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Four major Chinese cuisines

China is a country with a large catering culture. For a long time, due to the influence of geographical environment, climate, products, cultural traditions and ethnic customs, a certain region has formed a certain kinship inheritance relationship, similar dishes, high popularity and popular among some people. Famous schools of local flavors are called cuisines. Among them, Shandong cuisine, Sichuan cuisine, Jiangsu cuisine and Cantonese cuisine are known as the "four major cuisines", and Zhejiang cuisine, Fujian cuisine, Anhui cuisine, Hunan cuisine, Beijing cuisine and Hubei cuisine are the "ten major cuisines". This article focuses on how the "four major Chinese cuisines" have developed and evolved as a food culture, as well as their characteristics, superb techniques and famous representative dishes.

Keywords: cooking, unique flavor, all five flavors, superb skills, comprehensive techniques, and a wide range of ingredients.

Shandong cuisine has a long history and wide influence, and is an important part of Chinese food culture. It has become one of the four major cuisines in China, and is famous at home and abroad for its salty, fresh, crispy, unique flavor and fine production. Ancient books say: "The East is where heaven and earth were born." The land of Qi and Lu is a beautiful territory surrounded by mountains and seas, rich in products and developed economy, which provides good conditions for the development of culinary culture and the formation of Shandong cuisine. As early as the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, Yi Ya, a favorite minister of Duke Huan of Qi, was a famous chef known for his "good harmony of five flavors". During the Southern and Northern Dynasties, Jia Sixie, the prefect of Gaoyang, made a relatively systematic summary of the cooking techniques in the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River in his book "Qi Min Yao Shu", and recorded many famous dishes, reflecting the superb skills of Shandong cuisine at that time. Duan Wenchang of the Tang Dynasty was from Linzi, Shandong. He was the prime minister during the reign of Emperor Muzong, and was proficient in food. He compiled fifty volumes of food classics by himself, which became a historical anecdote. In the Song Dynasty, the "water cage" in the Song capital Bianliang was another name for Shandong cuisine, which had already taken shape. In the Ming and Qing dynasties, it was already called a cuisine. From Shandong and Henan to the capital, from Neiguan to Waiguan, the influence has reached the Yellow River Basin. The Northeast region has a broad mass base of food lovers. Shandong was once the Qi and Lu states, with seafood, aquatic products, grains, oils, livestock, vegetables, fruits, insects and game all available, providing rich material conditions for cooking. The exquisite Shandong cuisine cooking skills are also widely promoted. Shandong cuisine has a unique flavor and a distinct personality. Its flavor and skills are connected from north to south, especially popular in the northern region. The strong flavor of Shandong cuisine lies in the wide range of ingredients, exquisite selection of ingredients, fine knife skills, proper blending, good heat, and comprehensive cooking skills. Especially in stir-frying, frying, roasting, deep-frying, steaming, braising, and sticking, its flavor is salty, fresh, delicious, fragrant, crispy, tender, and the soup is refined and mellow. It has its own style and strong adaptability. In its long-term development process, Shandong cuisine has accumulated a complete set of cooking techniques, among which stir-frying is the most famous. The "frying" methods of Shandong cuisine can be divided into oil frying, soup frying, scallion frying, sauce frying, fire frying and so on. "Frying" requires high heat and fast cooking, so it is one of the best cooking techniques to protect food nutrients, especially oil frying, which must be done quickly with high heat, continuous operation, one-shot and instant completion. The finished dish is evenly coated with wine, oil and starch sauce, with juice but not visible, and the dish is all cleaned up. It is fresh, tender, crispy, refreshing and not greasy. "Collapse" is a unique cooking quality in Shandong. The main ingredients of collapsed dishes should be marinated with seasonings in advance, flavored or sandwiched with stuffing, and then coated with flour or egg batter. When both sides are fried until golden brown, add seasonings and clear soup, and slowly fry the soup to make it soak into the main ingredients to increase the freshness. "Pot-collapsed fish belly" and "Pot-collapsed yellow croaker" widely circulated in various parts of Shandong are traditional famous dishes that people have long talked about. Shandong cuisine takes soup as the source of all freshness. It pays attention to the use of soup and is good at making soup, especially the preparation of "clear soup" and "milk soup". It is light and distinct, and takes its freshness. There are many dishes made with "clear soup" and "milk soup". There are more than ten famous dishes such as "clear soup willow leaf bird's nest" and "clear soup family portrait". They are all delicacies for high-end banquets. Shandong cuisine is also unique in cooking seafood. It is especially good at cooking marine treasures and small seafood. In Shandong, all seafood, whether it is ginseng, fin, bird's nest, shellfish, or scales, shellfish, shrimp, and crab, has become a delicious home-cooked dish after being mastered by local chefs. The flatmouth fish that is abundant in the Jiaodong coast alone can be cooked into hundreds of dishes using a variety of knife techniques and different production methods. The color, fragrance, taste, and shape are all unique, and all kinds of clever changes are in one fish. "Oil-fried double flowers", braised conch, fried oyster roe, "stir-fried leek with worms", fried mullet strips with green onions, hibiscus chrysanthemum crab, and "shark fins with crab roe", "abalone in original shell", "rusty scallops", "purple abalone with sesame sauce", "fish bones with chicken paste" and other dishes made with other rare ingredients are all unique seafood delicacies. Shandong cuisine is good at seasoning with green onion fragrance. In the main process of cooking dishes, whether it is stir-frying, frying, roasting, braising or cooking soup, green onion is used to stir-fry the pot; even steaming, braising, frying, roasting and other dishes also rely on the flavor of green onion. For example, roast duck, roast suckling pig, pot-roasted pork elbow, fried fat cover and other dishes are all served with green onion segments. Due to the development of science and technology, vegetable oils have been widely used, and gradually evolved into the general use of green onions in stir-frying, braising, braising and stir-frying dishes. In addition to using the fragrance of onions to enhance the flavor, this method also takes advantage of its effects of clearing the orifices and relieving qi, dispelling wind and heat, evacuating greasiness, inhibiting bacteria, and strengthening the stomach, which is widely used by modern people. Jinan, the city of springs, has not been the capital of the province since the Jin Dynasty. The cooking masters of Jinan have made use of rich resources, fully inherited traditional skills, and widely absorbed foreign experience, integrating the cooking skills of Fushan in the east, Jining in the south, and Qufu, pushing the cooking skills of various places to a state of exquisite perfection. Jinan cuisine uses a wide range of ingredients, from high-quality mountain delicacies to low-quality pumpkins and vegetables, and even very common cattails, peas, tofu, and livestock and poultry offal can be made into delicious dishes. Yantai and Qingdao are located in the beautiful Jiaodong Peninsula and are known for their cooking. Poultry and egg dishes in western and northern Shandong; vegetarian dishes with soy products as the main ingredients, and meat and fish dishes with the legacy of Qi in central Shandong each have their own characteristics. Shandong cuisine is a combination of the best cooking techniques from all over Shandong, incorporating the characteristics of local flavors and developing them through a long period of historical evolution.

