The Eating Habits of Minority Ethnic Groups
10 min readTraditional Mongolian foods from Alxa, Inner Mongolia-fried rice, milk tea, hand meat, milk skin and cheese.
China is a large country that is home to many ethnic groups.Each of the country’s minority ethnic groups has developed their own unique eating customs.This is due to the influence of many factors including geography,climate,agriculture,religion and social history.For example,those minority ethnic groups that mainly engage in animal husbandry usually eat beef,mutton and dairy products and drink milk tea.Most southern minority ethnic groups grow rice and have this as their staple food,while northern minority ethnic groups who farm grains have wheaten foods and cereals as their staple foods.Minority ethnic groups living in cold areas like eating garlic,while those living in humid areas prefer eating spicy foods.The Hui and Uyghur people believe in Islam,so they do not eat pork and are prohibited from eating ferocious animals.Tibetans do not eat fish because of their religion.
To avoid offending people’s sensibilities,it is important to get to know the food customs and taboos followed by China’s ethnic minorities when traveling around China.
“Hand meat”is mutton boiled in water without any seasoning. In Wang Zengqi’s story,a traveler was roaming on horseback around the boundless prairie of Inner Mongolia. He was carrying a leg of lamb on his back. At dusk he saw a Mongolian tent, so he got off his horse and sought temporary lodging. His Mongolian host untied the lamb leg the traveler had brought and put it aside. He then slaughtered and cooked a sheep from his own herd for the guest. After having drunk and eaten enough, the guest slept in the Mongolian tent together with the host’s family. The next day, the host bade the traveler farewell and gave him another leg of lamb. As he journeyed around the prairie, the traveler met many other locals and the same exchange of food happened at each meeting, so, when the traveler eventually left the prairie he still had a leg of lamb on his back.
This story is probably true because Mongolians are famous for their hospitality and mutton is the main food that Mongolian herdsmen give to their guests. According to Mongolian customs,a sheep should be slaughtered whenever a guest arrives, regardless of the guest’s relationship to the host family. When the guest arrives a sheep is brought before them so they can inspect it. When the Traditional foods from Hongyao Stockade Village, Jinkeng, Guangxi-oil tea and bamboo rice.
Guest has nodded to indicate that the animal is satisfactory, the sheep is slaughtered. This is called “asking the guest before slaughtering the sheep”and is done to show respect for the guest.
Hand meat is the most traditional way of eating mutton in Mongolia and is an important part of the region’s culture. It is fleshy and juicy and smells delicious. To eat this dish, Mongolians like to hold a large piece of meat in one hand. They then cut the meat using a Mongolian knife, which they hold in their other hand. If an honored guest comes to visit a Mongolian family,a whole-sheep banquet is offered. This type of banquet is called a”yangbeizi”, which means “whole sheep boiled in a cauldron”.
Mongolian people usually only boil mutton for 30 minutes. This means that blood still oozes out of the cooked meat when it is cut with a knife. If Han guests are being entertained, then Mongolians will usually boil their mutton for longer, so that it is not so bloody.
For Mongolians, meat and wine are inseparable. Most Mongolian men and women can drink a lot of wine. At a banquet,a Mongolian host will fill three silver bowls with wine. He will then hold a white hada scarf in his hands and loudly sing a toast song. He will then propose a toast tohis guest to show his sincerity. According to Mongolian custom, the guest should then dip his right middle finger into some wine and quickly flip it up towards the sky and down towards the earth.
This is done to show respect for the sky and earth. The guest should then drink all the wine he’s been offered in one gulp. If the guest declines he will be thought of as lacking sincerity. Tibet, with its beautiful scenery and fascinating ethnic customs, is atracting more and more Chinese and foreign tourists. Tibet has a number of eating customs and many tourists enjoy finding out about these traditions while the visit. Many people who explore the country try buttered tea, which is the main beverage enjoyed by Tibetans. To prepare this drink, brick tea is crushed, boiled A long table feast held in Leishan Miao Stockade Village in Guizhou to celebrate the Spring Festival. This is the Miao people’s highest-level ceremonial feast and has been held for thousands of years. Such feasts are usually held for weddings, first month birthday banquets and stockade village reunion banquets. Seats on the left are for hosts, and those on the right are for guests. The people sitting opposite each other toast each other and sing loudly.
