Hunan Cuisine (Part 3)
Hunan Cuisine (Part 3)
Dear friends:
Just now, while savoring Hunan cuisine, we learned about the historical, geographical, and cultural environment that gave rise to it. I believe that through my explanation, you now understand the general reasons why Hunan people—and many others today—love Hunan cuisine. It is therefore not hard to understand why Hunan people are not afraid of spiciness, why Hunan cuisine has endured for thousands of years without decline, and why it continues to show a thriving trend of development. To give you a comprehensive understanding and a complete impression of Hunan cuisine, I will now introduce its three major schools and their flavor characteristics within the context of Huxiang culture.
Dear friends, as you know, everything that exists has a climate, environment, and soil suited to it. As mentioned earlier, the emergence and development of Hunan cuisine formed its own characteristics based on Hunan's specific geographical environment, local products, and style. Based on geographical environment and local products, Hunan cuisine in terms of cooking can be roughly divided into three major flavor schools: the Xiangjiang River basin, the Dongting Lake area, and the mountainous region of southwestern Hunan.
The Xiangjiang River basin centers on Changsha, Xiangtan, and Hengyang, with Changsha as its representative. Because this region was relatively developed in politics, economy, and culture, and had convenient transportation and abundant products, the catering industry was relatively advanced, and master chefs emerged in large numbers. Most of the distinctive banquet dishes in Hunan cuisine came from this regional school. Its characteristics include a wide range of ingredients, fine preparation, and particular attention to knife skills and heat control. The dishes prepared are clearly differentiated in richness and lightness, with distinct colors. Common cooking methods include simmering, stewing, curing, steaming, stir-frying, quick-frying, roasting, and flash-frying. In terms of taste, they are mainly sour and spicy, tender and soft, fragrant and fresh, light, or richly aromatic. Representative dishes include "Fire-Cured Silverfish," "Squirrel Mandarin Fish," "Scallop with Garlic Cloves," "Spicy Tender Chicken," "Duck Web Soup with Pork Tripe," "Stir-Fried Fine Beef Tripe," "Red-Simmered Abalone," and "Clear-Stewed Beef." For example, "Spicy Tender Chicken," created during the Tongzhi reign of the Qing Dynasty, uses tender chicken native to Hunan as its main ingredient, cooked with small red chili peppers, Sichuan peppercorn powder, soy sauce, fragrant vinegar, MSG, sesame oil, garlic, and other seasonings. The dish has a bright red color and a unique flavor that is spicy, numbing, fragrant, and fresh, crispy outside and tender inside—an excellent dish to accompany meals and drinks. "Duck Web Soup with Pork Tripe" uses pork tripe tips and duck webs as main ingredients, with button mushrooms and pea shoots as supplementary ingredients, and cooking wine, clear chicken broth, stock, pepper powder, chicken oil, and other seasonings, carefully prepared. The tripe tips are crisp and tender, and the soup is clear and delicious. These two dishes are most famous for being prepared at the century-old Changsha restaurant Yuloudong. To this day, Changsha still circulates the folk rhyme: "Spicy tender chicken and soup-soaked tripe, make one often remember Yuloudong."
"Red-Simmered Abalone" uses rehydrated dried abalone as the main ingredient, with fat hen chicken and pork belly as supplementary ingredients, and lard, cooking wine, soy sauce, rock sugar, pepper powder, scallions, ginger, sesame oil, and other seasonings. It is carefully prepared for over two hours. The dish is fragrant, rich, and delicious—one of the great banquet dishes. This dish has always been a traditional Changsha Hunan cuisine, and was most famous for the version prepared by the renowned Changsha chef Song Shanzhai (founder of the Xiaoxiang Restaurant) in the 1920s.
