The Chiu Chow and the Hakka

The Cantonese kitchen is sufficiently large and all-encompassing to include the cooking of two nearby cuisines, those of the Chiu Chow and the Hakka, both in southern Guangdong Province. Although neither is extensive enough or varied enough to be considered a school of cookery, there are regional peculiarities that make them important aspects of the cooking of Canton.

The Hakka, the so-called guest people of China, have been that vast country’s traditional wanderers. Dynasties ago they lived well in the north, but because they were different—taller, with pronounced cheekbones—they became the object of varying degrees of prejudice and thus began a forced migration that took them south as far as Canton and the New Territories between China and Hong Kong. There they came to rest. They are easily recognizable by their black cotton pajamalike clothes and the wide-brimmed fringed hats they wear.