I mean, we all know what Chinese food is like right? Chinese is a staple in the takeaway canon – crispy duck and pancakes, sweet and sour chicken, prawn crackers…you can’t go wrong! But this isn’t really Chinese food as I knew it in China.
The first thing to say is that the Chinese are serious about food, eating and cooking is a huge part of daily life and most business, family time and social occasions are centred around food. A good example of how integral food is in everyday life, it’s not unusual to be greeted with 你吃了吗 nĭ chī le ma? (Have you eaten?) instead of the traditional hello. As with everything else, the food in incredibly varied within the different areas of China. Each area of China has their own specific cuisine with its own unique style and flare to it, there are actually 8 cuisines in China but the variety of food in China can more simply broken down into 4 key regions of cuisine.
Lǔ 鲁 Northern China
A lot of Hui Muslim inspired foods so less pork and more beef. A lot of starchy noodles, dumplings and breads to stave off the winter cold.
Huáiyáng 淮扬 Eastern China
The land of rice and fish, this is where I started my adventure in China. The food is light, fresh and perfectly balanced.
Chuān 川 Western China
Spicy Sichuan peppers rule in the West, mouth numbing 麻辣 má là chilli is the order of the day. It’s nothing like the spice you get elsewhere, prepare to not be able to feel your mouth with a traditional Sichuan hotpot.
Yuè 粤 Guangdong, Hong Kong
Probably the most similar to the Chinese food we know in the West. Dim sum, roast meats, slightly sweeter flavours.
I first wrote this post after I’d been in China a couple months, some of what I wrote was still true two years later, other bits of it had a naivety that comes with only having experienced a small part of Chinese life. The blue bits are excerpts from that original post which still ring true. However even now, no matter how much I’ve travelled around in China, I’ve only sampled a small proportion of the food China has to offer. This is very much my experience of food in China and the things I loved.
The first thing to get to terms with is that fact meals are had very early; between 11:30-12:30 for lunch and between 17:00-18:30 for dinner. This meant my Western eating pattern had to be quite significantly adapted to fit in, and meant that breakfast became a thing of the past when eating on a Chinese schedule. This was more obvious when working in public school, private school in Yinchuan allowed time for the occasional bread stuffed with pickled goodies or vinegar cooked egg – not your normal breakfast!But breakfast itself was a strange novelty at first. On our first morning in Beijing when Jenny and I went down to the canteen I didn't really know what to expect. What we found was an interesting combination of dumplings, pickled vegetable and what can only be loosely called porridge, very watery almost zero flavour but I actually rather enjoyed it.
Some people immediately vowed off Chinese breakfasts and headed to the closest bakery, but I actually quite liked how different the breakfasts were. For me, it was definitely more tempting than a bowl of cornflakes from home.
Another thing that I found bizarre about meal times is that no one drinks anything with their meals (unless shouts of 干杯 “gānbēi!”, literally dry your cup, are involved and then the spirits and beer are cracked out). As a well-known water addict, this was a struggle for me. China has a massive problem with water pollution so no one drinks the tap water and the Chinese think that hot water is healthier to drink, I’m sure this stems from the simple fact that water straight from the tap will kill you. Ask for a glass of water in a restaurant and you’ll get a mug of boiling water, not quite the thirst quencher you were hoping for. I remember being drunk in a night club (sorry mum) and asking for some water, a sensible choice, but they brought me a glass of boiling water – we can all agree a terrible thing to give to a drunk person. It didn’t sober me up, but it did burn my mouth! It’s a good thing bottled water is dirt cheap in China otherwise I might have ended up spending majority of my pay cheque on safe hydration.
When I got a chance to travel around China between contracts, that is when I really got to understand the diversity of Chinese food but because I lived in the East and then the North that is the food that I really got to know and love.
Huáiyáng 淮扬 (Eastern China)
In Suzhou our food experience was a bit of a mixed bag, our first weeks were spent struggling to know where to go and what to eat. We were living out of a hotel so couldn’t cook, which meant that we were forced to go out and explore options. There were definitely food highlights, the 8RMB (80p) noodle bar and canteen style pick-and-mix rice restaurant, and definite lowlights, the instant noodles in the hotel room and KFC style fast food come first to mind.