"Stir-Fried Fine Beef Tripe" uses beef tripe as the main ingredient, with tender winter bamboo shoots, small red chili peppers, and yellow chives as supplementary ingredients, and lard, cooking wine, white vinegar, chicken broth, sesame oil, and other seasonings. It is quickly stir-fried over high heat and thickened with starch. This dish is finely made, with meticulous cutting—thin as a hair, white as silver thread, and brightly colored. Its taste is fragrant and spicy, crisp and tender, slightly sour, and extremely refreshing—one never tires of eating it. It is a uniquely styled Hunan dish. Along with "Braised Beef Tendons" and "Beef Marrow," it is known as one of the "Three Beef Treasures," all signature dishes of the century-old Changsha Halal restaurant "Li Hesheng." The "Three Beef Treasures" are exquisitely prepared. The hair-thin beef tripe must be selected from the wrinkled inner wall of the beef stomach, cut thin as hair, attractive in color, sour and spicy in taste, crisp and tender in texture, with all five flavors—sour, spicy, salty, fresh, and crisp—present at the entrance. Braised Beef Tendons uses beef tendons, refined with cinnamon bark, Shaoxing wine, scallion sections, ginger slices, and other ingredients—soft, glutinous, and delicious, with a fresh and fragrant taste. The famous playwright Tian Han, when in Hunan, had a special affection for the "Three Beef Treasures" at Li Hesheng Beef Restaurant. One day, when Tian Han was drinking with the famous Xiangxiang scholar Deng Youyuan, Deng, in his cups, blurted out a couplet: "Muslims jointly open a beef restaurant." Tian Han immediately responded: "Boss Li warmly entertains the drinkers of Xiang." This neatly incorporated the three characters "Li Hesheng." Li was overjoyed and brought brush and inkstone, asking Tian Han to inscribe it as a memento—a story that has been passed down as a favorite anecdote.
"Zilong Sheds His Robe" is a traditional Hunan dish using eel as its main ingredient. Because the eel must undergo procedures such as gutting, deboning, beheading, and skinning during preparation—especially the skinning, which resembles an ancient warrior shedding his robe—the dish was named "Zilong Sheds His Robe." Before Liberation, when Li Zongren served as Acting President of the Republic of China, he once hosted a grand banquet at the Nanjing branch of Quyuan, and at the table he praised "Zilong Sheds His Robe" endlessly. As a result, Quyuan became famous throughout the ancient capital of Jinling. "Zilong Sheds His Robe" is not only unique in its preparation but also novel and intriguing in name, constantly attracting many notable figures. For example, Qi Baishi, Wu Han, and Tian Han all visited Quyuan to taste this dish. After Liberation, the old chefs of Quyuan were even summoned to Zhongnanhai to demonstrate their skills for Chairman Mao Zedong. Today, it is only available by reservation at the Furong Hall of the Youyicun Restaurant.
"Fire-Cured Silverfish" was best prepared by Xiao Ronghua, the most renowned chef in Changsha in the early Republic of China. Xiao Ronghua opened the Feiyushang Restaurant on Lixiang Street in Changsha. Because the establishment was elegant and the dishes delicious, business flourished. At that time, when Governor Zhao Hengti was drafting the provincial constitution, candidates competing for provincial assembly seats all vied to reserve tables at this restaurant to entertain guests and canvass votes. Everyone considered tasting Xiao Ronghua's personally prepared famous dishes—such as "Fire-Cured Silverfish," "Sea Cucumber with Crispy Rice," "Milk Soup with Beef Tendons," and "Fresh Flower Mushrooms with Eggless Egg"—the greatest culinary treat. "Squirrel Mandarin Fish" was one of the signature dishes of Chen Pangzi, chef at the Quyuan restaurant on Zoumalou in Changsha. Chen was a favored disciple of Xiao Ronghua, inherited his master's full legacy, and even developed it further. Besides the many dishes passed down by Xiao Ronghua, his specialty was "Scallop with Garlic Cloves" and "Squirrel Mandarin Fish." Both dishes have now become signature dishes at hotels and restaurants throughout Hunan.
