On Thu, 1 May 2008 21:03:49 -0700, "Mike Schilling"
<mscottschilling@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:
>> On Thu, 1 May 2008 18:48:49 -0700 (PDT), DouhetSukd
>> <DouhetSukd@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>
>>> From my cookbooks, I think that China, India also have highly
>>> differentiated regional cuisines, but it has hard to judge from
>>> eating out.
>>
>> Having visited China -- oh, yeah. VERY regionally varied.
>
>Still varied by what's locally available, or now more by tradition?
Both, I think. I wouldn't want to eat seafood in Chengdu, for
example. And they don't bother ****pping huge amounts of grain around
needlessly, so you still get more wheat-based food in the north and
more rice-based food in the south. But it's probably just tradition
that's responsible for the Shanghainese cooking everything in broth
while they use lots of oil in Beijing.
I'm not an expert, though; I just spent two weeks there, and talked a
lot to my daughter, who lived there for a year and a half and spent
all her free time either traveling, cooking, or eating. When she
lived in Shanghai she traded English lessons for cooking lessons and
wound up judging a cooking contest, so I trust her to know what she
was talking about.
To give you an idea how specific it gets, after Kiri moved back to the
States we ate at a restaurant in Boston's Chinatown, and Kiri was able
to identify the chef as coming from western Shanxi Province.
There's been a lot of mixing, even though there are still big regional
differences. Mutton, which used to be a northern thing, is easy to
find in the south now, for example -- just look for restaurants
advertising Muslim or Mongol food. (Chinese Muslim cooking is
basically traditional ****k recipes with mutton substituted for ****k.)
As for what's available and what isn't, that's had some interesting
effects. Harbin used to have several traditional dishes made with
tiger, and killing Siberian tigers for food is now very strongly
frowned upon, even the tigers they raise in the city's tiger preserve,
which has meant drastically changing the city's high-end cuisine.
They do still have lots of chicken dishes, because chicken is what
they feed the tigers and they have extras...
--
My webpage is at http://www.watt-evans.com
The eighth issue of Helix is now at http://www.helixsf.com
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