Chinese Dragon Tattoo Head Dance Symbol Drawing Pictures Parade Costume Mask Images: Dragon City Chinese Food Chinese Dragon Tattoo Head Dance Symbol Drawing Pictures Parade Costume Mask Images

Thursday, 10 April 2014

Dragon City Chinese Food Chinese Dragon Tattoo Head Dance Symbol Drawing Pictures Parade Costume Mask Images

Dragon City Chinese Food Biography

Source(google.com.pk)

Let’s examine the history of Chinese food and its celestials to find out how this mother cuisine influenced the rest of the world. The cuisine of the first European explorers who reached the new world in 1492 had very little variety or change 24/7, they had almost no regional or national constructs and, since most of the world was illiterate, the few cookbooks in existence were those from antiquity usually written in Latin, Greek or cuneiform. However, in the middle kingdom of the same period, Chinese constructs had been written, first on bamboo, then silk and finally paper, for over 2000 years reflecting some six millennia of chameleon like culinary absorption from other cultures.
Mass printed and distributed wood block printed broad sheets, as the one distributed in 1594 describing the sweet potato’s virtues, planting, harvesting and cooking, [which showed an amazingly rapid adoption of new world crops] had been in use for centuries to promote various historic Chinese foods among the masses and the farmers. For 3500 years scholars, poets, moralists, rulers, politicians and philosophers had been writing treatises detailing the texture, aromas, flavors, colors and pleasures of both royal and plebeian Chinese food and cuisine. One surviving document written 1000 years before the current era, 3000 ago, details and defines the duties of the royal dietitian at a time when the inhabitants of Europe were still digging for roots and harvesting wild greens. The custodians of Chinese cuisine were always willing to embrace new cultivars or foodstuffs that their far-flung enterprises might contact. Stalwart new world examples include the chili pepper, peanut, the earlier mentioned sweet potato and maize which all arrived around the same time but may have taken centuries to adopt. You might also find it surprising to note that today over 20% of China’s population consumes the sweet potato as its major carbohydrate and the tomato is the most popular vegetable in the urban centers of the country. Upon arrival, most of these new world immigrants were usually relegated as marginal crops to the poor but eventually became major Chinese food archetypes both through necessity and government promotion.
We’ll begin our historical investigation of China’s food with a brief climatic survey of that vast country. The North and South have radically different climates that determined both the types and availability of indigenous protein sources and crops grown in antiquity as well as now. The North is comprised of grasslands, mountains and deserts that suffer from sporadic rainfall, cold winters, hot summers and frequent droughts. If you have the Yuan’s your regular menu will feature noodles with pork or mutton supplemented with unleavened breads, beer, peaches, apples and melons. If you are just one of the masses, your meals will be gruels or congees of millet, barley, wheat, corn and sorghum with a sprinkling of preserved vegetables or maybe a little soy sauce. The south in contrast has a temperate climate with seasonal rains that produce plenty of rice along with fresh water and sea fish, poultry and pork. The region produces taro root, eggplant, soy derivatives, various leafy greens and tomatoes and prolific amounts of longans, litchis, mangoes, bananas, and coconuts annually. Migrations due to famine, drought, disease or barbarian threat has always existed in China and in the last 30 years, an estimated 400 million people have moved to urban areas from the countryside bringing their culture and cuisine. Famine has long been one of China’s major problems and in the last 150 years, it has claimed over 60 million people. Only in the last few years has the country been relatively famine free even though this does not preclude a diet of just rice, sweet potatoes, or congee for much of the population.
The first domesticated protein sources in China were the Chow purple/blue tongued dog and the pig both being farmed around 6000 BCE. Until recently pork, as it was in antiquity, is at the top of the Chinese food pyramid and it comprises 70% of all the animal protein consumed annually. On a classic Chinese menu in China, unless otherwise noted, all the featured items are made with pork. The written character or rune for pork and meat are the same and the symbol for house or family is a pig under a roof. The penchant for pig is easy to understand; the fertile porker can produce litters of twelve, it’s can be raised in the smallest of spaces on a limited diet of scraps and waste and leaves almost no footprint at its demise. Lard is the dietary fat of choice, with duck running second, for the majority of the populace although the more affluent rely on Western oils like corn, soy or hydrogenated vegetable oil. Per capita pork consumption for 2006 was about 4 ounces a day for those who can afford it but these figures are somewhat skewed since the vast majority eat little meat of any kind and it’s hard to track production and consumption figures in the rural hinterlands. It’s of interest that many food anthropologists propose that this preference for pork may have slowed the Muslim spread in China’s early history.