Flavour: French Vs. Chinese Cooking

If you ever take a cookery class in France, the first thing you’ll learn is how to prepare a mirepoix - a fancy word for onion, carrots and celery all diced and sautéed in butter. It’s sometimes referred to as the ‘holy trinity’ because of its ubiquity as a base in classic sauces, soups and stews. In Italy, they may add tomatoes and peppers too (and call it a soffritto) but the principle is the same: to create a base of sautéed vegetables that flavour can be layered on top of. The foundation of Western cooking is patience - slowly cooking vegetables and meat until they develop into something rich and complex.

But this technique is nowhere to be found in the Chinese kitchen. Slow cooking is rarely the go-to method, and certainly not onion, carrots and celery. Garlic, ginger and scallions are the closest equivalent to an Asian ‘holy trinity’, but Chinese cooking is not really comparable to French cuisine. A number of dishes in French cooking start with onions, carrots and celery and yet the end results could be vastly different - a tomato soup, a coq au vin and a beef bourguignon do not taste similar at all.

Chinese cooking does not layer in the same way, nor do the same three ingredients appear over and over. Chinese cuisine tends to rely on contrasting flavours - we’re probably all familiar with sweet and sour, but you’ll also find hot and sour, sweet and salty, spicy and numbing, sweet and spicy, or in a traditional banquet, contrasting flavours across dishes - a cleansing soup or congee alongside sour pickles, salty soy-sauce vegetables and fragrant-sauced meat.

French cooking sounds somewhat boring in comparison. We describe a successful beurre blanc as rich and creamy or an onion soup as hearty. Depth of flavour in the form of richness is what we look for in French cooking, whereas we describe Chinese dishes as clean, fresh, alive, spicy, fragrant, numbing. The idea of one dish per person is also perplexing to a Chinese diner. Why would you want to eat the same flavour and texture for a whole meal? In my local Italian restaurant in Beijing, we frequently see couples ordering five, six, seven main courses, piles of food stacked on their table because that’s the preferred way to eat (the bill must be monstrous).

Over thousands of years these two spectacular cuisines innovated in completely separate ways. They were too far apart to be influenced by each other. Instead, inspiration came from the produce at their fingertips and the landscape around them, and in the case of China, creatively cooking at times when fuel was scarce.