Once shaped by court rituals, China’s imperial cuisine lives on today

BEIJING (AP) — It is said that Empress Dowager Cixi once dreamed of a pastry during the final decades of imperial China .

The same treat was served to her at breakfast the following morning. Delighted, she summoned her chef and rewarded him with a silver ingot.

“It was originally called ‘minced pork pancake,’ but because it had fulfilled her dream, it later became known as ‘dream pastry,’” said Zhou Tong, a chef at Fangshan Restaurant in Beijing .

Fangshan specializes in imperial cuisine, preserving dishes like the one associated with Cixi and other culinary traditions from China’s imperial court. The restaurant was founded in 1925 by former chefs from the Qing Dynasty at Beihai Park, a garden where royals from several dynasties rested, handled government affairs and performed ritual sacrifices.

“The name Fangshan literally means ‘imitating the imperial cuisine,’” said assistant general manager Di Xin.

A handful of other Beijing restaurants also serve versions of imperial cuisine, while the Palace Museum preserves Qing-dynasty objects tied to court dining, including pastry molds.

Imperial cuisine encompasses the meals emperors ate daily and the feasts their courts held throughout the year.

Each had its own rituals. Drinking milk tea, for instance, was an important first step at Qing-dynasty banquets, said Teng Deyong, a researcher at China’s Palace Museum.

During the banquet, the emperor bestowed wine or food on princes and officials. Recipients performed rites and paid their respects to him before they ate or drank.

Aside from banquets, sacrificial rituals were held. They followed a separate system and could involve meat offerings.

“At the Palace of Earthly Tranquillity, there was the eating of sacrificial pork, which we know was one of the most important rituals of the Qing imperial court,” Teng said.

In that ritual, fatty pork was boiled without salt. After the ceremony, it was distributed among guests, and receiving the sacrificial meat was considered a great honor.

Unseasoned food also appears in earlier Chinese ritual traditions. Wandi Wang, a professor of Chinese at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, said the “Book of Rites,” a classical work on rites and ceremonies, describes a meat broth known as “grand stew” that was served without seasoning during sacrificial ceremonies.

“The absence of added flavoring was itself meaningful: the unseasoned dish evoked an earlier and simpler way of cooking and thus expressed a ritual ideal of honoring antiquity and remembering cultural origins,” Wang said.

Pastries were key to imperial cuisine, and the court had an institution specialized in making them.

Sweets made at Fangshan by Zhou include Cixi’s dream pastry and a small steamed corn bun. Their recipes are rooted in the imperial court.

“When customers visit, our servers often tell them the stories behind these dishes,” Zhou said. “People enjoy them even more because they carry such meaningful history.”

He learned his pastry-making technique from a master who had also learned from a mentor. It’s a craft that has been passed from one generation to the next.

Traditional imperial methods mean cooking must be done by hand — no blenders or food processors are allowed. Ingredients like beans are pulverized using sieves and certain flours are handled in custom-made copper pots.

“A machine may be more convenient, but the texture is completely different,” Zhou said. “You lose the delicate graininess and sandy mouthfeel that handcrafted pastries are supposed to have.”

Among Fangshan’s bestselling delicacies are the pea flour cake and the red bean roll. During the busy season, customers order more than 200 of the cakes per day.

When he joined Fangshan as a kitchen apprentice, now-executive chef Fan Liangliang had to relearn everything he was taught at culinary school. Rather than employing techniques that allowed him to work quickly, he embraced slower processes he had never heard of.

One of them is “Nizihuo,” which Fan said involves mincing ingredients such as fish, shrimp or chicken into a smooth paste. It is then reshaped into decorative forms such as frogs, birds and flowers.

“This is one of the hallmarks of imperial cuisine,” Fan said. “Every dish had to be innovative, visually beautiful, nutritious and worthy of presentation on the imperial dining table.”

Rare ingredients such as bear paws are no longer served. Fan said adaptations are made to retain the spirit of each dish.

A celebrated Chinese poet once wrote about cold noodles made with pagoda-tree leaves.

“The poem is not simply a description of a dish,” Wang said. “Du Fu turns the verdant, fresh, yet modest dish into an expression of his political loyalty and thwarted ambition to serve the emperor.”

She added that Chinese cuisine has historically carried meaning beyond food, reflecting broader ideas about politics, culture and aesthetics that have evolved as circumstances changed.

“Preserving a culinary tradition begins with taking its history seriously,” Wang said. “Culinary heritage tells us not only how people ate in the past, but also how people in the present choose to remember and give meaning to that past.”

Chef Fan said that at the heart of Fangshan’s imperial cuisine is a fusion of Manchu and Han culinary traditions, bringing together the culture of the Qing rulers and that of China’s majority population.

“It’s not simply a collection of dishes from the two cultures,” he said. “It represents the blending of their different approaches to food into a unified cuisine.”

Some inherited techniques such as stir-frying, braising and stewing have survived. And while some ingredients have been substituted both for availability reasons and to suit modern tastes, Fan said his team’s commitment to Chinese heritage remains strong.

“When people dine at Fangshan Restaurant, I hope they experience more than just a meal,” Fan said. “They experience the weight of history.”

AP video journalist Wu Jia contributed to this report.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.