Influences from Within and Without

Wang Han, 1333-1378

A great cuisine selects, refines, and combines the best of many influences. While sampling foods in restaurants and homes throughout China, I was impressed by how many common elements and similarities there are between “Chinese” foods and the cuisines of other parts of the world. On the one hand, there are ingredients, dishes, and recipes that I believed had been introduced to China long ago but which are, in fact, of Chinese origin, such as rice. On the other hand, it turns out that there are “traditional” Chinese dishes that were adopted from foreign sources. Tomatoes, for example, are to be found everywhere in China and I assumed that they had always been a part of Chinese cuisine. In fact, tomatoes are a recent introduction having arrived from the Americas barely one hundred years ago. The same is true of such popular ingredients as corn, squash, and chilli peppers, all of which entered China comparatively recently.