Chinese Shantung Cooking

Shantung cuisine is famous for a handful of wondrous dishes like Fragrant and Crispy Peking Duck and Duck Soup.

Shantung is the northernmost of all the different schools with Peking perhaps the best known city which follows this style of cooking. It has nothing like the range or variety of Canton but is famous for a handful of wondrous dishes like Fragrant and Crispy Peking Duck and Duck Soup.

This area is specially noted for its 'drunken' dishes---i.e. dishes marinated or cooked in wines, such as swan's liver.

Although the cooking is not heavy, on the whole the sauces are richer than those or Canton. Flavoring is heavier, with light and dark soy, with the accent on the latter, crushed garlic, black and red bean pastes and sauce.

Plum sauce is another favorite accompaniment. Wheat, not rice, is the staple of the north and dumplings and noodles made from it are cooked in ever conceivable way, and combined with pork, seafood, poultry, offal and vegetable.

History plays a great part; for the Mongols came and ruled here, and brought with them their techniques of marinating and barbecuing meats, The Mongolian Hot Pot is obviously the ancestor of the modern Firepot: a dish where each diner can cook his own food in a central hot-pot, dipping into a variety of sauces and ladling a little of the soup into his own individual bowl. And the Mongols also left their taste for dairy produce and mutton, much disliked by the rest of China. The five-spice mixture of anise, cinnamon, cloves, fennel and star anise is used as a seasoning.