This
combines the cuisines from Chengdu and Chongqing. From as early
as the Qing Dynasty (1644 - 1911), books had systematically recorded
a total of 38 cooking methods like to scald, wrap, bake, mix, stew,
and adhere, etc. it features pungent seasonings which were famed
as 'Three Peppers' (Chinese prickly ash, pepper and hot pepper),
'three aroma' (shallot, ginger, and garlic), 'Seven Tastes' (sweet,
sour, tingling, spicy, bitter, piquant, and salty), and 'eight flavors'
(fish-flavored, sour with spice, pepper-tingling, odd flavor, tingling
with spice, red spicy oily, ginger sauce, and home cooking).
Delicious dishes menu:
Stir-fried Tofu with Minced Beef in Spicy Bean Sauce - A real feast of tender bean curd, minced beef, pepper and bean sauce. It is said that it was made by a pock-marked but ingenious woman, thus the name Ma Po Tofu (pock-marked woman's bean curd).
Lamp-shadow
Beef - with larruping techniques, the beef is cut in very thin sheet.
When a piece is carried, it looks like translucent paper, slippery
and reddish. When put under the lamp or light, a red shadow will
appear.
Lung Pieces by Couple - a quite popular in Chengdu. It got the name because the dish was ever sold be a couple and today it remains the original savor, tender meat, tingling and spicy.
Gong Bao Ji Ding - in Chinese it is called Gong Bao Ji Ding. This is a tender chicken dish, tender as the meat is quickly fried. Flavored with peanuts, this is tasty and very popular.
Hunan
cuisine lays a stress on the use of oil, dense color, and techniques
that produce crispness, softness and tenderness as well as the savory
flavors and spices. Stewed fins, fried fresh cabbage with chestnuts,
Dong Anzi chicken, immortal chicken with five elements, are of the
highest reputation. Chairman Mao, together with other leaders praised
the Hunan cuisine in 1958.
Stewed fins - had been famous during the Qing Dynasty. Choice fins, chickens, pork are stewed in chicken soup and sauce, tasting really fresh and mellow.
Immortal chicken with five elements - means to
put five elements, litchi, longan, red dates, lotus seeds, and medlar,
into the body of a chicken, then to braise. The taste is rather
peculiar but it is said to have the effect of strengthening the
constitution.
