Chinese Crudités

Chinese have little or no attraction to raw vegetables. Partly because of their fascination with transforming the colors and textures of food, partly because of the practice of fertilizing vegetables with “night soil” (human excrement), raw vegetables have played no part in classic Chinese cuisine. Even the poorest of Chinese poets, banished to the tropics with little to do but dapple in rusticity and lyricize its charms, would throw his turnips in boiling water before eating them. To Chine