Among the famous dishes of Hunan cuisine, the earliest documented in historical records is "Dong'an Zi Chicken." As far back as the Kaiyuan era of Emperor Xuanzong of Tang (713–741 CE), the people of Dong'an in Hunan began preparing a highly distinctive Dong'an chicken—"Vinegar Chicken"—which has a history of nearly 1,300 years. It was later introduced to Changsha in the late Qing and early Republic, and through the promotion of official diners, became a famous banquet dish. Tang Shengzhi, a valiant general of the Hunan Army and a native of Dong'an County, also loved chicken, especially large fat chickens weighing three jin. His way of eating was different: although he also enjoyed spiciness, he disliked using too many ingredients, preferring only fragrant mushrooms, and he favored braised preparation. The chicken was beheaded and de-footed, using only the breast and legs, braised until glossy red. The wings and feet were cooked separately in clear soup as another dish—one chicken, two preparations—known as Dong'an Chicken. This dish is beautiful in presentation, bright in color, rich in nutrition, and has six major characteristics: fragrant, sweet, sour, spicy, crisp, and tender. It makes one's mouth water just smelling it, and one never tires of eating it. Therefore, restaurants and eateries throughout Hunan vied to prepare this dish to meet market demand, and it gradually spread domestically and internationally. With its unique flavor, it enjoys great renown and has become one of the signature dishes of Hunan cuisine.
Among the Hunan cuisine schools of the Xiangjiang River basin, the Nanyue vegetarian cuisine belonging to the traditional Buddhist vegetarian series is also renowned for its distinctive character. Since it will be specially introduced in the Nanyue vegetarian section, I will only mention it briefly here.
In the Dongting Lake area, crisscrossed by waterways—a land of rivers and lakes—fishing and farming families commonly use aquatic plants and animals as ingredients, often employing boiling, braising, and steaming methods. The dishes are fresh and natural, without ostentation. Especially the "fisherman's dishes" and steaming pot stove specialties are filled with rustic pastoral flavors.
The Dongting Lake area, centered on Changde, Yiyang, and Yueyang, has long been known as the "land of fish and rice," with particularly abundant aquatic product resources. The Tang poet Li Shangyin, in his poem "Dongting Fish," praised: "Dongting fish can be picked up, no need to cast nets again; bustling as ants before rain, numerous as flies after autumn. Who would think of scales as mats, or consider bellies as lamps? On the vast celestial pond road, they soar and transform into rocs." As the saying goes, "Those near the mountains live off the mountains; those near the water live off the water." The abundance of aquatic resources led to a long tradition of fish dishes in these areas. Treating guests with fish became a folk custom, so the people here are most skilled at cooking poultry, game, and river seafood. Even local gazetteers record that "among the lakes and rivers of Hunan, when guests gather for banquets, clear fish soup is served," and there is a folk proverb: "No fish, no feast." Cooking whole fish was anciently called "the skill of slaughtering dragons." During the Spring and Autumn period, Zhuan Zhu of the State of Wu learned "whole fish roasting" from Taihe Gong at Lake Tai. The Tang poet Du Fu wrote: "Green bamboo shoots come out to greet the boat, day after day river fish come to the table," greatly praising fish dishes. The Song literary giant Su Dongpo often personally "cooked fish soup to entertain guests, and guests never failed to praise it." This cultural and historical influence undoubtedly promoted the development of Hunan fish dishes and further enriched their profound connotations. Lakeside cooking commonly uses stewing, braising, curing, simmering, steaming, and blanching methods. Dishes tend to be rich in color, thick in sauce, and heavy in oil, with tastes predominantly salty, spicy, fragrant, and soft. Representative dishes include "Xiaoxiang Five-Element Turtle," "Wuling Soft-Shelled Turtle Skirt and Legs," "Dongting Wild Duck," "Lotus Seed Shrimp Paste," "Green Dragon Plays with Pearl," and "Butterflies Crossing the Sea." The most distinctive is "Butterflies Crossing the Sea."
