Added: 09/02/2005 |
Chinese Food ? Why We Like It So MuchEverybody knows that the Chinese food traditions are something special and many of us really like the Chinese food and prefer going to the Chinese restaurant much more than, for example, to Mexican or Indian. Why we prefer this kind of ethnic cuisine and dreaming of trying Chinese food in China?
What is Chinese cooking for many of us? Is, in this sense, the manipulation of different foodstuffs as basic ingredients. Since ingredients are not the same everywhere, Chinese food begins to assume a local character simply by virtue of the ingredients it uses. Obviously ingredients are not sufficient for characterization, but they are a good beginning.
One important point about the distinctive assemblage of ingredients is its change through history. Concerning food, the Chinese are not nationalistic to the point of resisting imports. In fact, foreign foodstuffs have been readily adopted since the dawn of history. Wheat and sheep and goats were possibly introduced from western Asia in prehistoric times, many fruits and vegetables came in from central Asia during the Han and the T'ang periods, and peanuts and sweet potatoes from coastal traders during the Ming period. These all became integral ingredients of Chinese food. At the same time,. . . milk and dairy products, to this date, have not taken a prominent place in Chinese cuisine. . . .
In the Chinese culture, the whole process of preparing food from raw ingredients to morsels ready for the mouth involves a complex of interrelated variables that is highly distinctive when compared with other food traditions of major magnitude. At the base of this complex is the division between fan, grains and other starch foods, and ts'ai, vegetable and meat dishes. To prepare a balanced meal, it must have an appropriate amount of both fan and ts'ai, and ingredients are readied along both tracks. Grains are cooked whole or as flour, making up the fan half of the meal in various forms: fan (in the narrow sense, "cooked rice"), steamed wheat-, millet-, or corn-flour bread, ping ("pancakes"), and noodles. Vegetables and meats are cut up and mixed in various ways into individual dishes to constitute the ts'ai half. Even in meals in which the staple starch portion and the meat-and-vegetable portion are apparently joined together, such as in . . . "wonton" . . . they are in fact put together but not mixed up, and each still retains its due proportion and own distinction. . . .
There are many kinds of the Chinese food from North to South, East to West. However, the most popular are Beijing duck, Shanghai noodles, Sichuan soup and Guangdong dumplings.
Chinese food has some basic difference from the Western food, namely - Chinese food is several dishes in a meal; diversify and sophisticated; balance diet; healthier and tasteful.
The Chinese people enjoy eating good food at all levels of society so cooking has developed into a very sophisticated art. Might be, Confucius was right once said: "Eating is the utmost important thing in life."
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