When I studied Mandarin, a couple of years ago, I had
to read dialogues in that language. Among
the topic of the conversations, perhaps one of the most interesting for me was
food.
Reading dialogues in Chinese, there were always
mentions to exotic foods that caught my attention. In that time, I was living
in Venezuela, where there were options of Chinese food, but not that many to
include the ones I was reading about in my Mandarin classes.
Now that I live in Toronto, Canada, I started to taste
different kinds of food. When I visited Chinese restaurants, I found foods
different than the ones I knew from South America. But then I started to search for those foods I
read about before.
Time and a better knowledge of Toronto allowed me to
find at least 2 of those traditional foods from China.
One
of them is called东坡肉 (Dōng
pō ròu), also known as “Dongpo Pork”. In the page http://www.cultural-china.com/chinaWH/html/en/History147bye580.html
explains that according to a legend, under the leadership of the poet Su
Dongpo, who was also a local official in Hangzhou, he ordered to cook some pork.
By mistake, pork and a rice wine called白酒 (Bái jiŭ) or烧酒 (Shāo jiŭ) were cooked together. The flavor was
so good that this dish remains until today as one of the traditional foods from
Zhejiang Cuisine. Below is a picture of this dish that I found in Toronto.
Another dish is香酥鸭 (Xiāng sū Yā) or Crispy Smokey Duck. This
is a simple but delicious dish from Sichuan Food (川菜 = Chuān cài) Below, a picture of this dish
can be seen.
This dish is related with the Beijing Duck, 北京烤鸭 (Bĕijīng Kăoyā). More info can be seen in
the Internet
