THE SHORT HISTORY OF CHINESE CUISINE

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THE SHORT HISTORY OF CHINESE CUISINE

The history of Chinese cuisine is marked by both variety and change. The archaeologist and scholar Kwang-chih Chang says “Chinese people are especially preoccupied with food” and “food is at the center of, or at least it accompanies or symbolizes, many social interactions.” Over the course of history, he says, "continuity vastly outweighs change.

Picture source: Wikipedia; A Chinese painting of an outdoor banquet, a Song Dynasty painting and possible remake of a Tang Dynasty origina

Chinese cuisine as we now know it evolved gradually over the centuries as new food sources and techniques were introduced, discovered, or invented. Although many of the characteristics we think of as the most important appeared very early, others did not appear or did not become important until relatively late.

Han Dynasty (206 BC–220 AD)

Picture source: Han Dynasty; bhoffert.fsculty.noctrl.edu

During the early part of this period, noodles made usually from wheat dough or millet were the staple food of common folks. Excavated in the Northwestern part of China in 2005 was a 4000 year-old bowl of noodles made of millet. This is the earliest noodle ever found – implying that Asians and not Europeans were the first to invent this famous dish.

The most common staple crops consumed during the Han Dynasty:  wheat, barley, rice, foxtail and broomcorn millet, and beans.

Commonly eaten fruits and vegetables included: chestnuts, pears, plums, peaches, melons, apricots, red bayberries, jujubes, calabash, bamboo shoots, mustard greens, and taro.Domesticated animals that were also eaten included chickens, Mandarin ducks, geese, cows, sheep, pigs, camels, and dogs. Turtles and fish were taken from streams and lakes. The owl, pheasant, magpie, sika deer, and Chinese bamboo partridge were commonly hunted and consumed.

Seasonings included: sugar, honey, salt and soy sauce. Beer and yellow wine were regularly consumed, although baijiu was not available until much later.
Chopsticks began to take the role as eating utensils ( before were  used for cooking, stirring the fire, and serving bits of food)
During the Han dynasty, Chinese developed methods of food preservation for military rations during campaigns such as drying meat into jerky and cooking, roasting, and drying grain.

Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD)

The fascination with exotic from the diverse range of the Tang empire and the search for plants and animals which promoted health and longevity were two of the factors encouraging diversity in the Tang dynasty diet.
During the Tang, the many common food stuffs and cooking ingredients were: barley, garlic, salt, turnips, soybeans, pears, apricots, peaches, apples, pomegranates, jujubes, rhubarb, hazelnuts, pine nuts, chestnuts, walnuts, yams, taro.

The various meats that were consumed included: pork, chicken, lamb (especially preferred in the north), sea otter, bear (which was hard to catch, but there were recipes for steamed, boiled, and marinated bear), and even Bactrian camels.
In the south along the coast meat from seafood was by default the most common, as the Chinese enjoyed eating cooked jellyfish with cinnamon, Sichuan pepper, cardamom, and ginger, as well as oysters with wine, fried squid with ginger and vinegar, horseshoe crabs and red crabs, shrimp, and pufferfish, which the Chinese called 'river piglet'.

Picture source: Wikipedia; A terracotta sculpture of a woman, 7th–8th century; during the Tang era, female hosts prepared feasts, tea parties, and played drinking games with their guests.

Some foods were also off-limits, as the Tang court encouraged people not to eat beef (since the bull was a valuable draft animal), and from 831 to 833 Emperor Wenzong of Tang banned the slaughter of cattle on the grounds of his religious convictions to Buddhism.
From the trade overseas and over land, the Chinese acquired golden peaches from Samarkand, date palms, pistachios, and figs from Persia, pine seeds and ginseng roots from Korea, and mangoes from Southeast Asia.
There was a great demand for sugar; during the reign of Harsha (r. 606–647) over North India, Indian envoys to Tang China brought two makers of sugar who successfully taught the Chinese how to cultivate sugarcane.
Methods of food preservation continued to develop. The common people used simple methods of preservation, such as digging deep ditches and trenches, brining, and salting their foods. The emperor had large ice pits located in the parks in and around Chang'an for preserving food, while the wealthy and elite had their own smaller ice pits. Each year the emperor had laborers carve 1000 blocks of ice from frozen creeks in mountain valleys, each block with the dimension of 0.91 by 0.91 by 1.06 There were many frozen delicacies enjoyed during the summer, especially chilled melon.[4
During the Tang Dynasty, tea became synonymous with everything sophisticated in society.

Song Dynasty (960 – 1279)

The Song saw a turning point. Twin revolutions in commerce and agriculture created an enlarged group of leisured and cultivated city dwellers with access to a great range of techniques and materials for whom eating became a self-conscious and rational experience.
The food historian Michael Freeman argues that the Song developed a "cuisine" which was "derived from no single tradition but, rather, amalgamates, selects, and organizes the best of several traditions."

