Staple ingredients

Only the very finest delicacies were fed to the Emperor and his court, so food was imported to Beijing from the fertile south. Extravagant ingredients such as birds’ nests, sharks’ fins and abalone were favourites. Other regional specialties used local ingredients such as carp, king prawns and yellow croakers.

Cooking style

Style evolved over time, but the food always represented the best of the era. Using the wok for stir-frying was introduced in the Han dynasty, while tea became the national drink during the Tang dynasty. The Song dynasty was famous for its ostentatious banquets and rivers of wine, while Kublai Khan and the Mongolian emperors simplified things with nomadic influences. By the time of the last dynasty, the imperial culinary rituals were an established blend of all the previous eras. Today, though the Imperial dynasties are gone, their legacy is still apparent in Chinese cuisine.

Peking duck

Beijing is home to one of the best known Chinese dishes, Peking duck. This is an imperial meal of conker brown, crisp-skinned meat wrapped in pancakes with plum sauce and shreds of cucumber and spring onion. The duck (a variety local to Beijing) is pumped with air, hung to dry and brushed with a sweet marinade before being roasted over fragrant wood chips. A dish fit for an emperor.

Regional specialties

Mongolian hotpot and Peking duck are the imperial specialties you are most likely to come across outside China. Other banqueting dishes rather less well suited the foreign palate include sharks’ fin soup, golden toads, fish lips, thousand layer cakes and bird’s nest soup made from the pre-digested seaweed that swallows use to build their nests.

Try some recipes
• Duck soup with ginseng
• Clams in chicken soup
• Sweet and sour pork with water chestnuts