Cuisine

Cantonese

广东菜

Cantonese cooking is judged by whether the ingredient still tastes like itself after it leaves the wok or steamer. Wok hei is the faint scorch you get when food meets a properly hot carbon-steel pan. Steaming is a daily method for fish, dim sum and rice porridge. Chicken congee is rice cooked past the grain into a soft savoury soup, finished with ginger and spring onion. Char siu is pork roasted with a maltose-and-fermented-bean glaze until the edges catch. Light soy, oyster sauce and a little sugar season without burying the produce.

The Pearl River Delta's produce and seafood, plus a long restaurant culture in Guangzhou and Hong Kong, set the style. Diaspora Cantonese kitchens taught much of the English-speaking world what it thought 'Chinese food' was: roast meats, stir-fried greens, steamed fish, yum cha. Xiaolongbao — soup dumplings — are Jiangnan/Shanghai work that often sit beside Cantonese roast pork on overseas menus; they are not a Cantonese dumpling. Char siu and congee are the Cantonese plates in this kitchen; the soup dumpling is a neighbour.

High heat, short time, or gentle steam. Sauces stay thin. Seafood is often steamed with ginger and spring onion. Roasting is a shop craft of glaze and drip. Chicken congee should taste of rice and chicken, not of starch glue. Char siu should be sweet-savoury and a little charred, not candy-red throughout. This is not Sichuan mala and not a generic national Chinese flavour.