Chinese cuisine is actually a highly diverse assortment of regional and provincial styles of cooking, with Cantonese, Hunan, and Szechwan styles among the best known outside of Asia. Other cooking styles are city-based, such as Shanghai and Peking, and a few are characteristic of Chinese ethnic groups. Included in the latter category, and long overshadowed by other forms of Chinese cuisine, is the food of the Hakka people.
Hakka cuisine has a rather low profile on Taiwan's dining scene because it is usually considered inappropriate for formal banquets. "It's home cooking and therefore not fancy enough for special occasions," says Weng Yun-hsia (翁雲霞), director of the Foundation of Chinese Dietary Culture in Taipei. Nevertheless, she adds, "if there is anything about the Hakka that can be singled out to show the hard-working, thrifty, and intelligent character of the people, it's their unique style of cooking."
Hakka dishes are usually made with simple, less-expensive ingredients. For example, diners won't find expensive seafood dishes and shark fin soup on the menu in local Hakka restaurants. Traditional Hakka chefs favor dried cuttlefish, tofu, ginger, basil, and preserved vegetables. Also, unlike most other regional cuisines, Hakka dishes are easier to prepare because there are fewer steps in the cooking process. The two most frequently used techniques are steaming and stir-frying. In fact, steamed and stir-fried dishes make up most of the Hakka menu, including such favorites as stir-fried cuttlefish, fried intestines with ginger, fried eggplant with basil, and steamed tofu with meat stuffing.
What was once a family activity has become a major business—The Kungkuan Farmers' Association provides ready-to-use fu tsai for busy Hakka families around the island and abroad.
Hakka food reflects the nomadic history of this Chinese ethnic group. Over the centuries, the Hakka moved to different parts of China to escape the social upheaval caused by wars. The first major relocation was from north to south China. As the Hakka moved from place to place, their food gradually integrated some of the cooking styles found in the various provinces where they settled. There was also some reverse influence; some foods now believed to be Cantonese or Fukienese were originally Hakka.
Today, when people talk about Hakka cuisine, two words often leap to mind: salty and fatty. Consider steamed pork with mustard greens, for example, a famous Hakka dish that has also become a popular menu item in Taiwan restaurants that serve other regional styles of food. The dish is made by steaming a piece of pork leg—a particularly fatty part of the animal—with soy sauce and preserved mustard leaves, called fu tsai (福菜). Both the soy sauce and the dried and salted mustard leaves are quite salty, so diners tend to eat more rice than normal when eating this dish.
People have come to think of salty Hakka dishes as particularly great foods to eat when drinking together with friends. Many of the large number of beer houses and pubs in Taipei, for example, have menus that offer a few Hakka dishes, such as fried eggplant with basil, to help boost beer consumption.
These salty and fatty foods have historical roots. According to dietary expert Weng Yun-hsia, the custom is centuries old. When the Hakka migrated to different parts of China, they found that the best agricultural land in their new location was already owned and cultivated by other groups. As a result, the Hakka had to open up less productive lands, oftentimes in mountainous areas. Growing crops in these marginal lands was tough work. "The Hakka believed that salt and fat in the diet helped stimulate their appetite for more rice, thus providing them with the extra energy needed for working long hours in the fields," Weng says. "The salt especially helped replenish what they lost from perspiring."
Preserved foods became one of the major sources of salt in the Hakka diet. This was a clever adaptation to a rugged living environment. "In the past, the Hakka had few links with other groups because they often lived in isolated areas," Weng says. "Fresh foods were often hard to come by. Therefore, they had to be especially frugal and utilize everything at hand. In order to keep foods that they couldn't use right away, they developed means of preserving them by salting." These traditional styles of salting give Hakka cuisine its distinct taste.
Fried eggplant with basil is one Hakka dish that has been added to the menus of many restaurants specializing in other regional cuisines. It's a favorite in island beer houses as well.
Preserved vegetables have become a staple ingredient in Hakka cuisine. "In the past, vegetables were the easiest crops to grow in the mountains," Weng says, "and mustard greens were the most frequently used vegetable for preserving because they last longer." Preserved mustard greens are especially popular in steamed meat dishes and soups. As an ingredient, the greens not only add flavor and function as salt, they also absorb the extra fat from the meat. "As a result, the meat becomes tender and has a smoother texture," Weng says.
Preserved mustard greens are such an important part of Hakka cuisine that their origin is couched in legend. Many years ago, the story goes, there was a Hakka farmer who could barely make ends meet by growing crops in the mountains. One day, he saw a young woman about to ford a river. But the river was too turbulent to be safe, so the farmer offered to carry her across. To show her gratitude for the kindhearted gesture, the woman took a package of mustard seeds from her pocket and gave it to him. Afterward, the farmer grew so much green mustard that he had to come up with a way to save it. He tried salting the greens and putting them into big crocks, which he buried for safekeeping. Some time later, he dug up the crocks to find that the greens had turned into a brownish mass. A tentative taste revealed that it was delicious, and the farmer made a small fortune selling it in the market.
Legend is still replicated in fact. For example, in Miaoli county, northern Taiwan, where more than 90 percent of the population speak Hakka, February to April is the production season for preserving the mustard planted the previous fall. After harvesting the greens, farmers begin the preservation process by drying the vegetable in the sun and spreading a thick layer of salt on the leaves. Later, people walk barefoot over the leaves for about fifteen minutes in order to crush them. The leaves are then stacked one by one in large crocks. To help squeeze water out of the leaves, a clean stone is placed on top of the stack before the container is covered and left to stand another three days in the sun. The leaves are then removed from the crock and any water is poured out. This process is repeated three times. By the final step, the mustard leaves have become a brownish yellow.
