Ancient Chinese food

If you think Chinese food you think of rice, rice was first cultivated in China. There is archaeological evidence of rice along the Yangtze river since around 5,000 BC. People in acient times cooked rice in boiling water as we do today. Or they made rice into wine which had been popular since prehistory of China.

But rice doesn’t grow in northern China, which is much drier and colder. People in northern China gathered wild millet and sorghum instead. By 4500 BC, people in northern China were farming millet. They ate it boiled into a kind of porridge.

Another food people associate with China is tea. Tea grows wild in China. By about 3000 BC (or it could be much earlier), people in China had begun to drink tea. Soon everybody drank tea.

Wheat was not native to China, so it took much longer to reach China. People in northern China first began to eat wheat in the Shang Dynasty, about 1500 BC. Wheat was not native to China, but people brought it to China from West Asia. People in China boiled it like millet, to make something like Cream of Wheat.

These were the main foods of China - rice, millet, sorghum, and wheat. In northern China, people mostly ate millet, wheat, and sorghum. In southern China, people mostly ate rice. Poor people ate almost nothing but these foods.

When people could afford it, they bought or grew vegetables to put on their rice. Soybeans, for instance, are native to China. So are cucumbers. For fruits, the Chinese had oranges and lemons, peaches and apricots. The native flavorings are ginger and anise (Americans use anise to make licorice).

On special occasions, people also put little pieces of meat on their rice. By 5500 BC, the Chinese were eating domesticated chicken, which came originally from Thailand. By 4000 or 3000 BC, they were eating pork, which was native to China. Sheep and cattle, which were not native, reached China from West Asia also around 4000 BC.

Since meat was so expensive, and because Buddhists didn’t eat meat, starting around the Sung Dynasty (about 1000 AD) people also put tofu, or bean curd, in their food as a source of protein.

Since China has large forests, it is always difficult to get fuel for cooking. The Chinese have learned to reduce the food is very low, it would rapidly to very low heat for cooking.

During the dynasty of Han, millet wine, very popular and was even more popular than tea drinking. Apart from the Han dynasty, around 100 AD, the Chinese began to make wheat and rice noodles along.

Marco Polo, a visitor to China from Venice, said at the time of Kublai Khan in 1200, the Chinese ate millet boiled in milk to make porridge. Even in 1200 AD not BC, the Chinese people bake bread.