Guangzhou: Cantonese culture and dim sum heaven
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E-mail China Today, December 9, 2016
Cantonese Cuisine
Visitors to Guangzhou are always dazzled by its array of restaurants. If you are hungry, a multitudinous range of dishes awaits you, simple or sumptuous, high-end or cheap. Guangzhou’s developed economy has fueled its catering industry, and the city’s time-honored toothsome snacks and other delicacies have earned it a high culinary reputation.
Cantonese cuisine is one of China’s four major styles of cooking. It features a wide range of ingredients, diverse choices, and balanced flavors. Various soups form another characteristic of Cantonese cuisine, to which Cantonese teahouse desserts and herbal tea also contribute.
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Diners enjoy dim sum at a Cantonese tea house in Guangzhou. |
The teahouse is the most appealing aspect of Cantonese culinary culture, but not just because it provides all manner of savory and sweet refreshments at reasonable prices.
Tea drinking is actually a way of socializing. You can always see at the teahouse small groups of people on weekdays, or big family outings at weekends or holidays.
Alternately enjoying selections from several trays of snacks and sipping cups of tea, they gather there to talk about life and current news topics. This is part of the Guangzhou lifestyle. Taking morning tea, or yum cha, at the teahouse is a regular feature of daily life here, and also a Guangzhou cultural motif.
Cantonese refreshments, or dim sum, are based on Lingnan snacks, and have absorbed the techniques used to make imperial pastries and Western cakes. With more than 2,000 varieties and diverse flavors, Cantonese refreshments lead those of the entire nation.
Most famous are shrimp dumplings, steamed rice noodle rolls, steamed buns stuffed with barbecued roast pork, steamed chicken stuffed with glutinous rice, fried white radish patty, water chestnut cake, and steamed dumpling with pork, mushrooms, and bamboo shoots. Moreover, Cantonese mooncakes are popular at home and also have a high reputation abroad.
To best adapt to local geographic and climatic conditions, the Guangzhou people specialize in soup – a smart innovation – as it both appeases hunger and enhances health. Different combinations of ingredients and herbs perform different functions, such as maintaining youth and beauty, nourishment, and warding off disease.
The Cantonese people’s love of soups is well-known throughout China. Almost every housewife is skilled in this culinary specialty. Anyone whose meal doesn’t include a bowl of soup is to be pitied, as this implies they live in a loveless vacuum.