Guangdong cuisine, also known as "Yue cuisine", is one of the four major cuisines in China. There are records of Cantonese cuisine in the Western Han Dynasty. Influenced by the imperial chefs of Yangcheng during the reign of Emperor Baozong, it developed rapidly in the Ming and Qing Dynasties. In the 20th century, with the absorption of certain skills of Western cuisine through foreign exchanges and trade, Cantonese cuisine was also introduced to the world. There are thousands of Cantonese restaurants in New York alone. Cantonese cuisine is represented by the cuisines of Guangzhou, Chaozhou and Dongjiang. The dishes use a wide range of ingredients, with a variety of colors, novel shapes, and good at changes. They are fresh, tender and smooth. Generally, they strive to be light in summer and autumn, and strong in winter. The menu of Cantonese cuisine is colorful. The cooking techniques are excellent and it is famous for its wide range of ingredients. According to rough estimates, there are thousands of ingredients used in Cantonese cuisine. All the domesticated poultry and livestock, fish and shrimps used in local cuisines are used in Cantonese cuisine, while snakes, rats, cats, dogs, and delicacies from the mountains and the sea that are not used in various places are regarded as the best dishes in Cantonese cuisine. As early as the Southern Song Dynasty, Zhou Qingfei's "Lingwaidaida" had an insightful record: "The people of Kongtong are so deep and broad that they eat everything, regardless of birds, beasts, snakes or insects. There are both good and ugly game among them. There is a turtle in the mountain called Yi, which is boiled from pigs. The lips of sturgeons are cut into meat when they are alive and are called fish souls. They are all treasured. If they encounter a snake, they must catch it, regardless of its length; if they encounter a rat, they must catch it, regardless of its size. The hateful bats, the terrible geckos, and the tiny locusts are all caught and roasted and eaten. The poisonous beehives and the filthy hemp insects are all fried and eaten. The locust eggs and the wings of shrimps are all fried and eaten." The omnivorous style of Cantonese cuisine often makes some outsiders dumbfounded. When Han Yu was demoted to Chaozhou in the Tang Dynasty, he was surprised to see that the local people loved to eat dozens of foreign foods such as turtles, snakes, octopuses, frogs, etc. He was so scared that "the smell of fishy smell began to spread, and the face was sweating profusely after chewing and swallowing." To this day, abalone, ginseng, shark's fin, tripe, mountain and sea delicacies are still delicacies and medicinal foods with unique flavors in Cantonese cuisine. According to modern scientific tests, various game often contain essential nutrients for the human body that are not found in ordinary livestock. For example: "Insects and snakes contain a large number of essential amino acids for the human body. Snake oil contains linoleic acid, which has the effect of keeping blood vessels from hardening." Therefore, Chinese medicine has always regarded snake meat as an important medicine for dispelling wind and promoting blood circulation, removing cold and dampness. The wide range of ingredients used in Cantonese cuisine can make full use of food resources and benefit mankind. For example, the soaking, braising and boiling in Cantonese cuisine are transplanted from the stir-frying, braising and boiling in northern cuisine; the new methods of frying, frying and deep-frying are learned from Western methods. Through extensive learning, the cooking methods of Cantonese cuisine have become perfect and diverse. Stir-frying, deep-frying, pan-frying, steaming, braising, stewing, etc. are commonly used in local dishes, and Cantonese cuisine often uses them; while many local dishes do not use wolfberry, stewing, soft stir-frying, soft deep-frying, etc., Cantonese cuisine has unique accomplishments. Therefore, there are many varieties of Cantonese cuisine. The special flavor of Cantonese cuisine is that it is light and heavy. There are so-called five flavors (fragrant, loose, smelly, fatty, and thick), six flavors (sour, sweet, bitter, spicy, salty, and sour), and six flavors (sour, sweet, bitter, spicy, and salty).

