Chinese Food
American Known (from Cuisine and Culture: a history of food and
people by Linda Civitello)
• The sweet sour pork, shop suey, chow mein, greasy egg rolls, fried rice are “dumbed down” ataste buds sparing uses chili sauce, hot mustard, vinegars, sesame oil, and soy and oyster sauces. • Oysters, sea cucumbers, squid, jellyfish, and croaker are their specialty (no cornstarch, canned pineapple, MSG) • Dim Sum: small bites. • Chop Suey: miscellaneous scraps is of American origin (San Francisco). Someone went to restaurant during closing time, chief throw together leftovers.
Pork (700BC) • Two theories: 1) domesticated from the wild Sus Scrafa of the Near East then reach China some millennia later; (2) domesticated independently in Southeast Asia or east Asia from local wild pigs as early as or even earlier than in the Near East. • Why it became so popular? (accounts for 70-80% human intake of animal calories in China) • It produces twice the meat per acre of pasturage as that produced by cattle and sheep • It is an effective household scavenger that survived table scraps, chaff, and weeds. Human parasites being destroyed as they pass through the pig intestine. • Lord is main oil for cooking in mountains regions lack of land to grow vegetable oils
Shark fin soup
Olympic official lunch banquet Seafood soup
Birdnest soup
Frequency of major ingredients used in Chinese dishes based on the book ”The Chinese Kitchen: Recipes, Techniques, Ingredients, History, and Memories” from America‟s leading authority in Chinese cooking by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo
Meat: pork:35; Chicken: 24; duck:13; beef: 1; Sausage: 1; Lamb: 3; Bird Nest:1 Seafood: shrimp:15; Crab:7; Scallop:5; Lobster 4; Sea Bass: 4; Abalone: 2; Squid: 2; Shark fin: 2; Clam:2; Fret:1; carp:1; Sea Cucumber: 1; Jelly: 1 Cereals and Pulses (edible seeds) Rice: 23; noodles (wheat, rice, num bean) 15; Wheat (in bread form): 12; Soy bean (mostly in different forms of bean curd): 16; red bean:2; Black bean:1; peanuts: 3 Vegetables: mustard green (most in picked form):9; bok chuy: 9; Mushroom: 7; Snow Peas: 6; Lily Buds: 5; Bamboo shoots: 4; Chinese broccoli: 3; Cauliflower: 3; Lotus roots: 3; Winter melon: 2; bean sprouts: 2; Eggplant: 2; Asparagus: 2; Bell pepper: 2; Chives: 2; Lemon: 2; Leeks, cabbage, carrots, cucumber, Jicama, seaweed, Lima beans, sesame, walnuts, pecans, carrots, celery, water chestnuts, lotus leaves, lotus seeds, scallions, silk squash, ginkgo nuts: 1 Herbs: Ginger:5; Sichuan peppercorn: 4; Coriander, white pepper, garlic, shallot, onion, scallion, water crest, tealeaves Sauces: soy sauce, chili sauce, rice wine, rice vinegar, hot pepper oil etc. Fruits: pears:3; Peaches: 3; Dates, raisins, apples, banana, plum, lemon Methods: stir-frying, deep frying; oil-blanching (sealing process for meat or seafood), water-blanching (for vegetables), stock-blanching, dry-roasting (nuts, no oil or salt), steaming