"The appetite for food and sex is part of our nature." So said Kao Tzu about 2,300 years ago in the midst of a noted discussion with the philosopher Mencius about their philosophical views of human nature. This is probably the most often quoted aphorism when Chinese approaches to the world of the senses are mentioned. Wise indeed is this short phrase, for it not only points to the fundamental nature of food and sex, it also suggests the abiding imagination and sensuality that human nature lends to these two activities.
Professor K. C. Chang begins his book, Food in Chinese Culture (Yale University Press, 1977), with the same quote from Kao Tzu. But Chang says that these two activities are dissimilar, in that we tend to be more animal-like in our approaches to sex, and there is much more variety to food than sex. One does not have to agree or disagree with Chang to realize that both, as Kao Tzu intended, belong together with the imaginative and the sensual pleasures of life.
An episode during the historic visit of President and Mrs. Richard Nixon to China in 1972 illustrates how food and sensuality can come together in Chinese cuisine. The media and American public followed the president's every word in Tienanmen Square and every step along the Greal Wall with avid interest. But most people probably missed the delightful tidbit aboul Pat Nixon's visit with the chef after an elaborate banquet. Many dishes, and the Chinese culinary tradition itself, were praised. But she liked one dish above all others - it was some kind of a meat braised and simmered in soy sauce to give it a smooth and glistening red-brown color and a marvelous aroma. The dish, subsequently reported in one of the mainland weeklies, is well-known in East China as ti-pang (蹄膀) or yuan-ti (元蹄). In English,it is called "lady's quivering buttock." (The dish itself is, however, unisexual.)
"We eat crabs by choice and [tree] bark by necessity." Such was Lin Yutang's way of characterizing Chinese culinary sophistication, practicality, and variety. It is a felicitous turn of phrase and thought, but one part of the expression has over the years led to a misleading assumption. That is, the variety of food items in the Chinese diet can be traced to much starvation and marginal living on the land, as the eating of bark would suggest. But this notion is misteading. If starvation were the mother of culinary inventiveness, variety, and even sophistication, then there would be a lot more major culinary traditions in the world.
It is a truism that there are infinite variables and varieties of eating and preparing food. In addition, people express their pride and prejudices on this vital matter in different ways. And at the center of the host of reasons and explanations for this variability is the palate - the arbiter of taste. National traditions and reputations rise from the palate. They also fall from it. To cite Lin Yutang again: "The French eat enthusiastically; the British eat apologetically."
"Fire power" or huohou - if a cook doesn't know how to handle the complexities of fire power, he'll never become a chef.
Characterizing the Chinese palate is a complex business, and the following is only a few thoughts on the Chinese way of eating - or, rather, the pursuit of taste, which in Chinese is wei (味), meaning "taste," "flavor," and "meaning" itself.
Eating permeates, dominates, and perhaps best explains Chinese life. Much can be learned from watching Chinese people gathered around a table (most often round) laden with delectables from the mountains and the sea, or with the simple toufu, spinach, and salted fish. Chinese come alive when a tableful of dishes is spread in front of them. No waiting here for courses in linear order. This is the moment of high sociability and conviviality; it is also the moment of great personal reward, yet shared. Everyone is a cook, a chef, a gourmet or gourmand as the case may be, but all at one table. And the conversation is most likely about the next meal or some remembered culinary splendor.
Chinese everyday speech shows the primacy of eating in the culture:
·"Have you eaten?" is used for "How are you?"
·"What mode do you eat?" for "What work do you do?"and ·"What have you done to deserve to eat?" is ueed to imply irresponsibility. Moreover,
·"eat fragrance" means "to be favored by someone of higher rank"
·"eat loss" means "being taken advantage of"
·"eat strength" means "to get a hold of"
·"eat tightness" means "to be hard-pressed"
·"eat bitterness" means "to suffer hardship" and
·"eating around waiting for death" needs no translation!
Other closely related phrases include "a stomach full of books" to mean "educated," and "lots in the stomach" to mean "learnedness."
The Taoist classic, the Lao Tzu, declared that "one should rule a country as one would fry a small fish," which has been interpreted to mean various things: "don't turn things over too much," "keep the heat low," and "be careful and delicate." Then there is that well-known Peking saying, "Of all that flies in the sky, the kites we do not eat; of all that have legs on earth, the wooden bench we do not eat!" These few examples only indicate the vastness of the Chinese world of eating: the mundus edibilis Sinicus.
A delicious tradition lives - the kitchen staff at Fu Yuan restaurant in Taipei prepares dishes refined by generations of China's gourmet chefs.
How does one explain this catholicity of the palate, this preoccupation with food and eating? Psychology, aesthetics, geography, starvation and abundance, and a host of other reasons have been invoked to do the explaining. But the Chinese idea of taste - wei - has its roots in the Chinese view of the cosmos and of civilization.
The traditional Chinese world view entertained a balanced cooperation of all substances in the universe. These substances were parts of a hierarchy of entities forming a cosmic and organic pattern, and they obeyed the internal dictates of their own natures. Based on these cosmological assumptions, the world was watched over by "heaven" (tien 天), an impartial cosmic order for humans to emulate. Order means that all the parts of the cosmos are in the right place and work in the right way. Disturbances and malfunctions of thisorder, or of the parts, would only be temporary.