"Butterflies Crossing the Sea," also known as "Snakehead Fish Crossing the Sea," is a traditional popular famous dish of the lake region. The method of blanching slices in boiling water for dipping originally came from Dongting fishermen. Later, because of its unique flavor and the aesthetic pleasure it provides, it became an indispensable dish on the "Baling Whole Fish Banquet." This dish evolved from the folk tradition of cooking fish in stewing pots. The Dongting Lake area has long had the custom of using a seven-star stove—popularly called a "steaming pot stove"—to cook fish. Often, a family or close friends would sit around the stove, eating, cooking, adding ingredients, drinking, and chatting, deepening family bonds and friendships amid the blazing fire and rising steam. There is even a local folk rhyme: "I'd rather not be an imperial son-in-law in the palace, as long as the stewing pot stove goes gurgle-gurgle-gah." Restaurants and taverns mostly use hot pots to prepare this dish. The main ingredient is snakehead fish native to Dongting Lake. After removing the skin, innards, fins, bones, head, and skeleton, leaving only the pure flesh of the body, the fish is cut into thin slices using a cross-cutting technique, and the slices naturally form butterfly shapes. The removed skin, head, bones, and fins are then simmered into a broth. Clear broth is taken into a stewing pot, and bean sprouts, mushrooms, ham slices, silverfish, and seasonings such as minced ginger, soy sauce, refined salt, MSG, sesame oil, chopped scallions, and chili are added. The pot is placed on a small stove and brought to a boil. Raw fish slices are dropped in from one side, briefly blanched, and quickly scooped out from the other side—like pairs of butterflies crossing the ocean. Hence the name. The dish has an elegant and distinctive name. The soup is clear and the meat white, extremely fresh and tender—a prized delicacy at banquets and a winter delicacy. It is tender, smooth, and crisp to eat, refreshing without being greasy, combining freshness and fragrance, sweet and mellow. It is both a traditional snack for locals in their daily lives and a must-try signature dish for tourists visiting Yueyang.
The dish that most comprehensively reflects the characteristics of the lake region's water towns is the "Whole Fish Banquet." Legend has it that when Emperor Qianlong of the Qing Dynasty toured Jiangnan, he passed through Yueyang and tasted a banquet prepared by local Baling folk chefs using fish as the main ingredient. He praised it endlessly and bestowed the name "Baling Whole Fish Banquet." The "Whole Fish Banquet" is made by carefully combining and cooking various fish and lake delicacies from Dongting Lake. There are over ninety optional dishes, typically selecting ten to twenty dishes to form the banquet. Representative dishes include "Steamed Xenocypris with Soy Paste," "Red-Simmered Soft-Shelled Turtle," "Lotus Root Threads with Silverfish," "Pan-Fried Bream with Scallions," "Tile-Cut Carp," "Crispy Crucian Carp," "Frozen Fish Gelatin (Crystal Fish Jelly)," "Yellow-Braised Grass Carp," "Deep-Fried Black Carp," "Clear-Stewed Loach," "Mushroom Eel," "Steamed Whole Soft-Shelled Turtle," "Bamboo Tube Steamed Fish," "Goldfish Playing with Lotus" (shaped platter), "Five-Color Fish Floss," "Silver Needle Chicken Broth Fish Slices," "Green Pea Shrimp," "Chicken Mince with Fish Maw," "Spicy Crispy Fish," "Fish Fat with Hunan Lotus Seed Sweet Paste," "Winter Bamboo Shoot Fish Sandwiches," "Lotus Petal Fresh Fish Lips," "Fish Noodle Silver Thread Rolls" (pastry), and more. There is also "One Fish Five Ways": quick-fried fish slices, braised fish cubes, stir-fried fish shreds, steamed fish balls, and braised fish rolls. Every dish and pastry uses fish as an ingredient. The main ingredients are meticulously selected, mostly tender and fatty freshwater fish, loach, turtle, soft-shelled turtle, eel, etc. Supplementary ingredients are also local products such as lotus root, lotus seed, bamboo shoots, mushrooms, and lily. More than thirty Jiangnan-style seasonings are used, including ginger, scallions, garlic, dried chili, pepper, and pickled vegetables. Cooking methods number over twenty, including steaming, braising, pan-frying, stir-frying, simmering, stewing, crisping, quick-frying, deep-frying, and jellying. The culinary artistry is ingenious in