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Food & Drinks

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Food & Drinks


Food & Drinks


Chinese foods and drinks are quite different from other countries. Chinese wide areas and diversity of peoples give rise to Chinese colorful eating and drink. Chinese diet culture has become an art that attracts a number of foreigners all over the world. During a long period of production and living practice, Chinese nation has made great contribution to the world on the aspects of food resource exploration, food treatment, nutrition and health care, dishware design and cuisine aesthetics. Chinese intellectuals have created countless dishes with apt names, aromas, flavors and colors, greatly enhancing the dining experience. During these four or five thousand years of development, Chinese cuisine appears various features in different periods and regions. Generally speaking, Chinese people mainly live on the five common cereals and vegetables and added by a small supply of meat. This eating habit is formed by the mode of production which is centered by agriculture. Moreover, Chinese food makes cooked food and hot food primary, which is related to the advance of culinary skills and early civilization of the country.

China's Cuisine
China's cuisine is as varied as its landscape. Each city has its own specialties and styles: Sichuan for hot and spicy food imbued with the red chili pepper, Shanghai for sweeter flavors and famous dumplings and, of course, Hong Kong for the famed dim sum.
Generally speaking, there are eight main regional cuisines: Anhui, Canton, Fujian, Hunan, Jiangsu, Shandong, Sichuan and Zhejiang. There is also Huaiyang Cuisine, a major style and even viewed as the representation of the cuisine.
Occasionally, Beijing cuisine and Shanghai cuisine are also cited along with eight regional styles as ten regional cuisines in China. There are also featured Buddhist and Muslim sub-cuisines within the greater Chinese cuisine, with an emphasis on vegetarian and halal-based diets respectively.

Chinese Alcohol
In Chinese the word for alcohol "JIU" is used to mean all types of alcoholic beverages, from "PIJIU" (beer) to liquors (just called 'jiu') to grape wine ('putao jiu').
Chinese people have drunk alcohol with their meals since the Neolithic period (about 5000-1700BC). Most alcoholic drinks are produced from cereal grains and some are drunk warm. The little pot shown here, made between AD 500 and 580, was used for heating wine. The tripod legs would have straddled the heat source. The handle at the side of the pot is hollow to take a wooden extension for lifting it off the stove. At the same time a stick would have been passed through the ceramic loop on the opposite side to steady the hot pot. Wine warmers like this often look a bit like animals. The potters who made them sometimes played up this resemblance by adding tails and beast-like heads or faces, or by giving the tripod legs hooves or paws. This pot has an animal's tail but no face.

Chinese Tea
Tea is China's most popular beverage. Chinese people drink green unfermented tea, taken hot without milk or sugar, with meals and snacks and on its own throughout the day. Today, they use mugs with lids and handles, but up until this century tea was always drunk from small bowls. Eight hundred years separate the two tea bowls in the picture. The one on the stand was made between 1000 and 1125, by which time tea drinking had become an everyday habit for most and an art for some. Aristocrats and educated monks and nuns would gather together to taste fine teas and appreciate beautiful utensils. The powdered tea favoured at this time was whisked up with hot water in the tea bowl until it formed froth. The white whipped topping showed up well against black tea bowls like this, which was one reason for their popularity. Tea making competitions were held, the winner being the person whose froth lasted longest. The thick sides of these stoneware bowls mean the heat of the tea is not lost quickly and the tea- drinker's fingers do not get scalded. Stands, such as the one here, were used for serving or to raise steaming tea bowls to the lips.
In China, the Chinese drink tea at every meal for good health and simple pleasure. Chinese tea consists of tea leaves which have been processed using methods inherited from China. According to popular legend, tea was discovered by Chinese Emperor Shennong in 2737 BCE when a leaf from a Camellia sinensis tree fell into water the emperor was boiling. Tea is deeply woven into the history and culture of China. The beverage is considered one of the seven necessities of Chinese life, along with firewood, rice, oil, salt, sauce and vinegar.
Some writers classify tea into four categories, white, green, oolong and black. Others add categories for red, scented and compressed teas. All of these come from varieties of the Camellia sinensis plant. Chinese flower tea, while popular, is not a true tea. Most Chinese tea is consumed in China and is not exported. Green tea is the most popular type of tea used in China. Dragon Well Tea and Eyes on Heaven Tea is very famous in China.
Long Jing and Tian Mu may match Heaven Pool tea due to the weather in their growing regions. Because the cold season comes earlier to the mountains, there is abundant snow in the winter; hence the tea plants germinate later.

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