Thus, unlike much of Western tradition, evil for the Chinese does not have a fixed role or permanence, nor is it personified. Human errors were human in origin, social in character, and reparable in human and social terms. Aligning the moral order with the cosmic order is therefore the therapy for evil, because evil is but a temporary malfunction of the natural process, and is not seen as the wronging of a personal god. It is as if the Chinese Garden of Eden were first populated by Cantonese, and the snake was simply put in the broth!
The pervasive influence of cosmology on Chinese culture is nowhere more impressively evident as in the very notion of culture and civilization itself. Unlike the root word civis in the Western use of civilization, which suggests urban citizenship, the Chinese word wen (文), which is a root word when used in connection with others, connotes the following: refined, not coarse; smooth, not rough; composed, not agitated; civil, not militant; elegant, not vulgar; cultivated and polished, not unformed and jagged.
The root meaning of wen is "pattern." From this root, the term developed in two directions: in one line of linguistic evolution, wen meant markings, then adornment, then art; in the other, wen meant pattern, then symbol, then writings, then literature. The two streams of meaning eventually combined to mean culture (wen hua) and civilization (wen ming), literature and the arts (wen yi). Thus, the slow but steady fire in cooking is quite aptly called the wen huo, the wen fire.
Subsequent Chinese accomplishments in the arts of civilization trace ultimately to this cosmological interest in the workings of the universe, the organismic approach to cosmic functions, and a rational expectation of order, pattern, and harmony in the processes of life.
The world of thought and the realm of the senses, then, meet in the palate. Chinese approach food and eating much the same as they view culture and civilization - they look for the meaning of the patterns. Here the controlling notion is wei, or taste, flavor, and meaning.
The sloped sides of the Chinese cooking pan (wok in Cantonese) allow for subtle gradations in cooking temperatures.
Wen is to civilization what wei is to food and eating. The evolving conception and understanding of wen has given rise to literature and art, and the evolving conception and understanding of wei has given rise to the rich lore of Chinese cuisine-as-art. Mencius said that many know how to eat and drink, but few can tell taste. Thus, is it any wonder that for Chinese, wei is often likened to poetry and poetry to wei? Throughout Chinese history, wei has been savored again and again in literature.
For example, Ssu-kung Tu (司空圖, 837-908) of the Tang dynasty has this to say to a poetic friend:
My opinion is that one can not begin to speak of poetry if one has not learned to tell taste (wei). In the south, when considering allything that is palatable, if it is hsi (醯), it is merely soor and no more; if it is tso (鹺), it is merely salty and no more. Our people who eat merely to fill the stomach know only what is sour and what is salty, and not what perfection requires. Your poetry, sir, is already good as it is and few nmatch it. But if it is truly perfect, it is because it contains the meaning beyond the taste.
Since then, this idea of the "taste beyond taste" (or "meaning behind meaning") has tantalized both poets and chefs. The Chinese scholar Miao Yue (繆鉞), a senior professor at Szechwan University, has praised the use of food similes in the poetry of Huang Ting-chien (黃庭堅, 1045-1105), the Sung dynasty poet, singling out the following two lines:
Peaches, pears, the spring breeze and a cup of wine
Rivers, lakes, the evening rain and the ten-year lamp.
The first line is clear in its food references. The second line is oblique. By rivers and lakes are meant the ordinary offerings of fish and foul, by evening rain the transformative art of cooking, and by the ten-year lamp the long-lasting lingering taste. Huang's poems have been likened by another Sung dynasty scholar-statesman-gourmet, Su Tung-po (蘇東坡, 1037-1101), to the "marine crabs and scallops, all possessing a lofty character. One can consume a whole plate, leaving none."
Miao Yue also said: "Tang poetry is like eating lychees, put one in the mouth and the sweet fragrance suffuses the cheeks. Sung poetry is like eating olives, an initial astringent taste assuredly leaves a lingering sweet aftertaste." And a Japanese scholar has likened Tang poetry to wine, and Sung poetry to tea.
Then there is the pork made famous by Su Tung-po. But notice the place of bamboo and bamboo shoots in the landscape as well as in the recipe. Su wrote:
One can get on without meat, one cannot live without bamboos.
Meatless one becomes thin, bambooless one becomes vulgar.
A thin person can become plump, a vulgar one is beyond cure.
Later, this poem took the form of a ditty:
One can't live without bamboos, one can't live without meat.
Bambooless one becomes vulgar, meatless one becomes thin.
To avoid being vulgar and thin, in every meal let bamboo shoots accompany the meat.
Thus was born the Tung-po pork and bamboo dish, copied the country over from Szechwan to Hangchow!
The mystique of taste continues to intrigue the literary palate, and is nowhere more evident than in the very first poem with which Tsao Hsueh-chin ( 1715-1763) begins what has been hailed as China's greatest novel, Dream of the Red Chamber:
Pages and pages of idle words, uttered amidst embittered tears.
