The wheat of the North China Plain

The North China Plain is the great alluvial lowland laid down by the Yellow River and its neighbours, and it has been farmed for millennia. Its cooking belongs to the dry-field agriculture of the North, in which wheat and millet, not rice, stand at the centre of the meal. The Qimin Yaoshu of Jia Sixie (c. 544), a treatise written for farmers of this northern country, gives detailed instruction on the dry cultivation of grain, on fermentation and on the preparation of flour foods, and it remains one of the oldest sources for the wheat table of the region.

Wheat on the Plain is a winter crop. It is sown in the autumn, survives the cold under the frozen fields, and ripens in early summer, so that the harvest of the wheat fields is among the fixed points of the northern farming year. Fuchsia Dunlop, in Every Grain of Rice, takes the grain as the organising principle of Chinese eating: rice in the South, and in the North the foods of the mill, which she treats as staples in their own right and not as substitutes. The cook of the Plain thinks first of flour, and then of what is eaten with it. The flour is made into many forms. Noodles are pulled, cut with the knife or rolled and sliced, and are served in broth or dressed with a sauce. Steamed breads, known as mantou, are the daily bread of the household, while dumplings, jiaozi, filled with pork, cabbage, chives or other fillings, are the food of the New Year and of family gatherings. Flat breads and filled pancakes are baked or cooked on the griddle. The method follows the grain: the dough is kneaded, rested and then steamed, boiled or fried, with little reliance on the oven. Wheat shapes the seasoning as well. The northern kitchen leans on soy sauce, fermented bean and wheat pastes, vinegar, garlic and spring onion, which suit a plain starch and carry it. Shandong, on the eastern edge of the Plain, holds a place of its own in the history of Chinese cooking, with its tradition of braising, of clear soups and of seafood from its long coast, and its steamed and baked breads are part of the same wheat culture. Millet and sorghum, the older grains of the region, remain in the porridges and flatbreads of the countryside, and maize and sweet potato entered the fields in later centuries. In the long history of the Plain, the dry field, the mill and the steamer together make a table that is distinct from the rice cooking of the Yangtze and the South.

The wheat table of the North is plain in its base and strong in its accompaniments: a soft steamed bread or a bowl of noodles is eaten with garlic, vinegar, soy sauce, fermented pastes and braised or stir-fried dishes. Dumplings are the food of the New Year in the North, made and eaten together by the household, and they are served with a dipping sauce of vinegar, often with garlic. The pleasure lies in the texture of the dough, which may be chewy, springy or soft, and in the contrast between the neutral starch and the sharpness set beside it.