These are then poured into a cylinder and mixed with butter and salt. When a Tibetan offers buttered tea to a guest, it is tradition that the guest should drink three bowls of the beverage. After this, if the guest does not want to drink any more tea, he can pour the residue of the tea he’s consumed onto the ground. If he doesn’t do this, the host will keep askingthe guest to drink. The main foods eaten by Tibetans are highland barley flour, buttered tea, beef, mutton, and dairy products.A Tibetan family’s prosperity is based on its reserves of grain ratherthan meat and milk, as every family has sufficient meat and milk. Tibetans do not usually eat odd-
Toed livestock such as horses and donkeys or poultry such as chickens, ducks and geese. Instead they like eating even-toed animals such as pigs, cows and sheep. They are especially partial to air-dried beef. On the Tibetan Plateau, food does not rot quickly and air-dried fresh beef is therefore very common. Tibetans make it every autumn. To do this, they cut fresh beef into stripes, string these together, spray them with salt, Chinese prickly ash powder, pepper powder and ginger powder, and then hang them in a shady and ventilated place to dry. Air-dried beef is crisp and has a delicious spicy flavor that is both sweet and sour.
The southwest of China is inhabited by many minority ethnic groups that have a wide variety of eating customs. Because of the region’s humid climate, its cuisine is mainly comprised of sour, spicy, air-dried and smoke-cured foods.
The Yao people are distributed across the provinces of Yunnan, Guangxi, Hunan, Jiangxi, Guangdong and Hainan. They often mix maize, millet, sweet potatoes, cassava, taros, green beans and other ingredients in with their porridge or rice. Because the Yao cultivate crops in mountainous areas, their food has traditionally been easy to carry and store. This is why glutinous rice dumplings and bamboo rice are the favorite foods of the Yao people (these as eaten as either staple or non-staple foods).
During the farming season, Yao people often sit on the ground together to have a picnic. At such picnics, they share all of the dishes they have brought with them(apart from staple food items). Most Yao people like drinking wine, and most families brew wine with rice, maize, sweet potatoes and other ingredients. Drinking wine two or three times a day is a normal part of their culture.
Miao people live in the border areas of Guizhou, Hunan, Hubei, Sichuan, Yunnan and Guangxi.
These people like sour dishes, and sour soup makes up a vital part of every family’s diet. This is A Korean family crushing rice to make rice cakes (in A Hezhen woman preparing “raw fish”to treat her guests.Yanbian, Jilin).
Prepared by putting rice water or bean curd water into a pot and then boiling it with meat, fish and fermented vegetables. The main food storage method that the Miao people use is preservation. They like the sour taste of preserved vegetables, chicken, duck, fish and meat, and almost all familieshave”pots for sour preserved foods”. Miao people have a long brewing history and have developed a complete brewing process involving starter propagation, fermentation, distillation, mixing and cellaring.
The Dong people in Guizhou also like sour foods, and every family eats sour cabbages, sour bamboo shoots, sour pork and sour grass carp.A folk song of the Dong people highlights their loveof sour tastes in this way:”The husband is not lazy cultivating glutinous rice well, and the wife is not fond of playing, preserving grass carp well. If people work hard, treasures can be found in mountains. All families’ pots are full of sour food.”Dong people are not only famous for their sour foods. Their preserved chicken paste, preserved fish and preserved ginger are also well-known.
The preserved fish made by the Dong people has a particularly interesting preparation method. It is sealed up and stored underground for between three and eight years before it is unsealed and eaten.
Of all the ethnic groups in the southwest, the Bai people attach the most importance to festival foods. For almost every festival that they celebrate they have particular foods that they eat. For example, they eat dingding candies, puffed rice tea and pig’s head meat during the Spring Festival,and steamed cakes and cold jelly during the 3d Month Festival. They also eat cold assorted fooddressed in sauce and fried, crisp pork on the Tomb-sweeping Day, sweet foods and various candies during the Torch Festival, white cakes and tipsy cakes during the Mid-autumn Festival, and fat mutton during the Double Ninth Festival. In addition, they eat glutinous rice dumplings and drink realgar wine during the Dragon Boat Festival. Their lives are colorful and full of food!
