CLASSIFYING CUISINE
A new book looks to systematically categorize Chinese dishes across various dimensions to create a tabletop taxonomy, Li Yingxue reports.
Liu Guangwei views Chinese cuisine’s thousands of dishes as pearls — and he hopes to systematically string them together to create a beautiful necklace.
The Beijing Easteat Research Institute’s dean has wondered exactly how many dishes Chinese cuisine contains since he started learning how to cook in college in 1978.
He attempts to answer this question in a systematic way with his book, Chinese Cuisine Products 34-4 System, released earlier this month.
“It’s said that Chinese cuisine is extensive and profound — but how extensive? How profound?” Liu asks.
“We should establish a complete system to answer this question as soon as possible.”
His categorization system examines nine dimensions, including space, time, genre, raw materials, techniques, consumer, season, skills and ethnicity.
“It’s necessary to position each dish within Chinese cuisine. And the system has to be
accessible so that it’s used in practice rather than set aside as a neglected theory,” Liu says. Chinese Cuisine 34-4 System divides Chinese food into 34 kinds, and further classifies these by cuisine, genre, school and dish.
Liu also develops a 19-digit code to identify every Chinese dish.
The China Cuisine Association released a list of classic Chinese dishes and banquet themes for each provinciallevel jurisdiction on Sept 10. It includes 10 classic dishes from each place and a total of 273 banquet themes.
CCA president Jiang Junxian says the traditional regionbased “eight-cuisines” system that ordinary people use is insufficiently detailed to describe Chinese food’s complexity.
Liu explains that administrative division is the first tier of classification — that is, 34 cuisines for China’s 34 provinces, municipalities, and autonomous and special administrative regions.
“As we all know, China has eight traditional cuisines — they’re the major, broad categories. The theory of 34 cuisines does not deny the eight cuisines but adds 26 more to depict a complete picture,” Liu says.
Genre is the second classification tier. It’s indicated by location but without specific boundaries. Liu believes the ingredients available in each place determine each genre’s flavor in ways that are difficult to draw sharp lines around.
“China’s diverse landscapes generate Chinese food’s diversity, and its various cooking techniques, flavors and dishes,” he says.
“We named the genres according to the ancient names of their respective places of origin, since they took shape centuries ago.”
The third tier — school — is determined by chefs and apprentices.
“Chinese cuisine has different schools like Peking Opera,” Liu says.
Each school in Liu’s Chinese Cuisine Products 34-4 System must have at least 10 signature dishes created using unique cooking styles and have been passed down for at least three generations.
The fourth tier is dishes, for which Liu created the 19-digit IDs.
“The 19 digits respectively represent space, cooking techniques, main ingredients, skills, sense, time, consumer, ethnic group and season,” Liu explains.
“For example, the 19th number represents season — spring, summer, autumn or winter.”
The editors of Cooking Artist, published by the Beijing Easteat Research Institute, sent a research team to travel around China to verify information about genres and schools for the book.
The first part of Liu’s new book focuses on Chinese cuisine’s different orientations with a collection of his earlier essays examining space, time, structure and consumer.
The second part introduces the geography, economies, culinary histories and representative dishes of the 34 provincial-level administrations in 34 chapters.
“I identify 92 genres and exemplify 308 major schools in the book,” Liu says.
“The diversity and complexity within each cuisine means there are also many sub-genres that need more research.”
Liu’s system respectively examines cuisine, genre, school and dish, but he doesn’t list all of the schools. He believes more data will improve the system, since he doesn’t yet have all the information on the schools. For instance, if two chefs create the same dish, that’s currently tallied as two dishes.
“There’s a lot of work yet to be done in classifying dishes,” he says.
“This will require more in-depth research.”