CUISINE
Gastronomic challenges
PALLAVI AIYAR
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In China what you eat is not only what you are but also what you are worth.
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The more elaborate the dishes, the more bizarre; the more expensive, the better. In China, the greater the variety of things you can afford to eat, the meatier and the weirder, the higher your status.
PHOTO: RAMESH SHARMA
Culture of food: Nearly 100 kinds of snacks from all over China are assembled at the Donghuamen Night Market.
IF Descartes had been born Chinese his famous ontological catchphrase Cogito Ergo Sum, "I think therefore I am," would almost certainly have instead been Edo Ergo Sum or "I eat therefore I am." Food in China is a religion and permeates the culture so thoroughly that the equivalent phrase for "how are you?" in Mandarin is "chi fan le ma" or "have you eaten"?
This can prove quite puzzling to the novice Chinese speaker who arrives at a lunch appointment only to be asked if she has already eaten. But for the typical herbivorous paneer manchurian-savouring Indian, this is not the last gastronomic challenge that is likely to be encountered in the mainland. The culture surrounding food in the Middle Kingdom in fact has a Derridian complexity to it, the deconstruction of which requires consummate skill.
Throw a banquet
In China what you eat is not only what you are but also what you are worth. The accepted way to develop guanxi or connections — the key to making friends and influencing people — is to throw a banquet. The more elaborate the dishes, the more bizarre; the more expensive, the better is the algorithm that is followed on these occasions. Monkey's brains, turtle's penis, bird's nest soup: this is the stuff of a truly impressive meal.
A newly opened restaurant in Beijing's lakeside area of Xi Hai for example charges $400 for the chance to sample the private parts of a Canadian Seal. It's common enough to run up bills of hundreds, even thousands, of dollars at seafood restaurants while entertaining business associates or celebrating a special occasion.
I was sitting through what was, to me, a torturous three-hour lunch organised by the Henan Provincial authorities in honour of a group of visiting journalists, involving sea urchins and other unidentifiable aquatic beasts when finally what looked like coconut soup arrived. I slurped away, happy to have finally found something to my taste when the Chinese journalist to my left whispered in awe-struck tones that this was the most expensive dish on the menu. A veteran of the cost equals grotesque gastronomic calculus in China, she immediately dropped her spoon to query what was being served.
This in itself is a strange question in the mainland. People rarely ask what is being eaten. If it tastes good and costs money, it is worth eating.
The names of dishes too rarely give away the nature of the food. "Ants climbing up a tree" for example hardly reveals that vermicelli with minced pork is on its way. The correspondent's query led to a storm of controversy.
The dish was called "snowy wonder" but no one could quite agree on what that meant. Waitresses were summoned, but even they professed ignorance. Finally the manager of the restaurant arrived and announced with visible pride that the soup was a delicate blend of stock and frog's ovaries. A gasp of delight went up in the group and everyone, save the stricken-looking The Hindu correspondent, returned to eating with increased vigour, all the while approvingly muttering "hen gui, hen gui!" (very expensive, very expensive).
Nothing ordinary
Anything that one might eat as a matter of course at home: stir fried broccoli, diced chicken, dumplings and so on are anathema at a banquet indicating an ordinariness that shows disrespect for the guests. Worst of all is ordering rice. At the end of the meal, if people are still hungry it is acceptable to ask for rice as filler but to request it along with the main courses is to insult the host, indicating that the other dishes are so abysmal that plain rice is preferable.
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The complexities of a formal Chinese banquet do not end here. It's not just what you order and how much it costs but also how many dishes that is crucial.
The basic idea is to order two to three times what your guests might reasonably be thought able to eat. Guests are expected to sample only a small portion of each dish and leave the rest untouched. Such enormous waste may seem odd in a country that is no stranger to famine, but it is precisely because of China's history as a country with little arable land and food scarcity that displays of outrageous culinary extravagance are unparalleled status symbols.
Business tycoons style themselves as tu di or dirt emperors and entertaining lavishly is key to this identity. Qing dynasty emperors in the Middle Kingdom were routinely served up 20 or 30 course dinners, of which the majority were returned unsampled. Of the 4,000 imperial staff who once worked in the Forbidden City, almost 60 per cent were devoted to handling the emperor's food and wine. Following the communist accession in 1949 sumptuous banquets were strictly curtailed given their feudal-imperialist resonance. In 1976, at the time of Mao Zedong's death, there was thus only around one restaurant for every three million Chinese.
Visible transformation
With the onset of economic reforms one of the most visible transformations in Chinese society was the proliferation of eateries. Many of the very first private businesses to set up shop in the late 1970s were restaurants. Today there is one restaurant for every 400 Chinese and eating out is the number one leisure activity. Birthdays, weddings, even Christmas are all marked by a slap up restaurant meal.
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A slap up meal is expensive and plentiful but it must also adhere to traditional culinary philosophy that stresses the balancing of flavours and ingredients. Thus a complete meal should include the five flavours of sweet, bitter, sour, salty, and spicy and comprise both hot and cold dishes, meat and vegetables, sweet and salty pastries, clear soup and thick soup, pickles, rice, noodles, desserts, and fruits.
According to Chinese medicine all illnesses are caused by an imbalance of hot and cold elements in the diet. For years friends have besieged me offering watermelon when I have a summer rash or mangoes when she has a cold. Getting an aspirin has however usually proved tough.
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China's obsession with food is revealed both in its traditional aphorisms, "sow melons, reap melons" and in plenty of neologisms.
A short newspaper article is thus called dofu khuai or a bean curd cube. But to eat bean curd, chi doufu is to cheat on one's wife. To have one's squid fried, chao youyu, is to get fired while someone who doesn't want to leave his job at a state owned enterprise is called a guotie or a potsticker (pan-friend dumpling).
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If food is seen to be fundamental to culture as it undoubtedly is in China, the Himalayas have been a formidable divider. There is no greater difference between the Indian and Chinese cultures than in their attitude to food.
Cultural differences
While in India elite Brahmins delineate their status by increasingly pickier food choices: no meat, no garlic, no onions, no non-vegetarians in the kitchen. In China, the greater the variety of things you can afford to eat, the meatier and the weirder, the higher your status. Even Buddhist monks in Tibet eat yak. The handful of vegetarian restaurants in Beijing primarily serve up mock meats so that for those unfortunate souls forced to go vegetarian for health reasons, it is still possible to eat tofu-based "lamb intestines."
In India, even non-vegetarians will only eat certain animals and only certain parts of certain animals. Thus chicken is ok, but not chicken feet. Lamb is fine, but not the intestines. Prawns are good, but not octopus.
To an average Chinese, such discriminations are incomprehensible. Harried trade officials have often complained to me about the travails of entertaining Indian business delegations. "Indians don't eat anything," they wail. In my other ear, Indian business delegates moan, "These Chinese eat everything."
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