form, color, aroma, and taste, emphasizing harmony and unity while ensuring that form, color, flavor, and technique all differ. Some dishes even achieve the effect of letting diners eat fish without seeing fish, and taste its flavor without seeing its form. The entire banquet features thousands of shapes, vivid and lifelike; its colors are vibrant and pleasing to the eye; its aromas are rich and mellow, with lasting appeal; its tastes are fresh and tender, suitable to the palate, with endless aftertaste. It fully demonstrates the flavor characteristics of the lakeside school of cuisine and is a brilliant pearl in the artistry of Hunan cuisine. Its fame spreads not only throughout China but also overseas. For example, Japan—known as a maritime nation and skilled in seafood cuisine—has sent chef delegations from two renowned restaurants in Tokyo and Kyoto's Ginza to Yueyang specifically to taste and learn to prepare the Whole Fish Banquet.
In the mountainous region of southwestern Hunan and among the Miao, Yao, Dong, Tujia, and other ethnic minorities living there, mountain wild vegetables and cured products are commonly used. The dishes appear rough and simple but are rustic and genuine, with a rich and hearty mountain flavor. The local products of these areas are mostly mountain delicacies and game. With Han Chinese and ethnic minorities living together, folk customs include making various smoked and cured meats and pickled meat products. Most cooked dishes are also based on these, with main cooking methods being steaming, stewing, simmering, boiling, stir-frying, and deep-frying. Examples include "Steamed Assorted Cured Meats," "Double Ninth Festival Cold Mushroom Stewed Pork," and "Deep-Fried Loach." The flavors are salty, fragrant, sour, and spicy. Paired with traditionally brewed rice wine from the mountain communities, they leave an endless aftertaste.
"Double Ninth Festival Cold Mushroom Stewed Pork" is a seasonal dish. The main ingredient, cold mushroom, is a specialty of Hunan's mountain areas. Every year during the ninth lunar month, when temperatures gradually turn cold, tender fat mushrooms emerge from the forest floor. Because of the folk saying "On the ninth day of the ninth month, move the fire into the room," they are called "cold mushrooms," also known as "Double Ninth cold mushrooms." Since this coincides with wild geese flying south from the north, they are also called "wild goose mushrooms." At this time, the mushrooms are tender, smooth, and exceptionally delicious. Whether braised or stewed in soup, they are suitable—a uniquely flavored delicacy of Hunan cuisine not found elsewhere.
Although "Steamed Assorted Cured Meats" later became one of the common specialty dishes of all regions and schools of Hunan cuisine, its origin should be traced to the ancient mountain areas. Hunan, with its subtropical climate, has very high air humidity. Ordinary foods, if not processed promptly, easily become moldy and spoil. Under the conditions of a natural economy, people's daily life improvements mainly depended on slaughtering pigs at year's end, commonly called "slaughtering the New Year pig." The slaughtered poultry and livestock often had to last a whole year, so they had to be processed quickly for preservation. The most common processing methods were: curing the slaughtered livestock or captured wild animals and fish and shrimp with salt or wine lees. The former was called "salted meat," the latter "wine-lees meat." These meats, placed in containers, would gradually ferment and turn sour—this is the traditional food of western Hunan folk called "sour meat," "sour fish," and the like. After brief curing, they were taken out and air-dried naturally—this is what Qu Yuan's poems recorded as "exposed chicken" and similar items. Further processing involved smoking to become cured products. The term "cured" refers to the twelfth lunar month. Because the twelfth month is near the New Year, temperatures are lower and air humidity relatively lower. Preserving and smoking meat at this time meant the meat was less likely to spoil during processing, and the smoked finished product could be stored for years without deteriorating. Therefore, in the twelfth lunar month, every household slaughtered pigs and sheep, cured chickens and smoked fish—a bustling scene that became a major spectacle of the mountain folk's New Year customs.
