Jiangsu Food & Traditional Cuisine

Jiangsu is the home of Huaiyang cooking, one of the four great Chinese culinary traditions and the one historically served at the imperial court and at state banquets.

Where Sichuan is about bold layered heat, Huaiyang is about restraint and technique. The emphasis is on the intrinsic flavour of the ingredient, on clear soups and light braises, on a mild natural sweetness, and above all on knife work — the cutting is a display skill in itself, and dishes exist principally to demonstrate it.

The larder is freshwater: fish, eel, shrimp, crab and lotus root from the delta’s rivers and lakes, along with the vegetables of a wet, fertile plain and pork.

The hairy crab from Yangcheng lake is the region’s great seasonal obsession, eaten for a few weeks in autumn at prices that rise with the reputation of the lake.

Sweetness is used more than in northern cooking and less than in Shanghai’s, and it is meant to round rather than dominate.

Wensi tofu is the knife-work dish: a block of soft tofu sliced into several thousand threads finer than hair, which then float apart in a clear broth. It cannot be done with a blunt knife or a slow hand, and watching a chef do it is the point.

Hairy crab — dazhaxie — steamed whole and eaten with ginger vinegar, in season for a few weeks around October and November. The roe is what is prized, there is a traditional set of eight small tools for eating one, and a lake-certified crab costs a great deal.

Squirrel-shaped mandarin fish, scored deeply so the flesh opens into spines when fried, then dressed in a sweet-sour sauce — Suzhou’s show dish.

Lion’s head meatballs, large pork meatballs braised slowly until they barely hold together, in clear broth with cabbage.

Yangzhou fried rice, which in its home city is a careful dish of separate grains with shrimp, ham and egg, and bears little relation to what the name means abroad.

Also: crab roe soup dumplings; salted duck from Nanjing; and biluochun green tea from Lake Tai.

Breakfast is a Jiangnan institution: soup dumplings, wonton, rice porridge and, in Yangzhou, a full morning tea of steamed buns and dumplings that takes an hour and is eaten sitting down.

Teahouses in Suzhou serve pingtan storytelling in the afternoon — a singer and a lute, in dialect, to an audience of regulars. You will not follow the words and it is still worth an hour.

Hairy crab season transforms the restaurants in October and November, with tanks at the door and the lake of origin advertised. Yangcheng lake crabs command a premium and are widely counterfeited.

Night markets in Nanjing around the Confucius Temple, and the snack streets of Suzhou’s old town.

Tea: Biluochun from the hills by Lake Tai is one of China’s most famous green teas, picked very early in spring and rolled into tight spirals.

Vegetarian food at the Buddhist temples is genuinely good, particularly at Nanjing’s Jiming temple.

Jiangsu’s drinking tradition is huangjiu — yellow rice wine — rather than grape wine or baijiu, and it is the older Chinese drink by a long way.

Brewed from glutinous rice with a wheat starter, aged in earthenware jars and drunk warm, huangjiu is amber, low in alcohol by Chinese standards at fourteen to twenty per cent, and tastes closer to a dry sherry or a Japanese sake than to anything western. The most famous comes from Shaoxing just over the provincial border, but Jiangsu brews its own and drinks a great deal of it, particularly with hairy crab, where a warm cup with ginger is the traditional and genuinely correct pairing — the crab is considered cooling in Chinese dietary terms and the warm wine balances it.

Yanghe, from Suqian in northern Jiangsu, is one of China’s largest baijiu producers and its mianrou soft style is a recognised category.

Tea is the everyday drink, and Biluochun is the province’s contribution to the great Chinese teas.

Grape wine is made in small quantities and is not the point here.