Chinese Food (and drink)

The last few days in China have led me to reflect on Chinese food since it will be something that will not be as readily available once we leave China.

China has a large variety of food that varies by region, but with so much internal migration there is a lot of each region's food available in other regions - and what most restaurants have in common is a large menu!

There are a lot of favorites that I'd always tend to order--usually vegetables such as broccoli, cauliflower, eggplant, green beans, stewed radish, egg and tomato for example. We're not a fan of cold dishes (a requisite "starter" in China) too much but the smashed cucumber with garlic is good. Meet can be hit and miss in China with some highly variable quality: especially chicken, with lots of bones, and pork with lots of fat so beef is a safer bet and lamb is quite rare (though fantastic when cooked with cumin). From very spicy to sweet and sour or just fried with onions or other vegetables, there is a lot of choice. You can also go for meet cooked in a sizzling pan, or in a pan over a candle on your table, or of course cook it yourself in a hot pot on your table (or in another different style, have it cooked for you in a pot after you select it). It can also be BBQ'd in small skewers or even with a whole animal on a skewer in front of you.

We never used to go for fish too much, but have much more since having kids and finding a style of cooking fish that the kids would like and some fish without too many bones, or at least that enables easy removal of the fish off of the bones. Then of course there is the sort of deep-friend fish in sweet and sour sauce where the bones seem to get fried into smithereens and disappear!

There is the interesting presentation and approaches to combining foods: such as putting diced meat in a small bun to eat it, or putting ice cream inside a hollowed-out, warm, loaf of bread. Both of which are fantastic by the way.

The Chinese love their rice, and also their noodles - and there is a huge variety of noodles, both in how they are made (thin, wide, sliced, diced and more) and what they are made out of (including Spinach for example) and they'll come with anything under the sun if as a main course, on its own if at the end of the meal. Then there is also dumplings, more from the North, but available everywhere in various connotations, normally boiled or steamed (in which case it is not a dumpling strictly speaking), but occasionally fried. Usually dry, but also available in soups; usually filled with something (and it is amazing to watch how fast some cooks can wrap dumplings) but also sometimes without - just the dumpling skin.

Deserts don't really exist thought here is some sweet dishes and desert equivalents in Southern China especially Taiwan and Hong Kong with dim sum and shaved ice (an old favorite of mine was dipping a fruit in molten sugar and putting that in water to cool and go hard).

There's the raw spicy from Sichuan and the hot spicy from Hunan. There's the sweet and sour from the North-East; there's the lighter food from East China. There's the meat heavy food from the North-West, the preference for noodles in the north, rice in the south, and even bread in the North-West.

It is fairly hard to define Chinese food in general unless one talks about how it is eaten: mostly shared dishes, and always with chop sticks (the Chef will slice everything up small in advance). It's also mostly cooked in woks that are multi-functional allowing boiling, frying, steaming and everything in between in one pot. Unfortunately the Chinese still like to use a lot of oil in most of their cooking - it certainly makes it more flavorsome, but also makes it much less healthy.

I could go on forever, but I won't. I also won't try to even list my favorite dishes. I can't cook much Chinese food which is a real shame - it is not particularly hard from what I can tell and is usually just a mix-and-match of ingredients around a few ways of cooking mostly. I love the fact you can take-away any leftovers; and you can usually order food from the local at all hours (or online if so inclined).

Certainly being able to read Chinese is of immense help (even if there is a menu in English the translations can't be relied upon), though there are also frequently photos. I do still vaguely recall my early days in China of eating the same few dishes all the time (that i could pronounce in Chinese) and of lots of pointing (usually at other diners' dishes, sometimes in the actual kitchen). Though there are a million food related words with every part of an animal named differently, every variation in vegetable named differently too. It's not just the difficulty actually finding English names for some of the vegetables that are in the Far East, it is that there is not such a name (or maybe it only exists in Latin!) - 10 different type of mushrooms with different names, for example.

Few meal times would be complete without tea, of course; but also without alcohol from the many different kinds of hard liquor that the Chinese drink (usually awful to my tastebuds) to the lighter (sometimes sweeter) liquors that are quite nice to the generally bland-but-passable lagers and the new-ish tendency for wine.

The endless competition and entrepreneurial nature of China does mean some higher quality and more innovation, that is welcome... though queuing is common at popular restaurants. This also leads to the ready availability of Korean and Japanese food (not too bad), Western food (usually awful pizzas or french fries with something or a all-you-can-eat buffet) and even some Thai or Vietnamese food (highly varied). There's also western bakeries, though they're still outnumbered by Chinese bakeries with their very sweet breads and rolls, the tendency to put various fluffy things on top of the bread, or the desire to stuff the breads with sausages, cream or something else.

I think it is time to end this post for the meantime without even going into the supermarket experiences, the Chinese wet (and dry) markets, the passion for dried (and highly preserved) food and also the cultural connotations around certain foods (like giving and eating sweets for prosperity) or how it is eaten (the customs around serving others, paying and so on). Suffice to say, it is a special aspect of living in China and I foresee one that will be missed.... despite the odd Chinese restaurants overseas, it is certainly not going to be the same!