China's food culture, due to its specific economic structure, mode of thinking and cultural environment, has formed its own distinctive features, namely artistic tendency, which is mainly manifested in the following six aspects

1. Excellent selection of materials

Selection of materials is the primary skill of China chefs, and it is the basis for making a good taste of China cuisine. It is necessary to have rich knowledge and skilled application skills. The raw materials used in each cuisine, including main ingredients, ingredients, auxiliary materials, seasonings, etc., have a lot of stress and certain rules. In a nutshell, it is the word "fine" and "fine", which is what Confucius said: "You are never tired of fine food, and you are never tired of fine food". The so-called "refined" refers to the selected raw materials, taking into account their varieties, producing areas, seasons, growth periods and other characteristics, with fresh, tender and excellent materials as the best. For example, Beijing roast duck is made in Beijing, and its weight is about 2.5 kg. If it is too big, it will be old, but if it is too small, it will not be fat. Sometimes, according to the flavor of the dishes, the ingredients are specially treated. For example, the famous dish "West Lake Vinegar Fish" in Hangzhou uses live straw bag fish produced in the lake. Although it is delicious, its meat quality is loose and earthy. It must be put into a special bamboo cage and "starved" in clear water for 2 days. Once the meat quality is firm, the earthy taste will be removed, and then it will be more tender and delicious, and it will taste like crab meat. Another example is instant-boiled mutton, a famous dish in Beijing. It is a castrated ram from Inner Mongolia, weighing about 21 kilograms. After slaughter, it is buried in an ice pool for 2-3 days, and then sliced, so that it can be fresh in color, tender and not fat. The so-called "fine" means selecting the best raw materials. For example, the famous dish "Kung Pao Chicken" should use the tender meat of the chicken breast of the bamboo shoot chicken that year to ensure the fresh and tender meat taste; "Sliced pork" must be made from pork loin, which meets the standard and tastes tender, smooth and delicious. "Steamed pork with lotus leaf powder", pork belly should be selected to make the juice moist and the meat tender and fragrant. Excellence is based on richness. China's diet is all-encompassing, including the sky, the ground, the water, the ground, plants and animals. For example, in terms of animal species, in addition to chickens, horses, cows, sheep, pigs, meat, donkeys and other ordinary animals, there are also ants, rats, snakes, cats, even scorpions, and even maggots (such as the so-called "meat tooth vegetables"). Not only daily chicken intestines become delicacies, but almost all parts of animals can be eaten, and the more bizarre they are, the more unique they become, such as elephant trunk, scarlet lips, bear's paw, deer tail, snake gall, monkey brain, and even the * * devices of various animals have become delicacies for strengthening yang and tonifying deficiency, such as deer whip, dog whip, money meat, tiger Dan and so on. Some foods with strange taste have also become delicious, such as pickled cabbage and bitter gourd, while stinky tofu, which is against the diet, smells bad and tastes fragrant. In the Han and Tang dynasties, it was customary to call delicious food "Eight Treasures". About the Song Dynasty, Bazhen specifically refers to eight precious cooking materials. In the Qing Dynasty, there were numerous series of "Eight Treasures", mainly referring to the banquet of eight rare raw materials. For example, the "four treasures" of the "Manchu-Han banquet" refers to the banquet of four groups of eight treasures. Four Eight Treasures, namely, Eight Treasures of Mountain, Eight Treasures of Sea, Eight Treasures of Poultry and Eight Treasures of Grass, each refer to 32 precious raw materials, specifically:

Eight Treasures of Mountain: hump, bear's paw, monkey brain, scarlet lip, elephant, leopard fetus, rhinoceros tail and deer tendon.

eight treasures of the sea: bird's nest, shark's fin, radix aconiti, fish belly, fish bones, abalone, seals and pike (giant salamander).

Eight precious birds: red swallow, flying dragon, quail, swan, partridge, colorful finch, turtledove and red-headed eagle.

eight herbs: Hericium erinaceus, Tremella fuciformis, Dictyophora dictyophora, Asylum donkeys, Morchella esculenta, Flammulina velutipes, Day Lily and Yunxiangxin.

