Culinary Traditions

In China today, cooks enjoy a professional status. After being trained in cookery schools, then in restaurants, they are graded, and the talented ones rise above the grading to become special chefs. Even though their social status does not match the kind of stardom European, especially French, chefs enjoy, they are recognised as artists in the great Chinese gastronomic tradition, with much to contribute to the other food cultures of the world. This 20th-century phenomenon, however, is in stark contrast to the pattern set up during the previous two thousand years, when cooks were looked down upon as ‘lowly people’. Little wonder then that not much is known about individual Chinese cooks, and written descriptions of their art are few. And yet, paradoxically, in ancient times Chinese cooks seem not only to have enjoyed high social standing, but also to have wielded great political power. Two cooks became ministers at the royal court, one of whom left indelible gastronomic theories upon which the many facets of Chinese cookery are based.