Cooking

Cooking is 做饭 zuòfàn, literally “make the rice”, or 做菜 zuòcài, “make the dishes”. Both words follow the way the Chinese meal is split between 饭 fàn, the grain that fills you up, and 菜 cài, what goes with it (we saw this on the page Fruit and vegetables). The learned word is 烹饪 pēngrèn, which you read on catering school diplomas and almost never hear in a kitchen. 烹 pēng means to cook, with fire as four dots, 灬, under the character. It is generally accepted that the top part, 亨, is only a variant of 享 xiǎng, “to make offerings to the ancestors”: ancient inscriptions use a single sign for offering, for prospering and for cooking. People cooked for the spirits first. The fire is said to have come later, to tell the meanings apart; the details of this story are open to debate.

These four dots turn up all over this page: 煮 zhǔ to boil, 蒸 zhēng to steam, 煎 jiān to pan-fry, 熬 áo to reduce, and even 熟 shú, cooked. When the fire moves to the left, it takes back its full form: 炒 chǎo, 炸 zhá, 烤 kǎo, 炖 dùn, 焖 mèn. The oddest case is 然 rán. The character shows meat, a dog, 犬, and fire: it meant “to burn”, before it was borrowed for “thus”. So a second fire was added beside it to get the first meaning back, and 燃 rán, “to burn”, carries fire twice.

A Chinese recipe will rarely tell you how much. Salt is “a little”, 少许 shǎoxǔ, or “as needed”, 适量 shìliàng, and the cooking time is set by 火候 huǒhou, literally “the moment of the fire” ⟶ control of the heat, the point at which a dish is done. No English word quite covers it. It is what the cook knows and the recipe does not say: when to go from 大火 dàhuǒ to 小火 xiǎohuǒ, when to take the dish out of the wok, 出锅 chūguō. The word reaches far beyond the kitchen: of a calligrapher or an actor who is still green, people say the 火候 isn’t there yet. (The image works for a language too: you don’t learn Chinese any faster by turning up the heat.)

For a long time, Chinese cooking boiled and steamed more than it stir-fried. Neolithic sites have yielded perforated earthenware pots, the 甑 zèng, which were set on a cauldron to cook with steam, and the great ritual bronzes of the Shang and the Zhou are pots and cauldrons. Stir-frying in the wok spread only much later, with iron stoves and cheap oil. Its rise is usually placed under the Song, but the date remains approximate. And yet it is the stir-fry that stands for Chinese cooking today, with its fierce heat: 爆炒 bàochǎo, literally “stir-fry explosively”.

Watch out for 炸: it is read zhá when you deep-fry, 油炸 yóuzhá, but zhà when something explodes, 爆炸 bàozhà. Same character, two readings. 炒, for its part, has invaded everyday language. People “stir-fry” shares on the stock market, 炒股 chǎogǔ, they “stir-fry” a news story to hype it up, 炒作 chǎozuò, and the boss who “stir-fries your squid”, 炒鱿鱼 chǎo yóuyú, is showing you the door (the word is on our page Meat and fish).

Cutting matters as much as cooking. 刀工 dāogōng, “the work of the knife”, is what lets everything cook at the same time in the wok: pieces of the same size, in slices (切片 qiēpiàn), in threads (切丝 qiēsī) or in cubes (切丁 qiēdīng). Confucius was already fussy about this. Chapter 10 of the Analects says that he would not eat food that was badly cooked, 失饪不食, nor “what had not been cut in a regular manner”, 割不正不食, nor “what had not been seasoned with the proper sauce”, 不得其酱不食 (Couvreur’s translation, on our page Chapter 10 of the Analects of Confucius). Cooking, cutting, seasoning: the three themes of this page fit into three sentences. People have read it as the portrait of a gourmet. I rather think it shows a man who keeps the rites right down to his bowl, but the text does not settle the matter.

The same passage wants minced meat, 脍 kuài, to be cut very fine. Minced meat and roast meat, 炙 zhì, were the two dishes everyone loved, and Mencius already uses them as an example; hence 脍炙人口 kuài zhì rén kǒu, “what every mouth finds good” ⟶ what is on everyone’s lips. The most famous cook in China, for his part, is found in the 庄子 Zhuāngzǐ. Cook Ding, 庖丁 Páo Dīng, carves up an ox without ever striking a bone: his knife is nineteen years old and cuts as on the first day, because the blade passes through the joints, where it “has room to play”, 游刃有余 yóu rèn yǒu yú. (Nobody knows whether 丁 is his name or simply means “the man”, the kitchen hand.)

To season is 调味 tiáowèi, “to attune the flavours”, and this 调 is the one in 调和 tiáohé, to harmonise. Chinese thought took the image seriously. In the 左传 Zuǒzhuàn, the minister 晏子 Yànzǐ explains to his prince that harmony is like a broth: water, fire, vinegar, meat sauce, salt and plum, and a cook who adds what is lacking and takes away what is too much. The courtier who approves of everything is water seasoned with water: who would want to eat that?

Mencius left a sentence that people quote the wrong way round today: 君子远庖厨 jūnzǐ yuǎn páochú, “the gentleman keeps away from the kitchen”. It makes a handy excuse for those who would rather not roll up their sleeves. But the context says something quite different. King Xuan of Qi had seen an ox being led to its death to consecrate a bell; moved by its frightened look, he had it replaced with a sheep. Mencius explains the king’s own gesture to him: whoever has heard an animal’s cry cannot bring himself to eat its flesh (that is sentence 24 on the list). He was talking about pity, not chores.

The basic flavours, sweet, sour, bitter, hot and salty, are on the page The five senses; the dishes themselves and the cuisines of China and elsewhere will have the next page. Here come the pairings of flavours: 麻辣 málà, 酸辣 suānlà, 糖醋 tángcù. And 麻 is not a flavour at all: it is the tingling that Sichuan pepper leaves on the tongue. Where Chinese really is richer than English is in saying what happens between the teeth. 脆 cuì is what crunches, 酥 sū what crumbles, 嫩 nèn what gives way, 糯 nuò what sticks and melts like glutinous rice, 筋道 jīndao the noodle that fights back. 弹牙 tányá, “that bounces back under the tooth”, comes from Cantonese. You also hear Q弹, with a Latin Q that people trace back to Taiwanese, though nobody is sure.

Cooking idioms are often cruel. 煮豆燃萁 zhǔ dòu rán qí, “burning the stalks to cook the beans”, comes from the poem of the seven steps. 曹丕 Cáo Pī, once he was emperor, is said to have ordered his brother 曹植 Cáo Zhí to compose a poem in the time it took to walk seven paces, on pain of death. The beans weep in the pot, heated by their own stalks, and the poem ends on sentence 23 of the list. The anecdote comes from the 世说新语 Shìshuō xīnyǔ, two centuries after the events, and many doubt that the poem is by Cao Zhi. Every Chinese schoolchild knows it by heart all the same.

The last sentence comes from chapter 60 of the 老子 Lǎozǐ, better known in English as the Tao Te Ching: 治大国若烹小鲜, “to govern a great kingdom, one must imitate the man who cooks a small fish”, as Stanislas Julien translates it (on our page Chapter 60 of the Tao Te Ching). His commentary explains that a small fish is neither gutted nor scaled, and that one dare not handle it roughly, for fear of breaking it to pieces. To govern is not to stir too much. Ronald Reagan quoted the line before the US Congress in 1988. The advice works for fish too.

Click on any character on the page: its stroke order is shown stroke by stroke, with the arrow that gives the direction of the movement.