tbsps water
• Vegetable oil for deep-frying, as needed
• Peanut oil for stir-frying, as needed
• 1 egg, lightly beaten
• 100 ml Maizena
• 1 small onion
• 2 medium carrots, peeled and cut diagonally into 1 cm pieces
• ½ green pepper, cut into small cubes
• ½ red pepper, cut into small cubes

Marinade

• 2 tsps dark soy sauce
• 2 tsps Chinese rice wine (use a dry sherry if you don’t have any)

Method

• Coat the pork well in the marinade, using your fingers to make sure it is well covered and allow it to rest for about half an hour.
• In the meantime, combine the rice vinegars and the sugar and set aside in a small bowl.
• In a separate bowl, dissolve the Maizena in the water and set that aside.
• To make the sweet and sour sauce, bring the rice vinegars and sugar to a boil in a small pot over medium heat, removing from the heat while you stir to dissolve the sugar.
• Bring to the boil again and thicken with the Maizena mixture, stirring briskly.
• Check the sauce again to correct the seasonings, adding salt and/or vinegar if required.
• Set aside to keep warm while deep-frying the pork.
• Heat the oil to medium-hot for deep-frying.
• Dip the marinated pork cubes in the lightly beaten egg and dredge in the Maizena.
• Deep-fry the pork until it is golden brown and crispy for about 6 – 7 minutes but do this in batches, making sure that you overcrowd the wok.
• Remove and drain on paper towels.
• (If you are looking for extra crispy pork, deep fry it for a second time, but check on the heat – you don’t want it too dark.)
• Heat 2 tbps oil in another wok if you have one – alternatively clean the one you just used.
• When the oil is hot, add the onion and stir-fry until it is translucent and just soft, adding the onions at that point.
• Fry for about 2 minutes, then add the green pepper and then the red pepper.
• Push the vegetables up to the sides of the wok and pour the sauce into the middle, adding the pork and then mix everything together – cook briefly to heat through, and serve hot over rice.

Flavours are enhanced with seasonings and spices but the emphasis must be placed on the word enhanced. Soy sauce, sugar, vinegar etc are added in such a way that it never disguises the natural ingredients – only improve them. The Chinese genius when it comes to spicing is derived from a culture that is thousands of years old and where chefs were writing cookbooks long before our own cultures even existed. Like it or not, we have to respect that and we have to stop stereotyping a nation that we neither know or understand. They believe that a dish is only well prepared when it “tastes rich to those who like strong flavours, but not over-spiced to those who seek a milder taste. It should seem sweet to anyone who has a sweet preference, and hot to those who like piquant flavour. A dish that is all of these things to all people is a truly successful dish“. How many of us can do that?  However, colour, aroma and taste are not the only things that are important here – nutrition is of vital concern and the “principle of harmonization of foods can be traced back thousands of years“. The Chinese scientists of old  linked the five tastes: sweet, sour, bitter, hot and salty to the nutritional needs of the five major organ systems of the body: heart, liver, spleen, lungs, and kidneys and today we are re-discovering the immense value of ingredients like fresh ginger, garlic, spring onions and certain types of mushrooms in preventing and curing certain illnesses. They believe that food and medicine are of the same origin and that the ratio of meat to vegetable in any meal is vital to good health! One third of all meat dishes should contain vegetables and one third of all vegetable dishes should contain meat. “In preparing soups, the quantity of water used should total seven-tenths the volume of the serving bowl“. It seems, then, that the proportion of ingredients in each meal is vital to ensure that the meal is healthy. Because of the high oil content in the Northern Chinese dishes, vinegar and garlic is widely used and the preferred cooking methods are stewing, frying (that includes stir-frying and deep-frying), roasting and glazing as well as the healthier methods of boiling and steaming. Even though boiling and steaming is a method used on a daily basis, it is the stir-frying that has captured the imagination of the west and finely sliced ingredients are quickly seared in smoking, hot oil with the result that a healthy, crunchy and extremely tasty meal is prepared and is typical of Northern Chinese cooking.

