Guangdong is located in the southern coast of China, with numerous mountain plains, criss-crossing rivers and lakes, mild climate, abundant rainfall and extremely rich food sources for animals and plants. At the same time, Guangzhou, as a trading port city, has a long history, absorbing all kinds of foreign cooking materials and skills, making Cantonese cuisine more and more perfect. In addition, overseas Chinese sent back the cooking skills of Europe, America and Southeast Asia to their hometown, which enriched the contents of Cantonese cuisine recipes and left a distinct trace of Western cooking in Cantonese cuisine.
"Cantonese cuisine" consists of Guangzhou cuisine, Chaozhou cuisine and Dongjiang cuisine, with Guangzhou cuisine as the representative. It has a long history. As early as 2000 years ago, the book Huai Nan Zi in the Western Han Dynasty recorded that "Yue people think eating snakes is the best dish", and the Southern Song people also exaggeratedly described that Cantonese people "don't ask birds, animals and snakes what they eat". In the tomb of Zhao Hu, the second generation of Nanyue King around 122 BC, there were stoves, forks and suckling pig bones for boiling suckling pigs. 65438-0956, the first large-scale "Guangzhou Famous Cuisine Exhibition" was held. There are 5457 kinds of dishes and 825 kinds of snacks, which show the essence of Guangdong food culture.
On the basis of collecting outstanding folk cuisines from all over our province, Guangzhou cuisine constantly absorbs the essence of major cuisines in China and draws lessons from the strengths of western recipes. Guangzhou cuisine has a wide range of materials, fine selection of materials, superb skills, good at change and diverse varieties. 1956 "Guangzhou Famous Cuisine Exhibition" introduced 5447 Lai products. There are 8 15 snacks related to vegetables and hundreds of snacks. Guangzhou cuisine is the main body and representative of Cantonese cuisine. There are as many as twenty-one cooking methods of Guangzhou cuisine, especially frying, frying, stewing, frying, stewing and buckling. The cooked dishes pay attention to color, fragrance, taste and shape. The taste is mainly fresh, tender and crisp, paying attention to clear but not light, fresh but not vulgar, tender but not raw, oily but not greasy. Strong seasonality, light in summer and autumn, heavy in winter and spring. The more common dishes in Guangzhou are boiled chicken, boiled shrimp, open-hearth suckling pig, hanging roast duck, snake soup, oil-soaked shrimp, braised big skirt wings, steamed seafood, shrimp and so on.
The eating habits in Chaoshan area are close to those in southern Fujian, and influenced by Guangzhou area, they gradually converge to the strengths of the two families, each with its own flavor. In recent years, new Chaozhou cuisine has absorbed the essence of food from all over the world, gained a great reputation and become a famous Chinese and foreign cuisine. Chaozhou cuisine pays attention to knife modeling, and its cooking skills are good at stewing, stewing, burning, frying, steaming, frying and soaking. Cooking seafood, soup and beets is the most distinctive. The taste is still fresh, gloomy but not greasy. Love to use fish sauce, sand tea sauce, plum cake sauce, red vinegar and other seasonings. Famous dishes with flavor include roast goose, paste pot, clear soup crab balls, oil-soaked snail balls, crepe sweet meat, Taiji taro and so on.
Dongjiang cuisine is also called Hakka cuisine. Hakkas originally came from the Central Plains. After moving south, their customs and eating habits still retain a certain Central Plains style. Most of the dishes are meat, but there are few aquatic products. The main ingredients are prominent, the flavor is rich and the oil is heavy and salty. Casserole dishes are good at. Representative dishes include brine chicken, yellow duck, braised pork with plum, beef balls, sea cucumber crisp balls and so on.
In addition to formal dishes, snacks and snacks in Guangdong are also beautifully made, and the food customs in various places also have their own characteristics, such as morning tea in Guangzhou and kungfu tea in Chaoshan. These dietary customs have gone beyond the category of "eating" and become Guangdong's dietary culture.