Shandong cuisine, Sichuan cuisine, Jiangsu cuisine and Cantonese cuisine are known as the four major cuisines

The cuisines of Shandong, Sichuan, Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Hunan and Anhui are commonly referred to as the "Eight Major Cuisines" of China.

Different cuisines have different local flavors due to differences in geography, climate, customs, and specialties. In terms of the Han ethnic group's dietary characteristics, there are currently four major cuisines, eight major cuisines, and ten major cuisines, and the number of categories is still increasing. However, in general, Chinese cuisine can be roughly divided into four major cuisines: Sichuan, Guangdong, Jiangsu, and Shandong.

Judging from the naming of the cuisine, although it is named after the province, its influence far exceeds the boundaries of the province. All food customs are affected by it, and the taste and cooking are generally the same. This is the scope of the cuisine. Of course, within a cuisine, there are many schools or branches, which are just "small differences" in the "great sameness". As for the four major cuisines of Shandong, Sichuan, Guangdong, and Jiangsu, the scope of Shandong cuisine, in addition to Shandong, also includes the North China Plain, Beijing-Tianjin area, the three northeastern provinces, and Shanxi and Shaanxi, which are all regions with the taste and food customs of Shandong cuisine, becoming the backbone of northern cuisine. Sichuan cuisine is centered on the Land of Abundance and extends to the vast areas of the middle and upper reaches of the Yangtze River, the two lakes, and Yunnan and Guizhou. Cantonese cuisine is mainly in the Pearl River Basin, and Fujian and Guizhou are also affected. Jiangsu cuisine is also called Huaiyang cuisine, which is a vast area in the lower reaches of the Huaihe River and the Yangtze River, as well as cities such as Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Nanjing. Of course, this is just a rough division, and some of the bordering areas are overlapping.