Beijing Cooking and the Imperial Kitchen

Beijing became the seat of a great imperial court under the Yuan, when the Mongol rulers built their capital Dadu on the site, and it remained the capital through the Ming, with the court returning from Nanjing in the early fifteenth century, and through the Qing until 1912. The table of the city grew from this long residence of the court, its officials and its garrisons, and from the grain, livestock and tribute brought in from the north China plain, the Grand Canal and beyond. Hu Sihui's Yinshan Zhengyao of 1330, written for the Yuan court, records a kitchen in which mutton and the tastes of the steppe stood beside the dishes of the Han.

The cooking of Beijing is best understood as the cooking of a capital, in which several kitchens meet: the palace kitchens, the households of Manchu and Han officials, the Muslim restaurants that supplied mutton, and the shops and stalls of the city. Fuchsia Dunlop, in Invitation to a Banquet, treats the Chinese banquet as a thing shaped by court and by cities, and Beijing is the clearest case. Its dishes draw on the Shandong kitchen, whose cooks long served in the capital, on the Mongol and Manchu taste for roast and boiled meats, and on the wheat of the north, so that steamed breads, noodles, dumplings and pancakes carry the daily meal rather than rice. The imperial kitchen worked on a scale and with a division of labour that no household could match. Dishes were prepared in separate departments for the emperor, the empress dowager and the court, and the Qing banquet, with its many courses and its Manchu and Han services, set the pattern for formal dining that later restaurants imitated. What is passed down from this world should be read with care, since much of the popular lore about the palace table was written long after the dynasty fell. China: The Cookbook, by Kei Lum Chan and Diora Fong Chan, gives the established dishes of the northern kitchen, among them Peking duck, hand-pulled and knife-cut noodles, mutton cooked in the Muslim manner and the quick-fried dishes of Shandong style. Peking duck is the dish by which the city is known abroad. The birds are a fattened breed of domesticated duck, Anas platyrhynchos domesticus, inflated so that the skin parts from the flesh, scalded, dried in the air and roasted until the skin is thin and brittle. The duck is carved at the table and eaten with thin wheat pancakes, sweet bean sauce and slivers of spring onion. It has older roots in the roast ducks of Nanjing and in the Ming court, and the Beijing duck houses, one of them founded in 1864, built the method into a restaurant trade that endures. The twentieth century broke and then remade this inheritance. The fall of the Qing sent palace cooks into the city's restaurants, and the Republic and the early People's Republic gave the capital a new role as the setting for the state banquet, where a national cuisine was composed from the provinces for official guests. The Cultural Revolution closed or collectivised restaurants and drove cooking out of private life, and the return of the 1980s brought back the private restaurant, the regional kitchens and the street stall. The capital today holds the formal banquet and the street side by side: the duck house and the state dining room on one hand, and on the other the breakfast of soy milk, fried dough sticks and filled flatbreads, the mutton hotpot of the winter, and the noodles with fried bean sauce, zhajiangmian, eaten in an ordinary shop.

The flavours of Beijing run to wheat, sesame, soy and fermented bean sauce rather than to heat, with spring onion, garlic and sesame paste as constant partners. The table is built on bread and noodles: the thin pancake of the duck, the steamed bun, the hand-cut noodle with its sauce, and the baked sesame flatbread. The Muslim kitchens of the city gave mutton in the winter, in the copper-pot hotpot and in quick-fried and roasted cuts, and the tradition counts such dishes warming and serves them in the cold months. A banquet here still opens with cold dishes, moves through hot courses and ends with a soup, a staple and sweet things, following the order that the court table set.