Perhaps Chinese cuisine doesn’t exist — but it’s delicious
Does Chinese cuisine exist? I’m not merely being provocative when I suggest … sort of.
Chinese food, as it’s perhaps better thought of, certainly exists.
But its diversity is as great as a continent’s, in that it’s actually hundreds if not thousands of cuisines.
Arguably, it’s tough to place ethnic Kazakh cuisine — think butter and horse intestines as staples — from the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region in the same category as the saccharine fish of Jiangsu province’s Wuxi. They’re at least as different as Swedish versus Italian cuisines — or say, Ecuadorian food.
To be fair, that’s contrasting fare from the country’s northwestern grasslands and its southeastern river delta.
But within Jiangsu alone, Wuxi’s and Nanjing’s respective cuisines, for example, actually share little resemblance despite both being categorized as sucai under the widely used “eight-cuisines” model.
Wuxi’s fare is characterized by copious sugar and such aquaculture staples as blowfish and the “three whites” — white fish, white bait and white shrimp.
Not even 200 kilometers away, salted duck and duckblood soup are mainstays of Jiangsu’s capital.
As a friend from Nanjing recently put it, “They’re totally different.”
Another friend, from Wuxi, agreed.
That’s not to say the eightcuisines classification is wrong.
But it’s far from sufficient to describe the enormous and diverse country’s vast gastronomic landscape.
I’ve discovered while traveling through every province, municipality and autonomous region in China that the eight cuisines are far too broad to describe what people actually eat in different places.
For reasons experts debate, certain cuisines account for a disproportionate share of restaurant representation nationwide.
You’ll rarely need to go more than a few blocks to find a Sichuan, Hunan and Cantonese restaurant in any big Chinese city.
But you’d have to search a bit to find meals from Jiangxi, Qinghai or Hainan provinces.
Yet these places have produced distinctive cuisines that are just as sophisticated — and delicious — as those that have become icons of the national culinary scene.
One of my favorite things about visiting Hubei’s provincial capital, Wuhan, for instance, is the food.
Hubei’s cuisine is often placed under the broad xiangcai category associated with Hunan province’s cuisine.
But Hubei’s gastronomy is unique from Hunan’s. It’s generally saltier and less spicy, and more likely to be sour or deep-fried.
Again, while Hunanese restaurants abound nationwide, you’d have to hunt for a Hubei restaurant, even if both are technically xiangcai.
I was delighted when a Guizhou restaurant opened near my home years ago.
The province is one of my favorite places to eat.
But its dishes aren’t nearly as popular as those of neighboring Yunnan and Sichuan provinces.
The joint was typically pretty empty — perhaps because of a lack of brand recognition of Guizhou cuisine — and eventually shut down.
The book Chinese Cuisine Products 34-4 System released last month attempts to more precisely classify China’s cuisines.
The author, Liu Guangwei, addresses the complexity of Chinese food using a categorization system that accounts for various dimensions. Liu developed a taxonomy in which every dish can be rendered as a 19-digit code, like a barcode.
For instance, the first two digits represent the province. The last digit represents the season. Codifications in between indicate such dimensions as ingredients, cooking techniques and ethnicity.
This approach is useful at an academic level in how it — perhaps imperfectly — explores the question, “What is Chinese food?”
But, practically speaking, it doesn’t necessarily mean that, say, more of us outside the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region will be more likely to sample “beer fish”, let alone understand the dish’s position in the greater concept of “Chinese cuisine” — to whatever extent that exists.