The Taste of Home Dishes
8 min readGenerally speaking，Chinese people eat three meals a day.They attach the most importance to supper，and breakfast is normally quite simple.On Chinese breakfast tables，common foods include steamed stuffed buns，steamed buns，a bowl of porridge and a dish of pickles.Wontons，noodles in hot soup，rice and stir fried dishes are also eaten for breakfast，but these are less common.
Eggs and bean curd are the most common sources of protein at breakfast and are easy to prepare.
At lunch and dinner, Chinese people eat staple foods such as rice and flour. They also eat stir-fried dishes, soup and porridge. Guangdong people are particularly fond of drinking porridge and soup. The preparation of family food is generally undertaken by housewives, however, in families in which both parents work, men also play their part. People in the north mainly eat wheaten foods, of which there are more than 280 documented varieties. This type of food is prepared using flour made from wheat, maize, sorghum, beans, buckwheat or oatmeal. According to their personal preferences, people either stir-fry, fry, stew, steam, braise or roast these foods. Shanxi Province, is considered to be the”hometown”of wheaten foods in China.
All Chinese people are extremely fond of noodles. Noodles are a very convenient food to cook and come in many different flavors. Fine dried noodles and instant noodles can be stored for long periods of time, are portable and easy to prepare. Today they are found in most Chinese people’s homes.
Home dishes and double-stewed soup from Guangzhou.
People in the South of China have rice as their staple food, and cooking and sharing a pot of delicious rice is a very common thing for families in this part of the country to do. However, eating plain rice all year round can become monotonous. People therefore make a wide variety of different rice dishes. These are prepared in many different ways, which include steaming, boiling, stir-frying, braising, frying and stewing.
Unlike people in the West, most Chinese ethnic groups do not eat much dairy food on a daily basis. However, in areas inhabited by minority ethnic groups in the northwest of the country, dairy food is a very important part of the local people’s daily diet.
Chinese people do not normally eat fish and meat every day. They eat many more seasonal vegetables, which are much healthier and more economical. Green turnips, white turnips, summer radishes and carrots are just some of the vegetables they eat. Turnips are cooked, stir-fried and Nest-shaped oat flour noodles. This is a type of Shanxi wheaten food that is carefully prepared using oat flour. The noodles are steamed and mixed with mutton or mushroom soup. They are quite delicious and have a lasting after-taste. They are named aftertheir shape, which looks like a round-bottomed wicker basket (called a “laolao”).
A hotel chef in Xuchang，Henan passing on his secret of how to cook with radishes.
Carrots are used for stewing beef or spareribs and are an ingredient in many other dishes.Not only do carrots taste good，but they are also healthy.Vegetables with edible stems and leaves（such as cabbages，spinach，rape，celery，chives and mustard）are all classified as“green vegetables.”These vegetables are stir-fried，boiled and stewed.They are also served cold dressed with sauce and can be stir-fried together with a little fish or egg.
The commonest raw material found in the Chinese kitchen is bean curd.Bean curd is eaten in many ways.Cold bean curd is dressed with sauce，while tender bean curd is mixed with spring scallion and sprayed with fine salt and sesame oil，or mixed with seasonal vegetables such as cucumber.Bean curd can also be fried and then braised with seasonings or stewed with green vegetables.Sichuan people like eating stir-fried bean curd in chili sauce.This dish is prepared bycutting bean curd into small cubes and adding stir-fried meat powder and seasonings such as pepper oil and Chinese prickly ash powder.People in the Jiangsu-Zhejiang-Shanghai area like eating fish-head bean curd and strong-smelling preserved bean curd.A kind of frozen bean curd is also eaten inChina.This food is porous，elastic，nutritious and capable of lowering a person’s cholesterol level.
Ma Po bean curd.
Apart from bean curd, bean dishes and bean products also feature on Chinese dining tables all year round.
Bamboo shoots are another foodstuff that is commonly used by many Chinese families, especially in the south. Common home dishes made out of bamboo shoots include: cold bamboo slices dressed in sauce, braised bamboo shoots, stir-fried winter bamboo shoots, bamboo shoots braised in soy sauce and bamboo soup. The different bits of a bamboo shoot are quite different intheir texture and tenderness. As a result, housewives usually cook them in different ways: the more tender tips are stir-fried, the middle parts are cut into slices and served as an accompaniment, and the less tender roots are stewed and boiled with pork.
The Chinese eat many types of meat, including chicken, duck, fish, pork, beef and mutton.
Chicken plays an important part in the country’s cuisine. This is not surprising, as China has along history of breeding chickens. Indeed, chicken has been thought of as a delicacy and chicken soup has been considered as a good tonic since ancient times.
Three-nested duck,a famous Yangzhou dish prepared Foreign tourists eating instant-boiled mutton in the with a complete domesticated duck, wild duck and edible Donglasishun Restaurant in Beijing in 1993.
