Cooking of the South

Canton is China’s richest growing area, a subtropical bowl that produces tons and tons of rice and vegetables and fruits including oranges, tangerines, pineapples, and coconuts. Its waters account for one quarter of the country’s total seafood catch and its offshore fish farms abound with prawns and grouper. Canton thus has had the raw materials with which to experiment, to change an existing cuisine. It is also the region which has been most open to Western influences—and even today is the heart of East-West trade—so that such concepts as roasting beef, currying lamb, even making ice cream, came early to Canton.