Ancient Chinese food
When you think of Chinese food you think of rice, and rice
was the first grain that was farmed in China. There is archaeological
evidence of rice farming along the Yang-tse River as early as about
5000 BC. People cooked rice by boiling
it in water, the way they do today. Or they made it into wine.
Rice wine has been popular in China since prehistory.
But rice doesn't grow in northern China, which is much drier and
colder. People in northern China gathered wild millet
and sorghum instead. By 4500 BC, people in northern China were farming
millet. They ate it boiled into a kind of porridge.
Another food people associate with China is tea. Tea grows wild
in China. By about 3000 BC (or it could be much earlier), people
in China had begun to drink tea. Soon everybody drank tea.
Wheat was not native to China,
so it took much longer to reach China. People in northern China
first began to eat wheat in the Shang
Dynasty, about 1500 BC. Wheat was not native to China, but people
brought it to China from West
Asia. People in China boiled it like millet, to make something
like Cream of Wheat.
These were the main foods of China - rice, millet, sorghum, and
wheat. In northern China, people mostly ate millet, wheat, and sorghum.
In southern China, people mostly ate rice. Poor people ate almost
nothing but these foods.
When people could afford it, they bought or grew vegetables to put
on their rice. Soybeans, for instance, are native to China. So are
cucumbers. For fruits, the Chinese had oranges and lemons, peaches
and apricots. The native flavorings are ginger and anise (Americans
use anise to make licorice).
On special occasions, people also put little pieces of meat on their
rice. By 5500 BC, the Chinese were eating domesticated chicken,
which came originally from Thailand. By 4000 or 3000 BC, they were
eating pork, which was native
to China. Sheep and cattle,
which were not native, reached China from West Asia also around
4000 BC.
Since meat was so expensive, and because Buddhists
didn't eat meat, starting around the Sung
Dynasty (about 1000 AD) people also put tofu,
or bean curd, in their food as a source of protein.
Because China doesn't have big forests,
it was always hard to find fuel to cook with. Chinese people learned
to cut up their food very small, so it would cook quickly on a very
small fire.
During the Han Dynasty, millet
wine became very popular and was even more popular to drink than
tea. Also beginning in the Han Dynasty, about 100 AD,
Chinese people began to make their wheat and rice into long
noodles.
Marco Polo, a visitor to China from Venice,
wrote that by the time of Kublai
Khan, about 1200 AD, Chinese people ate millet boiled in milk
to make porridge. Even as late as 1200 AD, Chinese people did not
bake bread.
Here is a video of some Chinese kids eating with chopsticks:
To find out more about Chinese food, check out this book from Amazon.com or from your library:
Moonbeams, Dumplings & Dragon Boats: A Treasury of Chinese Holiday Tales, Activities & Recipes, by Nina Simonds and others (Children's Museum of Boston, 2002).
The Young Chef's Chinese Cookbook (I'm the Chef), by Frances Lee (2001). Fifteen easy recipes for kids, with pictures. Shows how Chinese food fits into Chinese culture.
The
Food of China, by E.N. Anderson (reprinted 1990). Not for kids,
but it explains the history of food in China.
Indian food
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Main China page
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