Braising in soy sauce and boiling and stewing in brown sauce. If all Chinese chicken dishes were brought together into one menu, it would be as long as a book.
The favorite food of the people who live in the Jiangsu-Zhejiang-Shanghai area is duck. In this region”boiled salted duck”and”duck soup”are not only the signature dishes of many bigrestaurants but are also cooked to a high standard by many housewives. Ordinary families inthe north of China seldom cook duck, and the famous”Beijing roast duck”can only be eaten in restaurants that specialize in this type of meat.
As Chinese people have become more aware of the need to eat in a healthy way, fish dishes that are rich in protein and low in fat have become more popular. These dishes feature common fish and shrimps such as carp, grass carp, crucian carp, blunt-snout bream, prawns and dam shrimps.
Generally speaking, fresh fish, shrimps and prawns are mostly steamed in a clear soup or stewed without seasoning. When this produce is less fresh it is generally braised in soy sauce or sweet and sour sauce. Common home fish dishes include: lake fish in vinegar gravy, fried yellow croaker in”squirrel shape”, Yellow River carp in sauce, crucian carp in milk, blunt-snout bream steamed in clear soup and braised sliced fish in chili sauce. Some families also eat cuttlefish braised in soy sauce and cold sea cucumbers dressed in sauce.
Pork is the commonest type of meat eaten
It is particularly popular amongst the Han people. There are many methods of cooking pork. These include: stir-fried pork, pork braised in soy sauce, boiled pork slices, double-fried pork, steamed pork, steamed pork slices with glutinous rice flour and water-boiled pork. All of these are common home dishes.
Many Chinese cooks like treating pork with a little edible starch and some seasonings before they cook it. This is meant to make stir-fried pork taste fresher and more tender. Beef and mutton are the main foods of northwestern minority ethnic groups, who normally roast these meats. In most Han families, beef and mutton are normally stir-fried, preserved or stewed. Slices of these meats are also “washed”in hot pots with boiling water.
During cold winter weather many Chinese families like to sit around a table and eat instant-boiled meat from a hot pot. There are many kinds of hot pots. These include: Sichuan’s spicy hot pots, Guangdong’s seafood hot pots, Shanghai’s chrysanthemum hot pots, Beijing’s instant-boiledmutton hot pots and Hainan’s dog meat hot pots.
Instant-boiled mutton is the home dish that is eaten most regularly by people in Beijing in the winter.
It is prepared by first cutting up two plates of best-quality mutton and beef. Three, four or five different vegetables are then added to the meat, and all the ingredients are then cooked in boiling water Preserved turnips being dried in autumn sun. in a hot pot. The ceoked dish is then eaten with a variety of specially prepared seasonings. Common seasonings include sesame paste(or sesame oil), fermented bean curd, leek flowers, pepper oil, chopped green scallion and coriander powder. Sweetened garlic is also used to eliminate the smell of mutton and grease. After they have had their fill of instant-boiled mutton, diners normally put a plate of vermicelli into the thick soup that remains in the hot pot they’ ve been eating from. Vermicelli soaked in soup is very tasty. Then, one or two small sesame seed cakes are eaten. These are really delicious and have a lasting aftertaste.
In the summer, Beijing people often eat noodles with soybean paste. They first cook the noodles and then soak them in cold water to cool them down. Soybean paste is made with ginger, garlic and brown sauce. It also includes half-fat, half-lean diced pork that has been cooked using a slow fire and which is oily but not greasy. When noodles with soybean paste are eaten, they are normally accompanied by various side dishes. These include tasty, refreshing and tender seasonal vegetables such as bean sprouts, small summer radish tops, shredded cucumber, shredded string beans and chive segments supplemented with shiny soybean paste.
Pickles are a kind of folk vegetable dish that is very common across China. There are few areas in China that do not produce pickles, and each region’s pickles have their own special characteristics. Generally speaking, pickles in the north are salty, while those in the south are sweet.
Famous pickles that are used as appetizers include pickled Chinese cabbage from the northeastregion, Beijing’s preserved cabbage mustard, Sichuan’s Fuling pickled mustard tubers, Zhejiang’s dried turnips, Guizhou’s salty and sour pickles and Korea’s red pepper pickles. There are so many kinds of pickles that it seems that almost anything can be preserved: radishes, melons, lettuces, garlic sprouts, nectar, lotus roots and even peanuts, walnuts and almonds are all preserved by Chinese cooks.
In the past pickling was used as a way of storing food, however, as living conditions have improved, this aspect of pickling has become less important. Now pickles are used mainly as supplementary dishes for adjusting flavors.
As can be seen from the above examples, ordinary Chinese families eat an enormous variety of exquisite and unique foods. This shows that Chinese people consider eating to be a joy and an art.