In the Song, we find well-documented evidence for restaurants, that is, places where customers chose from menus, as opposed to taverns or hostels, where they had no choice. These restaurants featured regional cuisines. Gourmets wrote of their food reviews. All these Song phenomena were not found until much later in Europe.
Texts from the Song era provide the first use of the phrases nanshi, beishi, and chuanfan to refer specifically to northern, southern, and Sichuan cooking, respectively.
There were also some exotic foreign foods imported to China from abroad, including raisins, dates, Persian jujubes, and grape wine; rice wine was more common in China, a fact noted even by the 13th century Venetian traveler Marco Polo.
The main consumptionary diet of the lower classes remained rice, pork, and salted fish, while it is known from restaurant dinner menus that the upper classes did not eat dog meat.
Common fruits that were consumed included melons, pomegranates, lychees, longans, golden oranges, jujubes, quinces, apricots and pears.
Specialties and combination dishes in the Song period included scented shellfish cooked in rice-wine, geese with apricots, lotus-seed soup, spicy soup with mussels and fish cooked with plums, sweet soya soup, baked sesame buns stuffed with either sour bean filling or pork tenderloin, mixed vegetable buns, fragrant candied fruit, strips of ginger and fermented beanpaste, jujube-stuffed steamed dumplings, fried chestnuts, salted fermented bean soup, fruit cooked in scented honey, and 'honey crisps' of kneaded and baked honey, flour, mutton fat and pork lard.
Dessert molds of oiled flour and sugared honey were shaped into girls' faces or statuettes of soldiers with full armor like door guards, and were called "likeness foods" (guoshi).

Mongol Yuan Dynasty (1271 – 1368)

Contacts with the West also brought the introduction to China of a major food crop, sorghum, along with other foreign food products and methods of preparation. Hu Sihui, a Mongol doctor of Chinese medicine, compiled the Yinshan Zhengyao, a guide to cooking and health which incorporated Chinese and Mongol food practices.
Mongolian influence during the Yuan dynasty made yoghurt very popular.
China during the Ming Dynasty became involved in a new global trade of goods, plants, animals, and food crops known as the Columbian Exchange. Although the bulk of imports to China were silver, the Chinese also purchased New World crops from the Spanish Empire. This included sweet potatoes, maize, and peanuts, foods that could be cultivated in lands where traditional Chinese staple crops—wheat, millet, and rice—couldn't grow, hence facilitating a rise in the population of China.

Ming Dynasty (1368–1644)

Picture source:Wikipedia; Spring morning in a Han palace, by Qiu Ying (1494–1552); excessive luxury and decadence marked the late Ming period, spurred by the enormous state bullion of incoming silver and by private transactions involving silver.

China during the Ming Dynasty  became involved in a new global trade of goods, plants, animals, and food crops known as the Columbian Exchange.
Although the bulk of imports to China were silver, the Chinese also purchased New World crops from the Spanish Empire. This included sweet potatoes, maize, and peanuts, foods that could be cultivated in lands where traditional Chinese staple crops—wheat, millet, and rice—couldn't grow, hence facilitating a rise in the population of China.
After sweet potatoes were introduced to China around 1560, it gradually became the traditional food of the lower classes. Because of the need for more food, prices went up and more of the lower class citizens died.

Qing Dynasty (1644 – 1912)

Jonathan Spence writes appreciatively that by the Qing Dynasty the "culinary arts were treated as a part of the life of the mind: There was a Tao of food, just as there was Tao of conduct and one of literary creation."
Yuan Mei  was a well-known poet, scholar, artist, and gastronome (today we would call him a ‘KOL foodie) of the Qing Dynasty, described his food experience at one of the banquets like this:
"I was once asked to a party by a certain Governor, who gave us plain boiled swallows-nest, served in enormous vases, like flower pots. It had no taste at all.... If our host’s object was simply to impress, it would have been better to put a hundred pearls into each bowl. Then we would have known that the meal had cost him tens of thousands, without the unpleasantness of being expected to eat what was uneatable"

Post-dynastic China

After the end of the Qing dynasty, the cook previously employed by the Imperial Kitchens opened-up restaurants which allowed the people to experience many of the formerly inaccessible food eaten by the Emperor and his court. However, with the beginning of the Chinese Civil War, many of the cooks and individual knowledgeable in the cuisines of the period of China, left for Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States. Among them were the likes of Irene Kuo who was an ambassador to the culinary heritage of China, teaching the Western of the more refined aspects of Chinese cuisine.

In Beijing in the 1990s, a Communist-style cuisine, which is also called Cultural Revolution cuisine or CR cuisine has also been popular. Other recent innovations include the Retro-Maoist cuisine, which cashed in on the 100th anniversary of Mao Zedong's birthday, whether it was officially endorsed or not. The menu includes items such as cornmeal cakes and rice gruel.

One of the cuisines to benefit during the 1990s was the Chinese Islamic cuisine. The cuisines of other cultures in China have benefited from recent changes in government policy. During the Great Leap Forward and Cultural revolution of the 1970s, the government pressured the Hui people, to adopt Han Chinese culture. The national government has since abandoned efforts to impose a homogeneous Chinese culture.

Information source
Wikipedia