Cantonese Dumplings  (Wuntun雲吞)

As Cantonese people are extremely demanding about their foods, they have always tried to innovate and re-create the foods that are introduced from other places in order to suit their tastes. One prime example is the dumpling soup. As the local history of Canton has it, that dumpling soup was a dish that was introduced from the northern part of China in Qing Dynasty in the early nineteenth century. Dumplings from the North according to local Cantonese had too strong taste, too rough materials and too monotonous compositions.

For the local Cantonese, the best foods should be delicate, smooth, easy to chew but not so slack, the interactions between the teeth and the foods should be consistent, sufficient but not ineptly tiresome. Traditionally, northern dumplings were only composed of several kinds of meats hastily wrapped up by flour layer. The taste was intolerably intense and dominating because chives was added.

The Cantonese took a totally different approach. They renovated not only the layers and the materials contained inside, but also the soup. It is no longer a flour layer, but rather a thin piece of smooth mixture of flour and egg fluids; the materials inside are not just pork, but are mixture of pork, chives and shrimps. The layer contains most part of the materials inside, and a stitch is left and will be filled with egg-yolk fluids. The pork should be carefully chosen, better to be 30% fat. The size of Cantonese dumpling is strictly calculated: the perfect size for a Cantonese dumpling is to be swallowed with one mouthful.

Big shrimps visible through the transluscent layer made up with flour and egg-yolk

The soup of Cantonese dumplings (wuntun) is also innovated, as it is no longer plainly boiled. Instead it is soup cooked with fish and pig bones. The thicker the soup, the better it will taste. Most of the time, it takes three hours to finish cooking a jar of soup like this. To increase the aroma of the soup, some restaurants might add shrimp eggs, which belongs to much higher level. But some other might use shrimp shells in the bottom of their boilers in order to produce the same aroma. Actually both taste the same but the shrimp shells can make people’s temperament violent.

Besides dumplings and soup, a dish of Cantonese dumplings actually includes the noodles in the soup. The noodles are not just plainly flour-made noodles in the North; rather it is made of a mixture of flour and egg fluids in the proportion of 100:55. In the process of making noodles out of such pile of mixture, any drops of water should be avoided in order to increase the flexibility of the noodles. To formulate beams of noodles, experienced chefs use bamboo basket to filter out the beams from the pile of the mixture. This process will take almost two hours.

When the soup is boiled, noodles should be thrown into the boiling soup soon after the dumplings. A specially made spoon will drag the noodles to the bottom of the huge soup-container, and the noodles are not supposed to stay inside the soup for more than twenty seconds!

Compared with Mandarin dumplings from the North, Cantonese dumplings are apparently more popular in Canton. Wuntun, as the local Cantonese people call it, is more lovely, more delicate, and less aggressive than the Mandarin dumplings. The difficult processes of preparing the soup and the noodles also reflect a typical outlook on living of the Cantonese people.

Flour Ribbons

Flour ribbons are typical and vernacular foods in Canton, which started to become popular in the city since 1920s. At first, people who sold flour ribbons carried loads of rattan containers in which flour ribbons were stored; as late as 1930s, small restaurants which specialised on making flour ribbons appeared on the streets of Canton. It was not until the 1940s when flour ribbons entered the menus of the most expensive restaurants and hotels of the cities and became one of the most representatives of Cantonese dim sums.

Flour ribbons are popular amongst local Cantonese people because the texture is smooth and delicate, and it makes people easy to invent different methods to innovate the dish. Most of the Cantonese people eat flour ribbons in their breakfast, with the accompaniment of porridge. A dish of flour ribbon is indeed composed of a thin layer of gelatine-like flour, which is folded many times into complex ribbon-shaped object. Different kinds of meats, vegetables or spices can enveloped inside the flour ribbon, creating different sorts of flavour in the ribbon, such as flour ribbons with eggs, beef, pork, or shrimps. Sometimes these flour ribbons contain no foods inside at all, if the guest demands a pure dish of flour ribbon.

Flour ribbons with shrimps inside.

The secret of successfully cooking a dish of flour ribbon depends on how delicate and smooth that layer of flour can be made. There are two sorts of cooking flour ribbon: to steam with an iron board, or to steam with a layer of cloth. The raw material for a layer of the flour ribbon is indeed rice powder, which is boiled with little water into thick jam. The most important procedure in making flour ribbon is to evenly spread the thick jam on the iron board or on a layer of cloth, quickly put meats or other spices on the surfice of the thick jam, then wait until the jam becomes solid. Also very quickly, the thick jam which becomes a solid layer has to be scrapped down evenly and coherently with a long iron shovel. The layer now scrapped down, has to be folded several times with shovel, and some sauces must be spread from head to the end.

Liwan is formally called the Bay of Lichee, which locates at the western end of the downtown of Guangzhou, at the bank of Pearl River. For two thousand years, a typical Cantonese fruit with red and rough skin but juicy, half-transparent and sweet fresh, lichee, have been widely flourishing at both banks of the river, which becomes the reason for associating the name of this place with such kind of fruit. In 905 AD, a duke who ruled the southern China built a summer palace amongst the lichee trees there and indulged himself with fruits, alcohol and women. The banquets were often called “Red Clouds Banquet” because of the picture of the garden with red-coloured lichees around.

After the dukedom in Canton was crushed by troops from the north, new occupants were still attracted by the taste of the fruits and the wander of such a vast red jungle. Therefore the Lichee Bay became places for summer residences of many officials or merchants. At that time Liwan was still a rural region, with many ponds and rice-fields. From the ponds there yielded the four famous agricultural products of Liwan, the water caltrop, the lotus (seeds), the arrowhead, and the water spinach. From the river there lingered fishing boats on which fishermen singing folksongs. Such idyllic picture lasted for centuries.

In the history of Canton, Liwan was formerly called Xiguan, the Western Border. As stated before, it was a wealthy district, with merchants’ villas one after another. As a result of foreign trades in Qing Dynasty, the amassing residences of costume officers and head-quarters of unions in Liwan formed a town outside at the West of the fortifying wall of Canton. The most striking feature of this satellite town was the overhead terraces, which became the typical Cantonese architecture popular in the whole southeast Asia.

In 1984, just nine hundred metres away from the harbour of the Swedish city Goetheborg, people discovered a shipwreck, heavily loaded with Chinese porcelains and some huge boxes, inside which, archaeologists found packages of tea leaves. The patterns on the porcelain containers were obviously Chinese-styled after the mud on them was removed.

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Traditionally, keeping flowers at home is the typical Cantonese way to celebrate the Spring Festival. Because Canton is one of the warmest cities in China, its climate at the end of winter is always warm enough to keep flowers and the variety is great enough to combine each kind of flower in many ways. Customarily, Cantonese people like choosing the flowers with warm colours or those with the names which pronunciations are similar to something good or lucky. One of the most popular choices is tangerine. The Cantonese pronunciation of tangerine is very similar to lucky or fortunate, and its yellow colour looks gold, which connotes “money” or “property” for the family; daffodils are also good choices, because its fragrance is delicate for domestic environment. Those who wish that they can meet true love or have romantic experience in the future year will keep a branch with peach flowers in their living room or corridor.

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When Canton was the major destiny of the Over-sea Silk Way, there was an Islamic missionary who arrived in Canton and built a mosque in the year 627 A.D., with financial supports of the them Arabian immigrants in the city. In the mosque, there was a tower which also functioned as a light-house for the sailing shops coming into the Pearl River. Nowadays, people can only see that the tower is quite far away from the river, but that is the result of centuries of landscape transformations. Back to the Tang Dynasty, the Pearl River was so much wider.

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