Historical Chinese Cuisine

Historical Chinese Cuisine

{Cuisine of China}

The Cuisine of China spreads both around the world and deep into history and is marked by both variety and change. The archeologist and scholar K.C. Chang says “Chinese people are especially preoccupied with food” and “food is at the center of, or at least it accompanies or symbolizes, many social interactions.” Over the course of history, he says, "continuity vastly outweighs change." He posits basic organizing principles which go back to earliest times and give a continuity to the food tradition, principally that a normal meal is made up of fan (grains and other starches) and cai (vegetable or meat dishes). Others see a succession of changes and development which bring incremental but basic change. Endymion Wilkinson offers four keys to the “richness of ever-changing Chinese cuisine”:

1. Huge and expanding geographical area, with climate zones from the subarctic to the tropical, each providing new ingredients and cultures with cooking traditions of their own.
2. An elaborate tradition of dietary and medicinal cooking which saw food as the basis of good health: “Food was medicine and medicine, food.”
3. Demands from different patrons or groups for their own specialized cuisines, for example, the imperial courts, rich households, and “scholar-gourmands.” By the later empire, there were enough businessmen and scholar-officials living away from home to support restaurants catering to their desire to eat the cuisine they were familiar with.
4. The continuous absorption of all sorts of foreign influences, including the ingredients, cooking methods, and recipes from the people of the steppe as well as from the rest of Asia, the Americas, Europe, and Japan.

The philosopher and writer Lin Yutang is more relaxed:

How a Chinese spirit glows over a good feast! How apt is he to cry out that life is beautiful when his stomach and his intestines are well filled! From this well filled stomach suffuses and radiates a happiness that is spiritual. The Chinese relies upon instinct and his instinct tells him that when the stomach is right, everything is right. That is why I claim for the Chinese a life closer to instinct and a philosophy that makes a more open acknowledgment of it possible.