For final fermentation, the mustard leaves are folded into small bundles and again layered one by one in crocks. To guarantee the best results, farmers usually use a bamboo stick to find and eliminate any air pockets in the crocks. After sealing, the crocks are placed upside down on the floor of an air-cooled storeroom. Three months later the fermented vegetable is ready for the wok or steamer.
The fired-clay crocks used by the Miaoli Hakka for preserving mustard greens and other vegetables used to be a special product of the county. During the 1970s, the town of Kungkuan was a major crock supplier for the Taiwan Tobacco & Wine Monopoly Bureau. When the bureau stopped using crocks in making liquor, the thrifty Hakka decided not to waste any of their unsold stock. One way to make the best of them was to use them for preserving mustard greens. Although the crocks are still being used, plastic containers with wider mouths are starting to replace them because they make it easier to pack and unpack the greens.
No frills, but authentic fare—The Village Restaurant in Kungkuan, Miaoli county, serves hundreds of guests each day in a converted tea factory building.
There are other changes as well. Fewer Hakka families are making their own preserved mustard. Instead, they purchase mass-produced, ready-to-use fu tsai from nearby markets. Although it might not taste as good as the homemade style, it saves time and energy for those who lead a faster-paced life. The factory opened in 1979 by the Kungkuan Farmers' Association is now Taiwan's biggest producer of preserved mustard. According to Lee Wen-ta (李文達), secretary director of the factory, it produces 60 percent of Taiwan's fu tsai. "Approximately 98 percent of our product is sold locally," he says. "The rest goes to overseas Chinese in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere."
Rice is also essential to the Hakka diet, even though the group's earliest ancestors came from wheat-producing areas in northern China. The Hakka have developed a dozen different pan (粄), or rice foods, including the snacks served especially during religious festivals and other celebrations. One example is the soft, sticky, and chewy tzu pa (糍粑), a glutinous rice dumpling (called muachi in Taiwanese). Made from rice flour and very similar in texture and taste to machi, a Japanese festival dumpling, tzu pa is the most frequently seen rice food on Hakka banquet tables. Red pan, another glutinous rice food, is usually made into the shape of a peach, a symbol of longevity. It is used as an offering at religious ceremonies.
Hakka banquet hosts often show their hospitality by giving their guests rice foods to take home. Weng Yun-hsia says that this custom has deep historical roots. "In the old days, people often had to walk long distances through mountains to attend a Hakka banquet," she says. "By the time they arrived, they were usually very hungry, so they were offered rice food snacks to suppress their hunger while waiting for the banquet to begin. And when it was time to leave, the hosts would give their guests packages of snacks to take with them on the journey back home."
Another typical Hakka snack is fa pan (發粄). It is made by grinding glutinous rice and penglai rice (a short-grained variety) into dry starch. This is then mixed with sugar. Weng says that the key to making good fa pan is making sure that the appropriate quantity of sugar is used. "When the weather is warm, it is very easy for fa pan to ferment in the steamer, even though only a little sugar is used. In cold weather, you should use more sugar, otherwise the starch will turn sour before it is fully fermented." During the Chinese New Year, fa pan is on every Hakka family table.
Ai pan, another rice food, is served only at the annual Tomb-Sweeping Festival. It is made from rice flour and sugar. The plastic wrapping helps keep it fresh and clean.
Pan tiao (粄條), a wide, thin, flat rice noodle, is perhaps the best-known Hakka rice food. Unlike the others, fried pan tiao and pan tiao with soup are standard year-round menu items in almost every Hakka restaurant. The Hakka town of Meinung in southern Taiwan is reputed to produce the best pan tiao in Taiwan. Many restaurants even claim to serve only Meinung-style pan tiao to increase their business.
In Taipei and other urban areas, it is usually difficult to find restaurants that serve traditional Hakka food. And oftentimes the food offered in these restaurants is not quite the same as what can be found in more Hakka-populated places like Miaoli or Meinung. For example, some people say that the Hsiungchi Meinung Pantiao chain of Hakka restaurants—considered the best places for pan tiao in Taipei—tend to put more salt, soy sauce, oil, basil, hot peppers, and other condiments in their dishes. The result is spicier food than what is found, for instance, in the Village Restaurant in the town of Kungkuan in Miaoli county.
According to the self-effacing Mrs. Hsieh, owner and chef of the Village Restaurant, traditional Hakka food does not use any kind of peppers. Moreover, she says, seafood dishes are not part of an authentic Hakka menu, an understandable omission since in the past the Hakka people usually lived in places far away from the sea. Some of the bounty from rivers and streams was occasionally used, but this accounted for only a small portion of the typical Hakka diet. But most Hakka restaurants in Taipei have adjusted to the desires of their clientele and therefore serve seafood items as well as some spicy dishes cooked in the Hakka style.
Which is better, the traditional style or the spicier variations? It's all a matter of individual taste, of course, but judging from the large number of people eating in the Village Restaurant each day, tradition still has plenty of appeal. The large restaurant was converted from a tea factory, and what it lacks in decor is made up for in kudos from the hundreds of patrons eating there each day. Hsieh certainly has a loyal following from her Hakka neighbors. Besides serving the popular tsai pao (菜包), a rice flour bun with vegetable stuffing, the restaurant considers fried bean curd to be its trademark dish. Hsieh is not about to reveal the secret of her success. When asked why the restaurant is so popular, she just smiles and says, "It's really hard for me to say. You see, I learned to cook from my grandfather when I was little."