China's cooking technique of "Five Flavors Harmony" aims at seeking delicacy. During the processing, hot frying and long-term slow fire attack will destroy the nutritional components of dishes. Although French cooking also pursues delicacy, at the same time, it never forgets the premise of "nutrition". They don't want to give up nutrition and seek delicacy. Especially in the 1960s, the modern cooking trend of thought put special emphasis on health preservation and weight loss, thus pursuing lightness and less oil, emphasizing the use of fresh raw materials, and emphasizing the preservation of original nutrients and original flavor in the cooking process, so vegetables are basically eaten raw. Therefore, the emphasis on nutrition in western diet is universal.
To be fair, talking about nutrition also touches the biggest weakness of China's diet. Although we pay attention to dietotherapy, food supplement, and food support, and attach importance to keeping healthy and strengthening the body through diet, our cooking takes the pursuit of delicacy as the primary requirement, resulting in many nutrients being lost in the processing. In recent years, Chinese chefs have participated in the world cooking competition, and the nutritional components of a dish have been clearly listed, but we can't produce this material. After being asked questions, I was dumbfounded and confused, and I suffered a great loss!
We have always regarded the pursuit of delicious food as the primary purpose of eating. There is a folk saying: "Food is the most important thing for the people, and taste is the first thing to eat". Although people always say "good color, smell and taste" when praising food, it is because our sensory organs "eyes, nose and mouth" are arranged in this order. People's inner feelings about "color, fragrance and taste" have always been "taste".
Because people in China attach great importance to taste, some dishes in China are only the carriers of taste, such as sea cucumber, fish lips, shark's fin, bear's paw and hump, which are recognized as valuable dishes. Their main ingredients are animal glue similar to cheap meat skin, which is not delicious in itself. We have to feed it with fresh soup, feed it full and then feed it to people. Isn't this the authentic taste carrier?
China people attach importance to taste, which is also reflected in their daily conversation, such as family banquets. As soon as the main dishes are served on the table, the host often humbly says, "The dishes are not cooked well, which may not be to your taste." He would never say, "the nutritional value of vegetables is not high, and the calories are not enough."
Western cooking pays attention to nutrition and ignores taste, at least not to enjoy taste as the primary purpose. They eat with cold drinks, and ice cubes are added to the chilled wine. Once the taste nerves all over the surface of the tongue are chilled, they greatly lose their taste sensitivity and gradually become unable to distinguish taste. The bloody steak, great white fish, great white meat, raw vegetables, boiled beans and boiled potatoes, although they have a "taste" but do not enter the "Tao", all of which reflect Westerners' neglect of taste. Their refusal to use monosodium glutamate is more than enough to prove that this generation belongs to people who don't know the taste, and they are not guests who know the taste!
Based on the emphasis on nutrition, westerners eat more vegetables raw, not only tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce, but also cabbage, onions and broccoli. Therefore, their "salad" is like a plate of rabbit feed, which makes it difficult for us to accept. Modern China people also talk about nutrition and health care, and know that once vegetables are heated, vitamins will be destroyed, so we advocate stir-frying with strong fire. Although this also reduces the content of vitamins, it will not be completely lost, but it tastes much better than rabbit feed. Therefore, China's modern cookery aims at the best balance between nutrition and taste, which of course belongs to the "golden mean".
Due to the standardization of western cuisine, cooking has become a mechanical job. KFC old man fried chicken should be prepared according to the formula; The temperature of oil and the time of fried chicken should also be strictly regulated, so the chef's work becomes an extremely monotonous mechanical work. He is like a worker on an automated assembly line, and even a robot can take his place. Furthermore, the purpose of western people's eating is to absorb nutrition. As long as the nutrition is up to standard, others can be tolerant. Therefore, it is certainly not interesting for chefs to repeat mechanical work every day under the attitude of being extremely tolerant of diners.
In China, cooking is an art, as San Mao, a female writer, said in the article "Hotel in the Desert": "I have always hated doing housework, but I am very interested in cooking. A few onions and pieces of meat are fried to make a dish, and I appreciate this art." Cooking is an art, which, like other arts, embodies the unity of rigor and improvisation. Therefore, cooking in China has always been extremely interesting, even with a certain degree of playfulness, attracting China people who take diet as their greatest pleasure in life.
Interesting cooking is a tradition in China. The unearthed portrait of the Han Dynasty "Kitchen Picture" is very similar to the performance of a large acrobatic troupe. In Du Fu's two for the road, the poem "A machete cuts through the air" refers to a knife with many bells tied on its back. It is said that chefs in the Tang Dynasty could use it to play Ding Dong's music while cutting vegetables. It's a pity that this kind of knife and the skill of operating it have been lost.
The instant-boiled mutton, Sichuan spicy hot pot and Guangdong seafood hot pot, which are similar to them, are widely loved because they are fresh, tender, hot and comfortable to eat, and because they move the main part of cooking to the dining table, so that people can experience this interesting cooking while eating. Another example is the mutton buns in Xi 'an, which are hard and hard. It seems that the guests have to break them into pieces by themselves, which tastes more fragrant than the chopped ones by the chef. The reason why Beijing-style "barbecue season" barbecue is disappointing is that it is not as good as it used to be, and it is also because it has changed itself into "a gentleman speaks without doing it." This change has turned it into a boring one, and it tastes so bad. This is all because I don't understand China's interesting cooking, and it is absolutely impossible for western chefs to blindly command the tragedy and pursue the pleasure in cooking. Westerners' creed is "work while you work, play while you play". According to their dichotomy of mechanism, playing at work is dereliction of duty, and working in the game is a loss-making business, both of which are "I don't do anything"? For China people who advocate mastery, "there is a game in work and a job in the game" is the right way in the world.
