Complementary Flavours

The principle of complementary flavours is a fundamental one, very difficult to put into practice or to innovate upon. Too many encounters with bad cooking may give one the impression that in Chinese cooking all ingredients may be mixed indiscriminately. They sometimes are, but the resulting confusion was not meant to be. The matching of flavours follows a set pattern and is formal, not casual, though people differ on how flavours should be matched. Cantonese cooks like to mix contrasting colours and unrelated textures. Their dishes are rather garish according to Peking taste, which prefers the matching of like to like. Some wish the flavour of each ingredient to be preserved, but the pièce de résistance of Amoy cooking (Popia) depends on the fusion of flavours. Often the contrasts are very subtle, but they are perfectly definite. In other cases the contrasts are sharp. The bitter is matched with the sweet, the bland with the piquant, the acrid with the unctuous. The putting together of the different flavours (tiaowei) is itself an art. It is rather like creating chords in music, harmony through precise differences.