Chinese cuisine
Ginger, garlic, spring onion and soy: a kitchen of very high heat for a very short time, and a different one in every region.
Where it comes from
Millet in the north and rice in the south were domesticated roughly eight to nine thousand years ago; the dates vary with the archaeological evidence. Fermented soybean pastes (jiang) appear in written sources from the Han dynasty and are the ancestors of today’s soy sauce. Cooking in a wok over very high heat for a short time is often linked to a scarcity of fuel; that is a reasonable explanation, but it is not proven. Chillies arrived from the Americas in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, so Sichuan cooking’s identity with chilli is younger than it seems. The often-cited “eight great cuisines” (Sichuan, Cantonese, Shandong, Huaiyang and the rest) is a modern classification; China’s food does not fit under eight headings.
At the table
At a Chinese table dishes are placed in the middle and everyone takes from them with chopsticks onto the rice in their own bowl. A meal is chosen to balance cooking methods and tastes: a stir-fry, a steamed dish, a braise, a soup. Meat is cut to bite size in the kitchen, so no knife is used at the table. Tea is often drunk alongside the meal.
Fat, aromatics and acid
Figures are approximate; apart from those that are a definition or a regulation, they vary by product, recipe and source. Where we have no measured value the line reads “—”.
- ≈10–30 s The aromatic trio — Ginger, garlic and the white of the spring onion give up their scent in hot oil within seconds; the main ingredient follows at once so the garlic does not burn.
- >200 °C Wok heat — The wok’s surface can run far above this, which is why a neutral oil with a high smoke point is used. The smoky “wok hei” flavour is attributed to oil droplets partly burning in the flame; the mechanism has not been fully measured.
- ≈15–18 % tuz / salt Soy sauce and vinegar — Light soy is used for salt, dark soy for colour. Black Zhenjiang rice vinegar is the base of sweet-and-sour sauces.
- — Sichuan pepper — Sanshool in Sichuan pepper makes the lips tingle; Together with chilli it makes “mala”, numbing and hot. The site has no Sichuan pepper record.
- — Sesame oil — Toasted sesame oil is not a cooking fat but a finishing drop: its aroma is lost fast at high heat.
How this kitchen cooks
- Deep frying Stir-frying in the wok and deep frying.
- Marinating Velveting: meat coated in egg white and starch.
- Blanching Greens, and passing through oil.
- Fermentation Soybean pastes and fermented black beans.
- Smoking Tea-smoked duck.
- Poaching White-cut chicken.
- Pickling Sichuan pickles.
What is in the pantry
The historical claims rest on these books. Contested origins are written as contested.
- E. N. Anderson, The Food of China. Yale University Press, 1988.
- K. C. Chang (ed.), Food in Chinese Culture. Yale University Press, 1977.
- Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. Scribner, 2004.