At the same time, there are four major cuisines, which usually refer to Shandong cuisine, Sichuan cuisine, Jiangsu cuisine and Guangdong cuisine.
"Paintings that are pleasing to the eye, the sound of pleasing to the ear, are all fine arts, and the taste of pleasing the mouth, why not? Being a cook is also one of the arts. "
"It is the art of cooking that is born in civilization. If you are not deeply pregnant with a civilized race, you will not be able to distinguish between tastes. If you are not able to distinguish between tastes, your cooking skills will be bad."
-Sun Wen
Chinese food has experienced four or five thousand years of development history. It is composed of imperial court cuisine, official cuisine and local cuisines, with local cuisine as the main body. Its superb cooking skills and rich cultural connotations are world-class.
China has a vast territory, and different natural conditions, people's living habits and economic and cultural development have formed different local flavors in terms of food cooking and dishes. The two major flavors, North and South, began to appear in the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, and fully formed in the Tang and Song Dynasties. At the beginning of Qing Dynasty, Shandong cuisine (including the cuisines in northern areas such as Beijing and Tianjin), Jiangsu cuisine (including the cuisines in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui), Guangdong cuisine (including the cuisines in Fujian, Taiwan, Chaozhou and Qionglai) and Sichuan cuisine (including the cuisines in Hunan, Hubei, Guizhou and Yunnan) have become the most influential local cuisines in China, which is later called "Four".
"Qing barnyard grass banknotes" describes the diet situation in the late Qing Dynasty, saying: "The differences in eating habits in different places are due to the practice. Then northerners are fond of onions and garlic, Yunnan, Guizhou, Hunan and Sichuan are fond of spicy products, Cantonese are fond of light food, and Sioux are fond of sugar. " It also analyzes the characteristics of cuisines in various places in detail: "Suzhou people's diet-especially fat, cooking methods are all mixed with five flavors, but more sugar and five spices." "The diet of Fujian and Guangdong people-the food is rich in seafood, the meal must be accompanied by soup, and the Cantonese people are fond of living things, and they don't want to make progress." "Hunan and Hubei people's diet-like spicy food, although they eat before the abbot, before the fault is full, there is no pepper and mustard, and there are many soups." "Northerners eat onions and garlic, but also produce in the north to win ..." And so on, and so on. Although the quotation is not enough to explain the whole picture of the cuisine, we can see the characteristics of the four major cuisines in China.
With the further development of the catering industry, some local cuisines became more and more unique and formed their own factions. In this way, in the late Qing Dynasty, Zhejiang, Fujian, Hunan and Huizhou local cuisines became the "eight major cuisines", and then Beijing and Shanghai were added, which was called the "ten major cuisines". Despite the proliferation and development of cuisines, people are still used to using "four major cuisines" and "eight major cuisines" to represent tens of thousands of local flavor dishes in China. There are thousands of famous local flavor dishes, which are exquisite in materials selection, elaborate in production, diverse in variety and flavor, and pay attention to the coordination and unity of color, fragrance, taste, shape and utensils, and enjoy a high reputation in the world. Most of these famous dishes have their own development history, which not only embodies exquisite traditional skills, but also has all kinds of beautiful and touching legends or allusions, and has become an important part of Chinese food culture.