It is essential to use food as fresh as possible for Chinese cuisine and they have developed a style of cooking that obviates refrigeration despite the rigors of the climate. Blessed with an abundance of good ingredients in the most fertile areas of the country, the Chinese have become expert at extracting the essence of flavor.
A gourmet appreciation can be traced back to several centuries BC, as poetry of the period listed dishes to tempt the departing soul back to the body. During the Han dynasty, a scientific approach had been formulated for cooking and the basic rule was that the five flavors (sweetness, saltiness, sourness, bitterness and hotness) must be combined in a meal to achieve balance and harmony. Minced and thinly sliced meat and fish are also highly regarded to release the full flavor. True Chinese cooking developed only after the expansion of its frontiers southwards and westwards. New ingredients were discovered although the basic tenets were still held. The five-flavor cooking vocabulary is presently used but is actually inadequate to describe the full kaleidoscope of the Chinese cuisine.
