The State Banquet and the Street

The essay rests on Fuchsia Dunlop's Invitation to a Banquet, which reads Chinese cooking as a single long conversation between the formal table and the market stall, and follows it from the imperial and Qing banquet through the break of the Cultural Revolution to the return of regional cooking in the 1980s. Its ground is the whole country, from the Sichuan basin and the Jiangnan waterlands to the Cantonese coast, the northern wheat lands and the Chinese kitchens of the diaspora.

The phrase eight great cuisines belongs to the modern period. It is a convenient frame for teaching and for menus, and it has hardened into a habit of speech, but it is not a fact of history: cooks and writers before the twentieth century spoke of particular places, particular dishes and particular schools of the kitchen, and the borders between them were never fixed. Yuan Mei, writing the Suiyuan Shidan in 1792, judged cooking by its care and its materials rather than by a roll of named cuisines, and that remains the sounder measure. The regions in this book are therefore ways of ordering a large subject, and each has a character worth stating: Sichuan with its layered, numbing and chilli-hot seasoning, built on Sichuan pepper (Zanthoxylum bungeanum) and doubanjiang; Hunan with its sour and fresh chilli heat; the Cantonese table of Guangdong and Hong Kong with its devotion to the freshness of the ingredient; Fujian and Chaozhou with their soups, seafood and braising; the Jiangnan table of Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai with its rice, fish, vinegar and soy; Anhui with its mountain produce; Shandong and Beijing with their seafood, wheat and the court's inheritance; the Northeast and the Northwest with their cold-climate cooking of wheat, mutton and preserved vegetables; Yunnan and Guizhou with their mushrooms, fermented and sour flavours; the Hakka table with its thrift and its preserved foods; and the diaspora, where Chinese cooks have remade the food in new soils. The Qing banquet shows the formal side of the story. Dunlop reads the great banquet as a display of order, rank and abundance, in which the number of dishes, the rare materials and the sequence of courses declared the standing of host and guest. The Manchu-Han banquet is the best-known name attached to that tradition, though its exact form in practice is better left to the sources than to legend. What matters for the cook is the principle that a banquet is composed: contrasts of texture, of cooking method and of flavour are set against one another across the meal, and no single dish is judged alone. The everyday kitchen rests on two material facts, the wok and the fuel that heats it. The wok, shaped to concentrate heat at its base and to let the cook toss and slide food up its sides, made the rapid stir-fry possible, and it suits a kitchen where fuel was dear and ingredients were cut small so that they cooked quickly. Coal and charcoal stoves, with their strong and adjustable fire, gave the cook the heat on which wok hei, the breath of the wok, depends, and the stove and the pan together shaped the speed and the economy of the Chinese kitchen far beyond the banquet hall. The Cultural Revolution broke the line of transmission. In those years the restaurant trade, with its professional cooks and its formal traditions, was disrupted, and the culture of the banquet, condemned as bourgeois, was starved of its audience and its materials. The old culinary knowledge survived chiefly in the home kitchen and in the memory of older cooks. With the economic opening of the 1980s the regional cooking returned: restaurants reopened, cooks taught again, and local dishes that had been kept alive in family kitchens came back to the public table. The state banquet and the street are the two poles of this history, and Dunlop's argument is that they are joined rather than opposed. The formal table distils the techniques, the sauces and the disciplines of the street, while the noodle stall and the teahouse keep the dishes honest by feeding a public that knows them well. A cook who understands the banquet's balance of courses and the stall's economy of means understands the cooking of China as a whole, and the regions of this book are best read as different answers to the same question of how a people should eat well.

The flavour of the Chinese table is built from contrast across a meal rather than from the weight of any one dish: the numbing heat of Sichuan beside the sweetness of Jiangnan, the fresh clarity of Cantonese steaming beside the sourness of Hunan and Guizhou. A banquet sets rich dishes against plain ones and soft textures against crisp, with rice or noodles and soup to settle the palate, while the street offers a single dish well made, a bowl of noodles or a steamed bun, eaten at once and hot.