"Steamed Assorted Cured Meats" is a product of this social culture. Cured meat is mostly smoked around the "Winter Solstice" solar term, and its production areas span all of Hunan. The traditional method is: after curing fresh pork with salt, smoke it using sawdust, rice husks, peanut shells, sesame shells, and other fuels, utilizing the residual heat of the stove with cold smoke. The finished product has a yellow-black surface, fat that resembles cured meat, lean meat that is orange-red, a firm texture, tender meat with crispy skin, and a rich smoky fragrance with a unique flavor—comparable to "Jinhua Ham" and "Yunnan Ham." Among the people, there is no fixed combination of meats for "Steamed Assorted Cured Meats"; rather, it is assembled based on whatever meats the family has on hand. Generally, cured pork is indispensable, supplemented by cured fish, cured chicken, cured duck, etc., and steamed together with fermented black beans and chili. The aromas of multiple cured meat products blend together. The dish is deep red in color, soft without being greasy, rich in cured fragrance, savory and sweet—one of the traditional Hunan famous dishes suitable for both family meals and banquets. In addition, the mountain areas of Hunan have many traditional specialty flavor dishes, especially the home-style dishes of ethnic minorities, such as "Braised Whole Dog" and "Casserole Stewed Dog Meat." Under the impact of today's social trend of returning to nature and getting close to rural life, introducing these specialty rural dishes to attract diners has become a bright new landscape in the catering industry of large and medium-sized cities.
The best reflection of the mountain region's flavor characteristics is the large-scale local flavor banquet "Hunan Smoked, Roasted, and Cured Whole Banquet." The banquet includes the main flavor dishes and delicacies of Hunan's mountain areas (and a small portion from other regions), famed for their smoked, roasted, and cured characteristics. It includes: One decorative platter: "Dongting Junshan"; Eight flavor dishes: "Smoked Cured Tripe Slices," "Gold and Silver Grilled Liver," "Pickled Chinese Leek Bulbs," "Crispy Spiced Gizzards," "Salt-Baked Beef," "Five-Spice Smoked Fish," "Scallion-Roasted Turtle Dove," "Sesame Bean Curd Sticks"; Four sweet fruits: "Honeyed Water Caltrop," "Seedless Hunan Tangerine," "Sweet and Sour Lotus Root," "Frosted Waxberry"; Four hot stir-fries: "Yellow Chive Chicken
Shreds," "Tender Ginger Duck Strips," "Celery Cured Sausage," "Cured Meat with Winter Bamboo Shoots"; Six main dishes: "Steamed Assorted Cured Meats," "Brush Pot Squid," "Shrimp with Sea Cucumber Cubes," "Red-Simmered Cured Mutton," "Cured Sausage with Mushrooms," "Braised Whole Dog"; One soup dish: "Snow Mountain Hidden Treasure"; Two savory pastries: "Mandarin Duck Puff Pastry Boxes," "Pearl Oil Cakes"; Two sweet pastries: "Double Happiness Cake," "Hibiscus Glutinous Rice Cakes"; One tea snack: "Ginger-Salt Soybean Sesame Tea."
Dear friends, this concludes the explanation of Hunan cuisine. As a component of Chinese culinary culture and Huxiang culture, Hunan cuisine has undergone thousands of years of historical accumulation. Its connotations are broad and profound, and cannot be fully explained in such a simple manner. But I hope that through this explanation, you have gained a general understanding of Hunan cuisine, of Hunan, and of the enterprising spirit of the Hunan people. Thank you all!