Home Cooking - Chinese Food (It's a Big Country)

Non-regional discussions Home Cooking
21

conpoy

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22

@robert

But it is 1,000 years older than European food.

23

Itā€™s been a little bit, but if Iā€™m remembering correctly that ā€œbagpipeā€ sound was all guitar with effects.
Fun fact . . . for me at least.

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24

China and Europe both encompass a wide variety of cuisines from a diverse set of cultures with different languages, traditions, geographies, histories, and ingredients.

25

Oh. I did not know that. :smirk:

I think because China has been a unified civilization over a large geographic area for thousands of years, it gave China a stability that Europe only had under the Roman Empire, which ended 1,500 years ago.

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China has a long history, but its borders changed many times and many regions still have distinct cultures, albeit less so than before WWII. Itā€™s a very complicated history.

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It is. I suppose itā€™s time I hit the library. Chinese Civilzation 101A. And an atlas. Then I can venture into food history.

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28

Try the food documentary I linked above as well. I think it kinda does a decent job at attempting to wrap oneā€™s mind around the huge swath of material which encompasses Chinese food.

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29

Europe and China are about the same size. Some regional Chinese dialects are more mutually unintelligible than Italian and French (e.g. Shanghainese and Cantonese), though they all share the same written language.

Xinjiang is as far from Beijing as Lisbon is from Stockholm. While the area has technically been part of China for around 250 years, it has never been part of a unified Chinese civilization. The local Uyghur language is written in Arabic script and over half the population is Muslim.

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30

Okay, back to the library.

It really is a big country.

31

I really like this show. I still need an atlas, but so far I have learned that ā€œmianā€ means ā€œflour foodā€.

I found this version, because the version you linked to had an awful Australian mangling the English language in voice over. The translation on this one is better, too.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PCgYUKPNCug

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32

Thanks for the correct link. I had both youtube windows open on-screen, and was juggling a real-life ice cream cone over the keyboard at the timeā€¦ My bad.

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33

Have you seen All Under Heaven? It came out about a year ago and covers the main cuisines pretty well. I also like Phoenix Claws and Jade Trees.

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34

Thank you! I just requested it at my library.

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You are welcome. I frequently check out new cook books at our library to see if I want to own them. I did with it and it was a keeper.

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Both great books!