The Cooking of a River City

Tianjin cuisine is not one tradition but several running side by side. The sources describe it as a system built from Han Chinese, Muslim, mansion and vegetarian cooking together with all kinds of local snacks, which reflects the city's composition: a canal port with a large Muslim population, a merchant class wealthy enough to keep private kitchens, and Buddhist and Daoist establishments with their own dietary rules. Its main feature is the fresh fish and seafood of the rivers and the sea, which follows from geography rather than fashion. English-language accounts add that the cooking divides into rough, fine and high styles, a useful reminder that a city's food is not one menu.

The technique is described with unusual precision. Tianjin cooking is strongest in spoon-sauce, soft liu, quick stir-fry and steaming, and Tianjin chefs have always ranked three skills as basic: the great wrist flip, soup simmering and burnt sugar colouring. Each of those is a physical operation rather than a recipe. The great wrist flip turns food in a wok by moving the pan rather than a utensil, soup simmering reduces a stock until it coats, and burnt sugar colouring builds a caramel base for braised dishes. A culinary tradition that defines itself by three gestures is one that trains cooks rather than teaching dishes.

The cuisine has a starting point and a flavour base. The sources date its maturation to 1662, when the Juqingcheng restaurant opened, and record that the Qianlong emperor once tasted a dish of local flatfish and gave it the name officially cooked flatfish, which is the kind of imperial naming that fixes a dish in the record. The flavour depends on three seasonings: Duli aged vinegar, Tianjin sweet bean paste and garlic chilli sauce, which the sources call the core seasonings shaping the type. Two of the four delicacies of Tianjin are wheat or rice snacks rather than seafood, which is the other half of the story.