Cooking has always been regarded as a great pleasure by China people, and taking this job as a positive expression to enrich their lives. As the saying goes, "There is a paradise above and a kitchen below". Cooking is just as important to China as music, dance, poetry and painting, and it has great significance to improve the realm of life.
Mr. Qian Mu, a master of Taiwan Province's Chinese studies, said in the preface of the book "On the Academic Balance of Modern China": "'s academics are different with different cultures. China is harmonious and harmonious, and the West is divided. " This cultural feature is also reflected in Chinese and western food culture. Except for a few soup dishes in western cuisine, such as Russian red cabbage soup (Luo Songtang), which is cooked in one pot with a variety of meat and vegetable raw materials, fish is fish, chicken is chicken, snail is snail, and oyster is oyster. The so-called "roast beef with potatoes" is just cooked beef with cooked potatoes, and it is by no means a combination of potatoes and beef. Even the seasoning ingredients, such as tomato sauce, mustard paste, lemon juice and spicy soy sauce, are all eaten and added now. All of the above embodies the "western emphasis on separation."
China people have always regarded harmony and harmony as the most wonderful realm, paying attention to harmony in music and singing harmony, and advocating harmony in body and spirit in medicine. We hope that national politics will achieve "political harmony". And we call the marriage of husband and wife "marriage" and a beautiful marriage "a match made in heaven"; When we show our reverence, we take our hands together as a gift, and when all the beautiful things come together, we call them "a perfect match".
The core of China's cooking is "harmony of five flavors", which is called "fire and water hate each other, while the five flavors are in harmony" in Wen Zi Shangde. Lu's Chunqiu Benwei Pian praised "five flavors in harmony" as "a change in the tripod, exquisite and delicate, eloquent, and metaphorical".
China's theory of harmony of five flavors is composed of the theory of original flavor, the theory of smell yin and yang, the theory of time sequence and the theory of palatability. That is to say, the "five flavors harmony" should be carried out on the basis of attaching importance to the natural taste of cooking materials, and the basic laws of yin and yang and five elements should be used to guide this harmony. The harmony should conform to the time sequence and pay attention to the season, and the final result of the harmony should be delicious and palatable. Therefore, almost every Chinese dish has to be blended and cooked with more than two kinds of raw materials and various seasonings. That is, home-cooked dishes are usually cooked with vegetarian dishes, such as fried shredded pork with chives, fried garlic sprouts with sliced meat, braised pork with yuba, and fried dried bean curd with celery ... If these raw materials are cooked in western kitchens, shredded pork with milk is boiled with chives in white water, or fried pork chops are cooked with garlic sprouts with clear water, so it is natural for China diners to "cry and laugh"? And the authentic western food is a steak with two potatoes, three tomatoes and four-leaf lettuce. Although they are in the same dish, they are "fragmented" and do not interfere with each other. Only when you eat it in your stomach can you reconcile it.
China people call cooking "cooking", which means that we have always integrated cooking and blending. In the west, there used to be cooking without adjustment, but now there is adjustment, but it still belongs to two separate processes.
In terms of food instruments, the west pursues a separate meal system. First of all, we should order our own dishes and what we want to eat, which also shows the respect for individuality in the West. After serving, people eat their own dishes, add seasonings at will, eat the second dish after eating one dish, and never mix the first and second dishes. For Chinese food, a table of people sit around and eat a table of dishes together, and the hot pot in a cold and hot casserole fills the table. Diners eat a mouthful of food in the east and a mouthful of food in the west, and several dishes are swallowed at the same time, which are completely different from the food instruments in western food, and all reflect the fundamental differences between Chinese and western cultures of "separation" and "harmony".
Westerners emphasize science and nutrition in diet, so the whole cooking process is strictly in accordance with scientific norms. The taste of steak is the same from new york to San Francisco, and the side dishes of steak are only tomatoes, potatoes and lettuce. Furthermore, standardized cooking requires that the amount of seasoning added be accurate to grams and the cooking time be accurate to seconds. In addition, the article "Eating in Holland" published in the first issue of Overseas Digest in 1995 also describes that "Dutch kitchens are equipped with scales, liquid measuring cups, timers and graduated pots, and dozens of seasoning bottles of uniform size are arranged on the seasoning rack, just like a chemical laboratory."
China's cooking is totally different, not only the major cuisines have their own flavors and characteristics, but also the matching of the side dishes and seasonings used by the same cuisine will be different according to the chef's personal characteristics. Even if the same chef cooks the same dish, although it has its own method, it will be adjusted according to different seasons, different occasions and different identities of diners (for example, the flavor is rich in winter and light in summer, the wedding banquet must be brightly colored, and the funeral banquet should be red; Poor people should kill their greed with thick oil and thick juice, and gourmets should have fresh and unique meals. In addition, due to the change of the chef's own on-the-spot mood, he will make some impromptu play. Therefore, China's cooking not only does not emphasize the standardization of accuracy to seconds and grams, but also emphasizes randomness.
The randomness of food processing first led to the repeated expansion of China's menu space: the diversity of raw materials, knives, spices and cooking methods, and then cross-combined, one raw material can be made into several or even a dozen or dozens of dishes. For example, the most commonly used raw chicken, in the hands of Cantonese chefs, can cook dozens or even hundreds of dishes. So are other raw materials. Therefore, in places rich in a certain raw material, tables of banquets can often be made with this raw material, such as "all-duck banquet" in Beijing, "all-dog banquet" in Yanbian, "all-fish banquet" and "all-oyster banquet" in Guangdong, "all-cow banquet" in Li Hesheng, Changsha, "all-sheep banquet" in some Muslim restaurants in Beijing and "all-pig banquet" in Beijing casserole house, which embodies China cooking everywhere.