2. Skillful knife work

Knife skill, that is, the chef handles the raw materials by knife, making them into a neat and consistent shape needed for cooking, so as to adapt to the heat, heat evenly, facilitate the taste, and maintain a certain shape beauty, which is one of the keys of cooking technology. As early as ancient times, China attached importance to the use of knife-cutting, and after repeated practice by chefs of past dynasties, it created rich knife-cutting methods, such as straight knife-cutting method, slice knife-cutting method, oblique knife-cutting method (marking knife lines on raw materials without cutting them off) and carving knife-cutting method, and processed raw materials into pieces, strips, wires, blocks, diced, granules, velvet, mud and other forms and pills and balls. In particular, the combination of knife skills and hand-waving makes clinker and edible raw materials into artistic and lifelike fancy platters of birds, animals, insects, fish, flowers and grass, such as "Dragon and Phoenix in Prosperity", "proud as a peacock", "Magpie in Plum", "Lotus Crane" and "Flower Basket with Double Phoenix". For example, "proud as a peacock" is made of fifteen kinds of raw materials, such as duck meat, ham, pork tongue, quail eggs, crab clams and cucumbers, and it is finished through twenty-two fine knife techniques and assembling procedures.

In ancient writers' works, sentences often gush out to sing about the chef's exquisite knife skills. "Zhuangzi Health Master" describes the understanding of the skilled ox. After three years of hard training, the skilled ox has reached the position of "overstepping the whole ox" and "being comfortable". "The touch of the hand, the leaning of the shoulder, the walking of the foot, the squatting of the knee, and the sound of the knife. Watching him understand cattle is like watching ancient dance; Smelling the sound of his knife is like smelling ancient music. It is also an art to look at it from the point of view. In the Tang Dynasty, there were indeed artistic performances with knives. "Youyang Miscellany" said, "Those who have southern filial piety are good at cultivating and cultivating, and they are thin and can be blown up lightly; If the knife is sharp, if it is in rhythm. Show off your skills because of meeting people. "

The beautiful words describing ancient swordsmanship can also be mentioned as follows:

The fish raised in the pond is the carp. A fraction of the cut, such as hair awn; Scattered like a valley, accumulated like red. Residual aromatic odor, syncope and difference.

—— Yi Fu's Seven Exciting

Cut the cicada's wing, dissect the fiber and analyze it. Tired as a stack of valleys, away from the snow. Light flies with the wind, but the blade doesn't cut.

—— Cao Zhi's Seven Qi

Life is fragmented, and the frost is flying, the red muscles are scattered, and the skin is covered with snow. Louzi can't toilet its fine, and Qiu Chan's wings are not thin enough.

—— Seven Lives by Zhang Xie

Not only writers regard fine knife-cutting as a perfect art appreciation, but ordinary people often take a quick look at it. In order to broaden one's horizons, someone specially organized a knife performance in ancient times, which caused a sensation. In the Southern Song Dynasty, Zeng Sanyi's Record of the Same Talk said that one year Mount Tai held a unique performance, and the "best art in the world" naturally included those who were good at cooking. "There was a man who made a man bow down to the ground with his back bare, and took a catty of meat with his back as a few, and carried it with a knife. Try to withdraw the meat, and the soldier's back is not hurt at all. " Taking a person's back as a chopping block, shredding pork without hurting his back, this move can't help but be amazing.

3. unique heat

heat is one of the keys to form the flavor characteristics of dishes and delicacies. However, the temperature changes rapidly, and it is difficult to do it just right without many years of practical experience. Therefore, mastering the proper heat is a stunt of Chinese chefs. Chinese chefs can accurately identify different firepower such as strong fire, medium fire and weak fire, be familiar with the heat resistance of various raw materials, skillfully control the time of using fire, and be good at mastering the properties of heat transfer objects (oil, water and gas). They can also determine the order of cooking according to the tenderness, moisture content, shape and size of raw materials, and the thickness of whole pieces, and use them flexibly to make the cooked dishes tender and crisp. As early as ancient times, Chinese chefs had made a special study on the heat, and expounded the law of heat change and the key points: "Five flavors and three materials, nine boiling and nine changes, will win with it, without losing its reason." Su Shi, a great poet in the Northern Song Dynasty, is not only a gourmet, but also a cook. He created the famous Dongpo meat dishes, which is closely related to his good use of cooking time. He also wrote these experiences into stew poems: "Slow fire, less water, natural beauty when the cooking time comes." Later generations used his experience to cook the meat with a sealed low fire. The meat was original, oily and bright red, rotten but not broken, waxy but not greasy, tender like tofu, palatable and outstanding in flavor.

Temperature is the most important thing in cooking, and it is also the most difficult thing to grasp and explain. It can really be said that "Tao can be Tao, which is extraordinary", and whether a cook can become a famous chef is the key. Therefore, when cooking, the chefs in China's diet accumulate life experience, realize their own spirituality, give full play to their subtle observation experience and rich imagination, and create food art. The so-called wonderful operation, with a single heart, is really "knowing the gains and losses."