The Zhuang people are China’s most numerous minority ethnic group. They mainly live in Guangxi. There are also some Zhuang people in Yunnan, Guangdong, Guizhou and Hunan. Rice and maize grow widely in the areas where the Zhuang live. These grains are therefore their staple foods. Zhuang people also eat all kinds of poultry and livestock, and some are fond of eating dog meat. Zhuang people usually cook fresh chicken, duck, fish and vegetables until they are between 70 and 80 percent done. Vegetables are normally quickly stir-fried in a hot cooker and then removed so that they remain fresh. Rice wine is the main beverage the Zhuang people use for celebrating festivals and entertaining guests. They add chicken gallbladders to this wine to make “chicken gallbladder wine”, they add chicken giblets to make”chicken giblets wine”, and add pork liver to make”pork liver wine”. When drinking these types of wine, the wine should be drunk in one gulp, and the giblets and liver chewed slowly to neutralize the effect of the alcohol.
The Korean ethnic group inhabits China’s three northeastern provinces. Korean foods are fresh, delicious, crisp, tender, spicy and tasty. They are made using fresh and tender raw ingredients. Common Korean cooking methods include dressing raw food in sauce, preserving food and boiling food in soup. Traditional Korean delicacies include raw beef slices dressed in sauce, raw beef tripe slices dressed in sauce and fresh fish slices dressed in sauce. Korean pickles are also very famous.
They are made out of very simple raw materials, including cabbages, radishes, peppers and ginger.
Salt is added to these ingredients to preserve them. They taste fresh, tender, delicious, sweet, sour, spicy and salty, and contrast pleasingly with the folk vegetable dishes of the Han people.
The Hezhen people live on the Sanjiang Plain in Heilongjiang. They are the only ethnic group in the north of China that hunts using dog sleds. The food and drink of these people have ancient origins, and they maintain the custom of eating raw food. The most peculiar food they eat is “raw fish”. This is made of raw fish mixed with potato shreds, mung bean sprouts, chives, pepper oil, vinegar, salt and sauce. It tastes fresh and tender.
Hui people in Weining, Guizhou eating together in a mosque to celebrate Eid al-Fitr.
The Oroqen people and Ewenki people live in the remote mountains and thick forests of the Greater Khingan Range. They live in a “natural zoo”and maintain the primitive custom of “eating meat and drinking milk.”Amongst the foods they eat are deer milk, deer meat, roe deer meat, mountain hare meat and pheasant meat.
The Hui people, who believe in Islam, are distributed all over China. Though they live alongside other groups, such as the Han, they maintain their own unique eating habits. Their staple foods are rice and flour, and the foods they like include steamed buns, pancakes, steamed stuffed buns, dumplings, noodles in soup and mixed noodles. The Hui people have two grand festivals, which are called Eid al-Adha and Eid al-Fitr. The main foods of these festivals are “salted cake fried in sesame oil”and “fried fruit roll with sugar”. These are two traditional wheaten foods that are fried in vegetable oil. They are thought to be sacred by the Hui people.
It is taboo for Hui people to eat pork. In addition, they abstain from eating dog meat, horse meat, mule meat, fish that do not have scales and the meat of all dead animals that have not beenslaughtered. Drinking wine is also strictly prohibited. Because of their strict eating taboos, Hui people frequent their own Muslim restaurants in cities and towns and do not eat together with people from non-Muslim ethnic groups. Therefore, the Hui people’s Muslim dishes are unique among the dishes enjoyed by China’s numerous ethnic minority groups. There are many famous Muslim dishes anddelicacies. These include”fried three kinds of meat,””mutton steamed in clear soup,””mutton stewed in brown sauce”and “sheep tendons”. Hui folk dishes such as hand-pulled noodles, cold noodles, jellied bean curd, mutton offal, minced noodles and braised hele noodles are also widely known around China.
In addition, many Muslim restaurants, such as Donglaishun, Hongbinlou and Kaorouji, enjoy a high reputation in many Chinese cities and even abroad. Overall, it is true to say that the Hui people’s Muslim dishes have contributed greatly to the development of China’s cuisine.