How can you describe anancient menu for ancient chinese families?

Question

This is for a project that my daughter is working on.Anyone with knowledge in this area would be good.She is miffed as to how put it in menu form.She does do the work herself . As parents we are encouraged to be involved or give them a guiding hannot do the work just to guide them.

Answer 1

I searched and searched for a good link for the info that you need - I hope this one at least helps!

http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodasian.ht...

Good Luck!

Answer 2

An important point to note, which may be obvious, is that there's a whole world of difference between what the peasants & upper classes (the rich, officials, royalty) ate.

For the peasants, they hardly ate much meat, many only enjoyed such a luxury once a year at the Chinese Lunar New Year. The staple would have been thin watery rice porridge (to enable feeding huge families) made usually with unpolished or broken rice; white polished rice was an unimagined luxury only for the rich & even one rice bowl of steamed rice is out of the world for the poor. To stretch the porridge, diced root vegetables could have been added eg. sweet potato, yam as a treat. In different parts of China, the staple food would be different eg. northern China used more wheat & commonly ate noodles, buns & dumplings instead of rice.

To accompany the porridge or rice, one-pot meals would be likely, a big pot of cheap veggies stewed and eaten for the whole week. For those living in coastal areas, they could catch fish & other seafood to supplement their diet but those living way inland may never even have seen fresh fish all their lives and only ate preserved seafood. Curing & preservation of food was essential, leading to common food items like salted vegetable soups, century eggs, salted duck eggs, salted fish, cured hams etc. Those living in mountainous regions could hunt for game & pick wild veggies but often poor families preferred to sell such stuff for hard-earned money instead of eating it themselves. Other commonly eaten items were tofu, buns (man-tou), beans (eg. soybeans, mung beans & red beans) & other grains (eg. barley, sorghum, millet).

For the rich, of course the sky was the limit and the meals would have been more like modern Chinese meals with a variety of appetisers, soups, meats, poultry, seafood, veggies & desserts. But some things that we take for granted these days like iced drinks during summer were still rare due to the huge expense to transport ice from cold mountainous regions. As for the emperor, he could have a few hundred dishes per meal and only actually ate from a few dishes, with all uneaten food thrown away. Imperial banquets were the ultimate in food decadence, with many elaborate dishes & days of feasting, a famous one is the Manchu-Han Banquet http://www.china.org.cn/english/imperial...

http://www.chinaculture.org/gb/en_chinaw...

Some other websites about ancient Chinese food:

http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/chin...

http://www.chinahistoryforum.com/index.p...

There's lots of others but it could be too much info overload. Hope this answer helps a bit!