Chinese cuisine
The Chinese eat with chopsticks or use a porcelain spoon for their popular soup. Important foods are rice and wheat, corn and millet, but also legumes and sweet potatoes. A cereal porridge is often eaten for breakfast. Rice or fried wheat flatbreads and pasta are not missing from any meal. There are also various dishes with meat, but also vegetables or fish. Cooking is a men’s business in China.
My food tastes like wood!
Incidentally, Chinese food is not divided into “sweet” or “sour” as we do here, but according to the so-called “five elements”. Wood is sour, fire is bitter, earth is sweet, metal is sharp, and water is salty.
How does Chinese food taste?
Have you ever been to a Chinese restaurant with your parents? The food tastes very different from German cuisine. But the Chinese food that you get in China tastes different than what we get served here in a Chinese restaurant. In China, too, people eat three times a day, but usually an hour or two earlier than here. Breakfast is served around 7 a.m., lunch around 11 a.m. and dinner from 5 p.m. It differs from family to family, but that’s how it looks on average.
Everything on the table
While we usually only have one meal as a meal time, for example a schnitzel with potatoes or noodles with sauce, a meal in China usually consists of many different main dishes, all of which then eat. It would be like this if everyone in your family orders a different dish in the restaurant and everyone takes it. In China there is always a bowl of rice, but sometimes only at the end of the meal. This shows that the host does not need to satisfy the hunger of his guests with rice.
In the restaurant, they are served one after the other. You shouldn’t eat too fast here, maybe something tastier will come on the table. In China, the soup is only served at the end; you don’t eat it, you drink it. Tea is traditionally served as a drink, but now there is often water or soft drinks too.
Can the Chinese drink milk?
Many Chinese cannot tolerate milk at all because they lack an enzyme that can break down milk sugar. The consequences of drinking milk are often abdominal pain and gas. We also have an intolerance to milk, but only in some people. Nevertheless, you can get dairy products like ice cream or milkshakes everywhere in China, you can also buy cheese. For a long time, the Chinese found cheese disgusting, it wouldn’t have been on the table at all. At the beginning of the millennium there was a major campaign by the ministry telling people how healthy milk was. However, not all Chinese are avid milk drinkers.
One country – many dishes!
According to allcountrylist.com, China is a huge country, as big as Europe, so the cuisine naturally differs from region to region. For this reason it is difficult to speak of a Chinese cuisine, just as it is difficult to speak of a European cuisine. For example, there is a lot of fish in the north in Shandong Province because this province is by the sea and is also crossed by the Yellow River.
Well-known cuisines of China
The cuisine of Sichuan Province (Sezuan) is very spicy and is famous for that. The dishes are very diverse, pasta is also eaten here and people appreciate it sour and spicy. Another cuisine is Cantonese cuisine in Guandong Province. That is in the south of China and also by the sea. This cuisine is not as spicy as the Sichuan cuisine and the cooking here is extremely sophisticated. In the Huai Yang kitchen, the appearance of the food is very important. The ingredients have to be very fresh and are presented very nicely to the eye.
Eating is important!
By the way, food in China is also very important in everyday situations. If someone asks “Have you already eaten?”, They want to know whether the other person has time.
Table manners in Chinese
By the way, if you are invited to China, you shouldn’t eat everything empty, only the rice bowl should be empty. Otherwise, it looks like you haven’t got enough to eat and that offends the host.
But you can sip a lot in China. This is the only way the soup tastes good and you just have to suck the noodles in your mouth so that you can enjoy them. In China this is part of it and nobody finds it embarrassing.
Do the Chinese really eat dogs?
Yes and no! In any case, only some of the Chinese eat dogs, and not everywhere either. Dogs are also eaten in southern China, although they are mostly special breeds, but in the north they are not so appetizing. So it does not happen that dogs simply come from the street to the plate. But in some areas snakes and birds end up on the table, which is not unusual either. The customs of other countries are often different and some Chinese are surprised that we actually eat fermented milk – i.e. cheese. For the Chinese, this was a pretty gross thing for a long time.
