Regional Cuisines

China is large, and the produce, climate and peoples of each place differ, so each place's food has its own character. This class sorts local cooking by three kinds of standard: region, such as a province or a group of provinces; people, such as the food of the Mongols, Tibetans and Koreans; and food tradition, as Halal cuisine follows dietary rules and overseas Chinese cuisine follows places of settlement. Each class is made up of local ingredients, cooking methods and the eating habits of its people. The standards differ, so one dish may belong to more than one class, and the classes overlap.

Local flavours were set apart in writing early. In Northern Song Bianjing the eating houses already offered northern, southern and Sichuan fare, as the Dongjing menghua lu recalls, showing that in Song cities people already spoke of local ways of cooking separately. In the early Republic the Qingbai leichao (1917) lists the dishes of each place by name, showing that speaking of food by place was a common habit. The phrase eight great cuisines came later, and the eight usually counted are Shandong, Sichuan, Cantonese, Jiangsu, Fujian, Zhejiang, Hunan and Anhui. This class is named for all the directions, so it takes in more than those eight.

The same dish can be found in different classes: a dish common in the restaurants of one province and also seen by one people as traditional food relates to both a regional class and a people's class. A reader can enter by region, people or food tradition and then see how the classes overlap.

Today the food of every region appears side by side in the big cities, and people often look for a familiar taste by the name of a cuisine. This class keeps the names of the eight cuisines so that readers find familiar names, not to say that local cooking outside the eight matters less. The classes are for finding food and do not mean a dish belongs to one place only; particular dishes, products and well-known houses are recorded separately as entries.