The cuisines of China and the world

Chinese cuisine is 中餐 zhōngcān or 中国菜 Zhōngguócài, but a Chinese person will happily tell you that it does not exist. There are, instead, 菜系 càixì, literally “systems of dishes” ⟶ culinary schools, each with its own produce, its own cooking methods and its own pride. Traditionally there are eight of them, the 八大菜系 bā dà càixì: Shandong, Sichuan, Guangdong, Jiangsu, Fujian, Zhejiang, Hunan and Anhui. Careful, though: the list is younger than people think. At first there was talk of four great cuisines, and the eight only took hold at the end of the Qing, depending on who is counting. It also leaves out Beijing, the North-East and Xinjiang, which nonetheless have their dishes on this page. (The cooking methods themselves are on the page Cooking.)

The names of these cuisines are a geography lesson in a single character. 鲁 Lǔ is the old land of Confucius, Shandong; 粤 Yuè is Guangdong; 湘 Xiāng, the river that runs through Hunan; 浙 Zhè and 徽 Huī, Zhejiang and the old prefecture of Huizhou. 川 chuān, the river, comes from 四川 Sìchuān. The name is often explained as “four rivers”, but it more likely comes from the four circuits into which the Song had divided the region, the 川峡四路. The oddest is 闽 Mǐn, Fujian: a gate and, inside it, a 虫, an “insect” or a snake. The 说文解字 Shuōwén jiězì defines it as “the Yue of the South-East, of the race of the snake”. Contempt from a northern scholar, or the memory of a people who honoured the snake? Both readings have their supporters.

The proverb 南甜北咸，东辣西酸 sums up the map in its own way: sweet in the south, salty in the north, spicy in the east, sour in the west. Spicy in the east? Nothing to do with chilli. The 辣 of Shandong is the raw spring onion and garlic that people crunch with their flatbreads; the sourness of the West is the black vinegar of Shanxi. Chilli, for its part, arrived late. It came from the Americas and entered China at the end of the Ming under the name 番椒 fānjiāo, “the barbarians’ pepper” (the 辣椒 is on our page Fruit and vegetables). Sichuan cooking only adopted it in the 18th century, as far as the sources allow us to judge; before that, it got its heat from Sichuan pepper, 花椒 huājiāo.

In Sichuan, the names of dishes tell stories. 麻婆豆腐 mápó dòufu is said to be the tofu of Mother Chen, a restaurant keeper in Chengdu with a pockmarked face, in the 19th century: 麻 means “pockmarked” as much as “numbing”. 宫保鸡丁 gōngbǎo jīdīng bears the title of a governor of the province, 丁宝桢 Dīng Bǎozhēn, an honorary “guardian of the palace” who, so the story goes, was fond of chicken with peanuts. And 鱼香肉丝 yúxiāng ròusī, “fish-fragrant shredded pork”, contains no fish: the usual explanation is that it borrows the seasoning used for fish in Sichuan. The name gives fair warning, but it fools every beginner.

In the South, people say 食在广州, “Guangzhou is the place to eat”. The full saying (sentence 20 in the list) sends you to be born in Suzhou, for the beauty of its people, to live in Hangzhou, for its scenery, to eat in Guangzhou, and to die in Liuzhou, whose timber made the best coffins. No one knows who said it first. In the morning, in Guangzhou, people go to drink tea, 饮茶, or have 早茶 zǎochá: out come the bamboo baskets, 虾饺, 烧卖, and 凤爪 fèngzhǎo, “phoenix claws”. These are chicken feet. Cantonese cooking likes to ennoble humble cuts with a legendary name, and the 佛跳墙 fótiàoqiáng of Fujian goes further still: its aroma is said to have made a Buddhist monk leap over the monastery wall. Another story too good to be checked.

北京烤鸭 Běijīng kǎoyā is the dish every visitor to Beijing has tasted (see our page Beijing). Yet it is said to have come from the South: the Ming supposedly brought it from Nanjing when they moved their capital, at the beginning of the 15th century. The North also means wheat and mutton. The mutton hot pot, 涮羊肉 shuàn yángròu, has its legend, which places its birth in the camp of Kublai Khan; that one I do not believe. In Xi’an, you crumble your own flatbread into the mutton soup, 羊肉泡馍 yángròu pàomó, a dish of the Hui Muslims we talk about on the page Xi’an.

东坡肉 Dōngpōròu bears the name of the poet 苏东坡 Sū Dōngpō. Exiled to Huangzhou, he marvels in a short poem that pork costs so little there: the rich will not eat it, the poor do not know how to cook it. Then comes the recipe, little water, a low fire, and the advice that makes sentence 24 in the list: wait, do not rush it, let the 火候 do its work. Yet the dish is claimed by Hangzhou, where Su Dongpo had the West Lake dredged, and the two cities still argue over it. Further east, Shanghai cooking is called 本帮菜 běnbāngcài, literally “the cooking of our gang” ⟶ local cooking: sugar, soy sauce, and 小笼包 xiǎolóngbāo that you bite into with care.

Foreign cuisines entered the language in two ways. By sound: 汉堡 hànbǎo (which is also the city of Hamburg), 披萨 pīsà, 沙拉 shālā, 三明治 sānmíngzhì, 咖喱 gālí. Or by meaning: 薯条 shǔtiáo, “potato sticks”, 意大利面 Yìdàlìmiàn, “Italian noodles”, 快餐 kuàicān, the “quick meal”. Chinese usually prefers the second route, but food resists it. As for 西餐 xīcān, the “meal of the West”, it lumps together steak, pizza and croissants, and you often hear people say they leave the table still hungry.

Chinese food abroad is, for its part, foreign food to the Chinese. 左宗棠鸡 Zuǒ Zōngtáng jī, General Tso’s chicken, bears the name of a 19th-century general who never ate it: it was invented in Taiwan in the 1950s by a cook from Hunan, then sweetened in New York. 杂碎 zásuì, chop suey, is said to have been served to the viceroy 李鸿章 Lǐ Hóngzhāng during his visit to New York in 1896; the dish existed before him, and legend did the rest. And the 幸运饼干 xìngyùn bǐnggān, the fortune cookie, is American, perhaps of Japanese origin: you will hardly find one in China. In the other direction, Chinese travellers often keep their 中国胃 Zhōngguó wèi, their “Chinese stomach”, and set off with instant noodles in their suitcase.

In everyday language, a simple 式 sorts everything by country: 港式, 日式, 法式, 美式 (which, in a café, also means an americano). The 洋 of foreign things has kept a whiff of fashion: what is 洋气 yángqì is chic. 吃洋荤 chī yánghūn, literally “to eat foreign meat”, means trying something from elsewhere for the first time. And when KFC serves rice porridge and fried dough sticks for breakfast in China, or a pizza takes up durian (sentence 22), people speak of 本土化 běntǔhuà, “adaptation to the native soil”. Mao, for his part, said 洋为中用: make foreign things serve China.

The last sentence in the list is from Mencius: 口之于味也，有同嗜焉, “mouths share a taste for the same flavours”. The proof, he says, is that everyone defers to the taste of 易牙 Yì Yá, the cook of Duke Huan of Qi (he is credited with crimes I will spare you). Mencius drew a moral lesson from it: if our mouths agree on what is good, our hearts can agree on what is right. All mouths are alike. Cuisines, far less so.

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.