Interestingly, the rules associated with eating are also dictated by custom and in the North, all family tables are set with “chopsticks, a soup spoon and a small plate or rice bowl. There is also a set order of seating at the table. The eldest man is always seated first followed by the eldest woman. Then the rest of the family take their place and take the food wanted from communal plates using the serving chopsticks provided. If there are guests, the host serves them choice morsels to show that they are respected …….family members are seated around the table and begin by drinking tea, jasmine green tea the most popular. This indicates that they are ready to start the meal. During this tea drinking, appetizers are placed on the table. The appetizers are most often cold seasoned meat, seafood or vegetables. The meat can be smoked, stewed with special sauces, or pickled with salt, rice wine, or white wine. Vegetables can be seasoned and served raw. When the appetizers are finished, four to six main dishes (a combination of meat, vegetarian, and vegetable dishes) are placed on the table at one time. With them is served a dish made from wheat, most commonly a noodle dish. Dumplings or steamed bread may be served instead or with the noodles. The main dishes are eaten separately and in any order, but the last dish consumed is the noodle dish; it is consumed in a bowl provided for it“.

Vegetable and meat are not eaten served on top of the grain dish, but on their own. The last course can, at times, be a soup and that would signify that the main meal is over. As an example, herewith an example of a meal enjoyed by Dr. Zuo: “In my own family, I would begin with jasmine tea, of course. There could be cold sliced jellyfish simply seasoned with chopped green onion, salt and sesame oil along with sliced tomatoes sprinkled with sugar or thinly sliced cucumbers seasoned with soy sauce, white pepper, hot chili sauce and sesame oil. Following these appetizers I would serve four dishes, perhaps sliced White Boiled Pork, stir-fried green peppers and sliced pork, Stir-fried Bok Choy (we usually have this every day) and ground pork fried With tofu. After my family finishes these, I would serve noodles topped with stir-fried ground pork and yard-long green beans. Sometimes I do serve soup, but in the North we do not have soup every day but do like it after dumplings. This fills everyone up. The number of dishes may seem like a lot to eat, but the platters of entrèes are small by Western standards. For example, when I go to Chinatown in Toronto and order two dishes for two people, it is far too much; but in China, two people can order three or four dishes and easily eat all of them“. Banquets form similar patterns to family meals but are far more elaborate. They are arranged with round tables seating ten to twelve people and would, typically, begin with tea and 4 appetizers, a mixture of hot hors d’oeuvres and cold meats. “At a formal banquet, there may be as many as ten or twelve main dishes served one at a time accompanied by wine and soft drinks“. Wine is made in China and is also featured in this edition. The Chinese sculpted garnishes are legendary and the chefs turned have turned this part of cooking into a specialized art form using amongst others, tomatoes, Chinese white radishes and cucumbers – sadly never to be  eaten.

Even though chefs are male at the banquets, in the home they are usually female. At home the food is prepared adn allowed to cool down a little before eating but at a banquet this is unacceptable and food is served as soon as it has been made. In the North, at banquets, a chicken dish usually signified the power of the king and the fish the prosperity. Decorative sweet pastries are served after the soup and desserts like the woutou (a sweet steamed corn bread flavored with fragrant osmanthus flower paste) or special fluffy baked cakes shaped like baby chickens are the norm. At the end of the banquet fresh fruit or fresh fruits cooked together, sweetened, and slightly thickened with cornstarch or another starch such as lotus root is finally served.

Dr. Huiping Zuo, Associate Professor at Xian Jiaotong University in China, was Visiting Professor at the University of Guelph’s School of Hotel and Food Administration in Guelph, Ontario, Canada in 1997. She has co-authored four books including China’s Tourism Economy: Sustainable Development Strategy, and written numerous articles. This article is an adaptation of From Cathay to Canada: Chinese Cuisine in Transition as presented at and published in Toronto by the Ontario Historical Society in 1998 and all articles associated with it. Various other publications have also been consulted here. All recipes belong to Just Food Now.