Once we moved into our apartment we really got to grips with the local food and my love affair with Chinese food truly started. The two best things were school meals (surprising) and our little local market…
I actually think I'd be quite happy during the week living off one meal a day of school lunch. The food is so good and it's still a novelty to try all the different dishes that get served together every lunchtime. Maybe the novelty will wear off after a few months, but for now it's still going strong!
Potatoes feature heavily, as do generic greens, celery, and unidentifiable meat (god knows what animals, and which parts of them, I've actually ben eating!) and at the moment I love it all! In general the food in China seems to be very meat heavy so school lunch is one of the few times I actually feel like I'm getting anywhere close to my five a day, the huge piles of veg are deeply appreciated. I normally eat with the school headmaster and we can cobble together a conversation of gestures with his limited English and my non-existent Chinese. I’ve been told the belt fish is the local speciality (full of bones), and that as a girl I have to eat the pigs knuckles because the collagen in them (read fat) is good for my skin. Every lunch time is a wild adventure. And I know, the
food may look disgusting but when have school dinners ever photographed well, regardless of how they tasted?!
Outside of lunch we've been making the most of our local market area. Cheap restaurants, cheap street food, the 'real Chinese experience'...it's a dream to walk around. There is so much to look at that it's all pretty overwhelming at first, but we're taking it stall by stall and slowly becoming regular customers to some. One of my favourite stalls is the bread lady's stall. Her and her husband freshly bake delicious rounds of bread in a little clay oven and then dish them out all warm and tasty. Regular bread is surprisingly hard to find in China, it’s all either ridiculously expensive for super processed white bread or an enriched dough bread (sweet bread with added dairy) so completely useless to me. This is why the discovery of the bread lady was such a shining lantern of bready hope.
However, our first attempts to get bread were met with a definitive 没有 méi yŏu, that’s "don't have" to us English speakers. Hopes dashed. But with some strategic timing we managed to arrive before all the bread had gone and we've never looked back, bread is very definitely back in my diet.
Lǔ 鲁 Northern China
Moving to Yinchuan was a bit of a revelation in terms of food because it was just so different from what I had eaten before. The main difference is that Ningxia is a Muslim majority province. This means no pork for starters and slightly different spicing – more cumin and aromatic flavours.
My Chinese also improved a lot in Yinchuan which gave me access to a whole world of tiny local restaurants that I would have really struggled with before. Most of the time I ate in the small restaurants around where I lived and tried dumplings, barbecue with beer on the street, and more noodles than I ever thought I could eat. Some of my favourite dishes are from this part of China, some of which I still don’t really know the names of – like the delicious square noodles in a spicy and tomatoey sauce – and I was also lucky enough to have a lot of home cooking from my then boyfriend’s mum.
Along with the main dishes I also discovered the array of pickles that you can get to accompany your meals, cold noodles with bits of seaweed, pickled bean sprouts with chilli oil, pink pickled radishes. These are, in my opinion, best eaten with one of my favourite dishes -大盘鸡 dà pán jĭ. Literally translated as big plate of chicken, can you guess what it is?
Well it’s definitely a big plate that needs to be seen to be believed and there is a lot of chicken but it’s also full of potatoes, peppers and a spicy and spiced red sauce to coat everything. The way to eat it is get all the good bits and when it’s mainly just sauce left shout for the noodles, thick chewy rice noodles to slop up all that delicious sauce. The dream group meal.
Chuān 川 Western China
When I was travelling in China I was able to experience other kinds of food that I didn’t find so much where I was living. The best of these different foods were from Xi’an with the Muslim influence, and Sichuan province, more specifically in Chengdu. Chengdu is best known for two very specific things; one is having the best looking women in China, the other is their unique style of spicy food. Spicy food and spicy women. I don’t know too much about the spicy women, but I did sample my fair share of the spicy food – and let me tell you, it’s good!
