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Food

Fujian闽菜

A soup culture, which is unusual enough in China to be its whole identity. Fujian cooking runs on stocks, on wine-lees marinades, and on a coastline that supplies things the interior never sees. Its most famous dish has the best name in Chinese cuisine: 佛跳墙, Buddha Jumps Over the Wall — a slow-simmered pot of abalone, sea cucumber, scallop, ham and more, so fragrant that the legend has a monk abandoning his vegetarian vows and vaulting a monastery wall to get at it. It is also the mother cuisine of much Taiwanese and Southeast Asian Chinese food, which is why it tastes familiar to anyone who has eaten in Singapore or Penang.

What to do

  • In Quanzhou, do not order mianxian hu plain. Locals put vinegared pork in it, often with a length of fried dough as well, and a bare bowl marks you out immediately.
  • Read 姜母鸭 as old-ginger duck, not as ginger-and-mother-duck. 姜母 is one word, and the aged ginger is what the dish is built on.
  • Save the seafood for another coastal city if you are visiting several. Xiamen's reputation for it is inherited rather than earned — the exception is sandworm jelly, which exists nowhere else and is better with something oily alongside it.

Eat — Buddha Jumps Over the Wall if someone else is paying, fish-ball soup if not, and oyster omelette.