63 Chinese Cuisines: the Complete Guide

food, china, a succulent chinese meal, cuisine, Cantonese, Sichuan, Shandong, Jiangsu, banquet traditions of imperial China, Big four, Big Eight, Big sixty-three

63 Chinese Cuisines: the Complete Guide

Welcome to the project that drove me to the edge of my sanity.

The Big Eight was never meant to be an exhaustive list of all the cuisines of the country. It was a somewhat haphazard extension of the so-called “Big Four” banquet traditions of imperial China: Cantonese (粤), Sichuan (川), Shandong (鲁), and Jiangsu (苏). The reason why The Big Eight contains Cantonese and not Yunnan isn’t because people in Yunnan don’t have a unique cuisine – it’s because Cantonese had an establish system of banquet presentation that was enjoyed by the merchants and the Mandarins of the Qing dynasty, and Yunnan didn’t.

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Further, I also want to emphasize that we tried to come to this project from a position of humility. How to define the boundary of a ‘cuisine’ is not obvious. I went into (probably overly excruciating) detail about our methodology in the accompanying video, so I won’t re-hash too much of it here. Our rules of thumb were:

  • Passing The 50% Rule. If you’d estimate that more that 50% of the dishes are ‘unique’, and the dishes that remain often have different versions, it’s a separate cuisine.
  • Culinary Self-Determination. Do the people themselves (particularly the food world) make a distinction between cuisines? E.g. people in Louisiana are quick to make a distinction between Cajun food and Creole food, so to us this would be two distinct cuisines - even if the differences may not be overly obvious to an outsider.
  • Failing the ‘Mutual Intelligibility’ test. Imagine an old, talented home cook from one area. Would they be able to recreate a dish from another area solely from taste, without looking anything up?
  • ‘Culinary Continuums’ must be broken somewhere.A little like dialect continuums in linguistics, there can often be small changes in food between neighboring towns and cities - that then morph into large differences if you zoom out and look at either end of the continuum. Boundaries will ultimately arbitrary.

There will likely be a lot of contention about some of these boundaries, and there’s absolutely stuff that we missed. We’re also personally the most familiar with the South of China, so differing opinions and viewpoints are more than welcome.

All we wanted to do was improve on the big eight.

(via Chinese Cooking Demystified )