The spice in the region is a special kind of spice that is very distinctive. The Chinese call the flavour 麻辣 má là, with 麻 má meaning numbing and 辣 là meaning spicy, and that really is the best way to describe it. While Indian food might blow your head off, and Mexican food will tickle your throat and tongue, má là spice will numb your entire mouth – you will literally feel numb. It’s a bizarre sensation, but the flavours it brings are phenomenal. The dishes where you will most commonly come across the má là flavour is in the famous Chengdu hot pot and in 麻婆豆腐 má pó dòu fǔ (tofu and mince meat in a bright red spicy sauce, topped with spring onions). I also did a Chinese cooking class in Chengdu at the Lazybones Backpacker hostel. I learnt how to make 麻婆豆腐 má pó dòu fǔ and 回锅肉 (twice cooked pork), and where I learnt that 90% of Chinese cooking skill comes from just knowing how much of everything to add – an instinct I didn’t really have. Somehow in the hosts kitchen my dishes came out well, but when I tried to recreate them at home there was something frustratingly off!
Yuè 粤 Guangdong, Hong Kong
The southern food in Hong Kong and the southern provinces is the most similar to the Chinese food we have at home, and also my least favourite cuisine that I got to try. It’s not that it wasn’t good, all Chinese food is good, it’s just that it wasn’t quite as good as say the food in my home town of Ningxia. To be honest none of the meals I had in that part of the country stand out in my memory. The best thing about that side of the country is the ocean fresh sea food and abundance of fresh fruit. Anywhere where I can buy kilos of fresh lychees is going to be remembered fondly!
My favourite meal I had in the South of a China was on Hainan island in Sanya. I’m not sure if Hainan even counts as the Yuè cuisine, but give me a bit of leeway with this one. The benefits of travelling with my boyfriend of the time was that he knew the best places to go and what to do when you got there; I don’t think I would have been able to have this meal without him.
Hainan is China’s answer to Thai beaches and it really it’s a stunning tropical destination but the best thing is the abundance of fresh seafood. One evening we headed to the fish market and spent a good hour browsing the seafood on offer and haggling for our dinner. Most of the fish and seafood is live, so you know it’s fresh and the variety is immense; every kind of fish you can imagine, crabs, shrimps, huge prawns, lobsters...you name it, it was there. After haggling and buying an obscene amount of food we headed around the corner to the small parade of restaurants who take all the freshly bought seafood off you, cook it up, and bring it back to the table completely transformed. You can specify what you want done or do as we did and leave the preparation decisions up to the chef – after all, they are the experts! Everything was so delicious and an absolute bargain compared to what you’d pay for the same thing in a restaurant.
Customs
• Chopsticks should never be placed directly upright in a bowl. This is because they then look like the incense which is burnt to remember the dead, so it is considered bad luck.
• Slurping and talking with your mouth full are both acceptable. As is unceremoniously spitting out bones and meat gristle onto the table.
• Always serve someone else tea, or any other drink, before you serve yourself.
• Toasting is a big part of any formal dinner so if you start drinking be prepared to see it through! The host will toast you, then you’ll have to toast the host, maybe all the girls will drink, then all the boys. Couples may toast then everyone all together. The toasts are non-stop and when you’re drinking 60% liquor you’ve got to be able to hold your drink!
• When clinking cups in a toast it is a sign of respect to place your cup lower than a superior's cup and, as some may adhere to in the UK, keep eye contact during the clink to avoid bad luck!
• Since most food is served in large communal bowls in the middle of the table with each individual taking what he or she wants, no sifting through food to get to that nice looking bit of meat or tofu at the bottom. Take what's on top, within your reach or don't take anything. You’ll find if you are the guest the host will often find the best pieces of food and put them in your bowl, accept is gratefully no matter what it is.
• An empty bowl means that you’re not full yet so you will keep getting given food, leave something on your plate if you’re really done and tell the host how full you are! You can’t go wrong with 我吃饱了wŏ chī bǎo le.
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