Chinese Cantonese Cooking - Part 2

Cantonese cooking also specializes in soups, especially turtle soup, steamed, roasted and grilled pork and poultry dishes;

Cantonese cooking also specializes in soups, especially turtle soup, steamed, roasted and grilled pork and poultry dishes; 'double -pan' and large earthenware casserole-type cooking, A great deal of clear chicken broth is used as a stock or base for light gravies and is preferred to the sugar used by other schools to achieve 'sweetness'.

Cantonese is, however, a no-holds-barred school: practically everything which may be eaten with impunity, from pig's testicles, to snails, frog's legs, fish and chicken heads, duck's tongues and webbed feet, snakes and sea-urchins, is cooked and eaten. And it is here that the now universally popular Dim Sum originated.

Literally translated, Dim Sum means 'something to dot the heart with'. Traditionally a tea-house repast, many Chinese restaurants today will keep the Dim Sum trays, tiers of steaming bamboo baskets piled high over boiling water or bouillon, with those items needing the least cooking at the very top coming from morning until evening.

Mouth-sized morsels of delicious, steamed spareribs in sauce, called Thai Kuat; red-cooked sweet-savoury pork in cloud-light white buns called Char Siew Pau; and a magically successful combination of diced pork and crisp, sliced water-chestnuts wrapped in the merest skin of egg-dough topped with crab's eggs, called Siew Mai, are among the classic array of low-calorie, steamed, high-protein snacks suitable for eating from morning until cocktail time.