Chop Suey : A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States (13 page)

Figure 3.2. Two kinds of steamed dumplings, with either meat or vegetable fillings. Dumplings have been part of the Chinese menu for well over a millennium.

Another great revolution began with the invention of the first fermented drinks. Although Confucius extolled the virtues of water, it’s clear that the favorite beverage of the ancient Chinese was wine fermented from grains. They mastered the fermentation of sauces and pickles early on; likewise the complicated art of brewing this wine. Mixing boiled millet, rice, or wheat with sprouted grain (to add sugar from the malt), water, and a special “ferment” made from moldy grain that added the necessary yeast to turn the sugar into alcohol. They aged and filtered the resulting liquid to produce a fairly strong, flat drink—more like wine than beer—that was usually drunk warm in small cups. It was by no means the only beverage—people drank parched grain tea (like barley tea), fruit drinks, water in which grain had been boiled, a kind of sour milk, and perhaps even distilled liquors—but wine was certainly the most celebrated. Today, the Chinese still enjoy their rice wine, particularly at banquets, but the primary mealtime drink is now quite different.

During the Han Dynasty, a new thirst-quencher appeared, originating in the Sichuan basin: tea or
cha
, brewed by boiling in water the fresh leaves of the tropical and subtropical bush
Camellia sinensis
. Tea’s flavor was first appreciated along the Yangzi basin and south of it; in the North, Buddhist monks, who noticed that drinking tea helped keep them awake during long periods of meditation, spread its use. The virtues and rituals of tea drinking were promoted by Lu Yu’s eighth-century work
The Classic of Tea
, which gave the elite precise instructions on how to enjoy the brew (an art that lives on in the Japanese tea ceremony). By the time of the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368
CE
), tea drinking had spread to the lower classes, becoming one of the “seven necessities” of everyday Chinese life. (The others were fuel, rice, oil, salt, soy sauce, and vinegar.) This is not the place to enumerate the many varieties of tea or the new means for processing the leaf that were developed from the Yuan Dynasty on. Suffice it to say that by the seventeenth century, when tea first appeared in western Europe, tea had become the universal drink of China and one of the defining characteristics of its civilization. Tea was also one of China’s most important exports, as the taste for it brought first the Dutch, then the English, and finally the Americans to trade at Canton.

The chief arena for the display of all the main building blocks of Chinese cuisine, from foodstuffs to theories of health, was the banquet table. Indeed, from the Zhou Dynasty on, the feast was seen as a kind of stage where the participants reaffirmed the correctness and value of Chinese civilization, from the structure of its political and religious life to family relations. In the palace kitchens, chefs followed an encyclopedic rulebook that determined not only the appropriate type of banquet for each occasion but precisely how much food and wine guests of different rank were to
be served, the table settings, even the musical entertainment. The Qing emperors preferred Manchu food (boiled pork, wild game, sweet breads, milk products) for their court banquets, offering the top three grades to the gods and deified ancestors as sacrifices. Fourth-grade banquets were served to the imperial family, while envoys from tributary states like Korea were given the honor of fifth- and sixth-grade banquets. Women never mingled with men at these functions; cloistered by traditional Chinese morality, they ate in separate rooms, hidden from anyone who wasn’t family. Outside the palace walls, government officials and scholars who passed their examinations could enjoy six grades of more familiar Han Chinese banquets. The food served marked each diner’s place in the elaborate hierarchy of Chinese life (a system that was disrupted by the arrival of the tall, pale-skinned foreigners who disdained, among other things, Chinese food).

Private banquets also reflected and enhanced social status, but the rules were far looser. Pleasure, in fact, was often the guiding principle—in one’s choice of food, grain wine, drinking games, and guests. Menus could include as few as eight or well over one hundred dishes in multiple courses. At lesser events, a group of Chinese merchants staying in nineteenth-century Nagasaki, for example, would order eight-course banquets, for second-class occasions ten courses, and for really important events sixteen courses, featuring fish belly, dried mussels, crab sauce, steamed fish, goose, duck, two kinds of chicken, pigs’ feet, fried lamb, sea cucumbers, birds’ nests, sharks’ fins, deer’s tails, and bears’ paws.
¹⁸
Although Yuan Mei scorned them, these rare delicacies were included to display the host’s wealth and sophistication. After all, the ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius had said: “I love fish, so do I bear’s paw; but if I cannot get both, I give up fish and take bear’s paw.”
¹⁹
Birds’ nests, sharks’ fins, and sea cucumbers commonly came from Southeast Asia and in
fact comprised the bulk of Chinese trade with that region. All three are notable more for their texture than their flavor (as well as for how much they add to the banquet’s cost).

Intimate, shared, low-key, and generally nonalcoholic, the Chinese family meal was the daily counterpoint to the occasional banquet. Depending on the region, this main meal was consumed at midday, in the late afternoon, or at night. Until the twentieth century, men and women usually ate separately, and the men often enjoyed the tastiest, richest morsels. Places were set with cups for tea and bowls for soup and
fan
, along with chopsticks and spoons. In the middle of the table were placed—at the same time, in one large course—the
cai
dishes, including soup, a vegetable, and, if the family could afford it, a meat dish and a fish dish. Everybody shared, using chopsticks to pluck morsels from the serving dishes and place them on their
fan
. Greediness was frowned on; children knew that if they did not clean their bowls, they risked marriage to “a wife (or a husband if you are a girl) with pockmarks on her face, and the more grains you waste, the more pockmarks she will have.”
²⁰
These family-style meals were also consumed in many workplaces, including at Chinese restaurants. Today, if you visit a Chinese eatery nearly anywhere in the United States between the end of lunch and the beginning of dinner, you will likely see chefs and wait staff sitting down to a tasty, nutritious, highly traditional Chinese meal.

