authentic chinese

[Jason Perlow]

More information can be found in this thread in the China forum.

Soba

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Oh man. That thread brought back some painful.. oh never mind.

[origamicrane]

hmm.. just an opinion here.

ok even in China the same dish will have regional differences

as in any other national cuisine.

but i think that the dish should have at least the core flavour ingredients in common

otherwise it will probably called something else.

here's an example

lets take sweet and sour pork

in different regions it might be sweeter or sourer or even spicy it might have onions, pineapple peppers, etc

but put that on your plate and everyone will say its sweet and sour pork.

ok lets change a few of the ingredients,

lets remove the veg but if the sauce is the same its still S&S pork minus the veg.

Lets remove the pork and its just S&S sauce

remove the vinegar and its no long S&S.

So what am i rambling about?

well what makes a dish authentic to a country?

surely its the distinctive taste.

you can have S&S sausage, fish cakes, kanagroo, zebra,etc

the fact it has the base flavour makes it the very least a chinese dish.

But what will make it an authentic chinese dish?

well simply

is it available in China?

is it eaten by chinese people?

will they instantly recognise it as a chinese dish?

Edited June 12, 2005 by origamicrane (log)

[Chris Amirault]

Origamicrane made precisely the point I was about to make concerning regional notions of authenticity in Chinese cooking. Tonight, as it turns out, I'm about to cook three dishes from Grace Young's Breath of a Wok, including a spinach recipe by a home cook in Foshan and two Sichuan dishes (one with Sichuan peppercorns, one with lots of chiles -- thus spicy in the Sichuan manner) that are taught at the Chinese Cuisine Training Institute in Hong Kong. Reading through them, it would be challenging for this home cook of Chinese food to know how to think about regional authenticity for such dishes, for a bunch of probably obvious reasons: is a Foshan home cook making "authentic" Foshan food? how "Hong Kong" are these "Sichuan" recipes? What the hell do these regional designations mean exactly?

Meanwhile, more of this discussion has also been happening over on this thread on the entire concept of "authentic" cuisine, fyi.