Breakfast in China

tagged: breakfast in china, chinese breakfast, chinese cuisine, chinese dishes, chinese meals, featured

Chinese cuisine is well known for its delicious shrimp recipes, meat, poultry and other fantastic dishes, but breakfast is also a true experience. Although the Chinese breakfast and the English breakfast of porridge or cereal, bacon and egg, and tea or coffee are worlds a part, there are, in fact, a good deal of underlying similarities. It would seem that each of the various breakfast foods has this special function; if it is salty and strong tasting it wakes up the muggy early morning palate; porridge, which is warm and filling, insulates one from the first chilly venture into the outside world in winter; fruit juice cleanses and refreshes the mouth; finally coffee, which is stimulating and aromatic, helps to awaken the sleepy human spirit to the prospects of the new day.

A Chinese breakfast also aims at helping in man’s walking up. The pickles, salted duck’s eggs, and salt fish perform much the same function as the British bacon and egg. A big bowl of congee (which is soft watery rice) is almost the precise equivalent of porridge. Roasted peanuts provide, like coffee, the heady aroma, and their nutty rich crispness is in pleasing contrast to the soft rice. But the Chinese provide a wider range of breakfast foods than westerners. Thousand Year Old Egg (which is really pickled eggs), Meat Wool (a form of rich dehydrated meat, prepared by low-fire stir-frying), various jellied and pickled meats, and some smoked dishes can be incorporated in to a Chinese breakfast. The main feature of the meal is that everything is cold, except the congee.

The congee plays two roles: it is warming, like porridge, and refreshing, much as fruit juices are to westerners. Since there is no tradition of cold drinks in China, they use the refreshing qualities of the watery rice. Actually, Chinese much prefer this kind of refreshment to freezing cold drinks. This is because before the days of water purification, anything cold and uncooked carried risk of contamination. Cold drinks were, until quite recently, quite alien to the Chinese palate.

Weather meat, fish or shrimp recipes, Chinese meals are delicious even when it comes to breakfast time.