Restaurants have a very long history in China. At a time when fine food in western Europe was confined to a handful of great monasteries, the Song Dynasty capital, Kaifeng, supported hundreds of commercial food businesses and a rich gourmet culture:

The men of Kaifeng were extravagant and indulgent. They would shout their orders by the hundreds: some
wanted items cooked and some chilled, some heated and some prepared, some iced or delicate or fat; each person ordered differently. The waiter then went to get the orders, which he repeated and carried in his head, so that when he got into the kitchen he repeated them. These men were called “gong heads” or “callers.” In an instant, the waiter would be back carrying three dishes forked in his left hand, while on his right arm from hand to shoulder he carried about twenty bowls doubled up, and he distributed them precisely as everyone had ordered without an omission or mistake.
²¹

Some of the city’s restaurants were so renowned that the emperor himself ordered out for their specialties; they could also cater the most elaborate banquets, in their own halls or at the homes of the wealthy. Kaifeng’s many eateries also included teahouses where men could sip tea, gossip, and order snacks or full meals, as well as wineshops, which were more popular at night. There, music and singing accompanied wine and food; brothels were often attached to these establishments. Further down the social ladder, workers and poor families could buy their daily food from a huge variety of simple cookshops and street vendors. The offerings included noodles, congees, offal soups, fried and steamed breads, mantou, and many types of sweet and savory snacks. To the poorest, vendors sold boiling water in which they could cook their meager rations.

China’s vibrant restaurant culture continued unabated through the end of the Qing Dynasty. The English clergyman John Henry Gray, one of the few Europeans with a serious interest in Chinese food, summed up the typical nineteenth-century urban eatery thus:

The restaurants are generally very large establishments, consisting of a public dining-room and several private
rooms. Unlike most other buildings, they consist of two or three stories. The kitchen alone occupies the ground floor; the public hall, which is the resort of persons in the humbler walks of life, is on the first floor, and the more select apartments are on the second and third floors. These are, of course, resorted to by the wealthier citizens, but they are open to persons in all classes of society, and it is not unusual to see in them persons of limited means. At the entrance-door there is a table or counter at which the proprietor sits, and where each customer pays for his repast. The public room is immediately at the head of the first staircase, and is resorted to by all who require a cheap meal. It is furnished, like a
café
, with tables and chairs, a private room having only one table and a few chairs in it.
²²

The upper rooms, generally reserved for the elite, were used for dinner parties and banquets of all sizes. Downstairs, customers could order simpler, less expensive fare, noodle soups and roast meats, for a quick lunch or dinner. All guests, rich and poor, entered the restaurant through the ground-floor kitchen, where they could judge for themselves the skill of the chefs, the quality of the roasted ducks, chickens, and pigs hanging from the ceiling (right above the chopping block), and the facility’s cleanliness. When the Chinese immigrated to the United States, they carried this style of restaurant intact to their new homeland.

For more casual dining, the Chinese could choose from a variety of establishments. Teahouses were particularly ubiquitous after the spread of tea drinking to every rank of Chinese society. All of them were important social centers where men, in particular, liked to gather to relax, sip tea, crunch on salted melon seeds, gossip, smoke their pipes, listen to singers or storytellers, and perhaps have a more substantial bite to eat.
In some teahouses, patrons could order and savor rare and delicious teas; in others, mainly in the South and especially in Guangdong Province, the food predominated. Gray wrote of the “tea-saloons” of the type he knew in Guangzhou:

Each consists of two large saloons furnished with several small tables and stools. Upon each table is placed a tray, containing a large assortment of cakes, preserved fruits, and cups of tea. A cashier seated behind a counter at the door of the saloon receives the money from the guests as they are leaving the establishment. There is a large kitchen attached to all of them, where cooks remarkable for their cleanliness are daily engaged in making all kinds of pastry.
²³

Those pastries were what we now call dim sum, from
dim sam
, Cantonese for “dot heart,” an expression roughly equivalent to “hits the spot.” As in dim sum parlors today, the bill was totaled by adding up the number and size of the small plates on the patron’s table. The Guangzhou teahouses were strictly segregated by sex—no women were allowed—and often featured early morning songbird competitions in which patrons vied to see whose pet could sing the sweetest tune. For those with less time to waste, a popular option was to purchase food from the itinerant street vendors who traveled across cities much as the coffee and lunch trucks in modern America do. The basic equipment of these traveling kitchens was a stove and a provisions chest, suspended on either end of a strong bamboo stick that the chef shouldered from spot to spot. Wherever a hungry-looking crowd gathered, he would stop to vend his inexpensive but filling food in bowls that were wiped clean between every customer. This simple, highly portable cuisine could also be transported overseas to new settlements throughout Southeast Asia and even across the Pacific Ocean.

For at least three thousand years, the basic building blocks of Chinese cuisine remained largely the same: ingredients, cooking methods, tools, flavorings (particularly soy sauce, ginger, and scallions), the
fan-cai
dichotomy, and the interlinked concepts of food and health. Nonetheless, all Chinese did not by any means eat all the same food. For truly “national” dishes, we would have to look to the tables of the elite—the delicacies like sea cucumbers and birds’ nests that were served in similar preparations on banquet tables across China—and to the codified menus for official celebrations. At other times and on other tables, regional food preferences were as different as, say, the cuisines of Italy, Germany, England, Spain, and France. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, Yuan Mei and other food writers began to recognize and celebrate the culinary differences among the various regions and cities of China. This topic long fascinated, and bedeviled, Chinese gourmets. (For the sake of simplicity, in the following discussion I limit the main regional cuisines to four, based on the points of the compass—with considerable fuzziness around the edges.)