Everyone thinks the author beguiled,
Who really can understand the flavor within?
Each region of China has its own snack food specialties. Here, a young cook prepares O-ah chien, a Taiwanese snack made with eggs and oysters.
There it is again, the flavor or wei within. Message and flavor, purpose and taste. They are interchangeable. Generations of scholars of the Dream of the Red Chamber have been tantalized by Tsao Hsueh-chin, and continue to decipher the dream. It is clear that Tsao pined for the food and the taste of Chiangnan (literally, "south of the river," the area south of the Yangtze River). There are no less than 197 specific names of dishes in the novel. From the most exquisite, such as duck web in wine less, to such ordinary delights as five-spiced pressed toufu. Tsao was longing for the salubrious life which nurtured his youth as well as his senses.
Of course, we encounter similar literary and culinary cross-metaphors in the West. Dorothy Canfield once described reading Isak Dinesen's novels as biting into some extraordinary fruit, its flavor indescribable. And Paul Valery likened the hidden meaning of poetry to the nutritional value of fruits. That is the flavor within.
The degree to which food is celebrated in Chinese literature and is associated with the lives of scholars is perhaps unmatched by other civilizations - Caesar salad, oysters Rockefeller, beef Wellington, and steak Diane notwithstanding. This cultivation of the imaginative and the sensual becomes simply part of life as it is lived by the high part of society and those not so high. There is a vast lore of lyrical praise of the simple and unadorned, though carefully produced, foods in China.
The poetic imagination and the prandial expectancy have excited each other to make the treatment of food an art, not technology, to make it an alchemy, not chemistry. Of all the uncountable treatises, essays, and notebooks on food and eating, none is really a book of recipes. Menus, yes, but only to mark memorable occasions. Assembling ingredients is much like composing a poem - seldom can it be just jotted down. One works at it. A Tang poet likened the writing of poetry to shelling walnuts. The taste comes after three layers!
So it is the spirit of food and its ingredients that challenge the imagination, and the philosophy of food and its preparation that engage the senses. Strange, though, for a culture with so much emphatic demand of and from eating, that there never arose a personal code that says, "I eat, therefore I am - Manduco, ergo sum."
Yet, the enjoyment of food as a form of sensuality could lead to depravity if it becomes excessive. And Chinese observers of life are well aware of this. Cosmology and philosophy, literature and folk tradition all handle this question, but with both sobriety and humor. For sheer stark realism, listen to the two lines of the compassionate Tang dynasty poet Tu Fu (杜甫, 712-770): "Behind the vermilion doors wine and meat decay/Out on the streets frozen bones litter the way." And Po Chu-yi (白居易, 772-846):
Proud to be invited to the Governor's feast,
one gallops as fast as the clouds.
The cups are filled with the nine spirits,
from land and sea are gathered the eight treatures.
Peelillg tangerines from Tungting, savoring carp from Heaven Lake,
our minds are at ease when we are full, our spirits stirred when the wine is pleasant.
The same year there is drought south of the river;
In Chuchou, humans are eating humans.
But then there is also a good deal of humor, focusing on gluttony and overindulgence in both meat and wine. Instances abound of parody, of contrast between greed and sober rectitude. For example, the Unofficial History of the Scholars, the Julin Waishih (儒林外史), written in the mid-eighteenth century, is full of episodes of scholars scoffing at the salt merchants. A wedding feast of the pretentious Lu family first has a rat falling into the bird's nest soup, and when the cook tries to kick a dog, his shoe lands in a dish of pork dumplings and wrappings made of goose fat and brown sugar. Hedonism simply could not thrive on its own!
When all is said and done, when we take leave of the savoring of taste in the literary muse and return to palatal appeasements, we note that without the chef there is no cuisine. And if a cook does not know how to handle fire power - huohou as the northern Chinese call it and wokhei as the southern chefs would have it - this cook will never become a chef. Fire power is the central element of the Chinese cooking art. It regulates the temperature within the pot and without - the two temperatures are not the same, but intimately related. There was a restaurant in Canton which once selected the head chef by asking the applicants to prepare scrambled eggs. The seemly simple is often the most complex.
So, it is with Szechwan cuisine, which has more distinctive tastes than any other region in China. In addition to the usual five of sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and peppery, the Szechwan palate discerns in addition the aromatic and the roasted-nutty - collectively known as ma la (麻辣). Szechwan, with the richness of its natural resources and year-long growing season, and with its frequent historical experiences as being almost a state within a state because of its isolated geography, has produced an enviable cuisine. In addition to its famed range of snack foods, it also introduced the tradition of the state banquet.
The pleasures of the Chinese palate are indeed as endless as they are tantalizing. Yes, the "lady's quivering buttock" may be an East China specialty, but when it comes to appreciating fine renderings of good food - to get at the taste beyond taste - perhaps what matters most is a quivering palate. - Dr. D. W. Y. Kwok (郭穎頤) is a professor of Chinese History in the Department of History at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and is well-known among his colleagues and friends as an exceptionally adept chef.