China

The west has been infatuated with Chinese cuisine for decades. Stir-fry sauces line our supermarket shelves and dim sum restaurants are packed with foodies who have mastered the art of eating with chopsticks – to a degree, at least!

But many of the dishes we know and love bear only a passing resemblance to the food served in China itself. Authentic Chinese cuisine is steeped in tradition. In a country with such a rich and extensive history, eight different regional cuisines rise above the rest. These are known as ‘the eight cuisines’ and they owe their differences to the geographic variations across China. Food eaten in villages hidden among the peaks of misty mountains is vastly different to that enjoyed in cities surrounded by lush forest. Similarly, the different ethnic groups and cultures have their own food cultures as well. Light and perfumed Cantonese cuisine is perhaps the most popular of the eight and is what most of us associate with Chinese food from takeaways or in dim sum restaurants. Sichuanese food, bold and feisty, is also renowned, laced with fiery chillies and mouth-numbing Sichuan peppercorns.