At his toilet a Chinese uses a basin of tepid water and a cloth, and it has been aptly remarked that he never appears so dirty as when trying to clean himself. Shaving is done by the barber, for no man can shave the top of his head. Whiskers are never worn, even by the very few who have them, and mustaches are not considered proper for a man under forty. Snuff bottles and tobacco pipes are carried and used by both sexes, but the practice of chewing betel-nut is confined to the men, who, however, take much pains to keep their teeth white. Among ornamental articles of dress, in none do they go to so much expense and style as in the snuff bottle, which is often carved from stone, amber, agate, and other rare minerals with most exquisite taste. Snuff is put on the thumb-nail with a spoon fastened to the stopper—a more cleanly way than the European mode of “pinching.”[366]
The articles of food which the Chinese eat, and the mode and ceremonies attending their feasts, have aided much, in giving them the odd character they bear abroad, though uncouth or unsavory viands form an infinitesimal portion of their food, and ceremonious feasts not one in a thousand of their repasts. Travellers have so often spoken of birdsnest soup, canine hams, and grimalkin fricassees, rats, snakes, worms, and other culinary novelties, served up in equally strange ways, that their readers get the idea that these articles form as large a proportion of the food as their description does of the narrative. In general, the diet of the Chinese is sufficient in variety, wholesome, and well cooked, though many of the dishes are unpalatable to a European from the vegetable oils used in their preparation, and the alliaceous plants introduced to savor them. In the assortment of dishes, Barrow has truly said that “there is a wider difference, perhaps, between the rich and the poor of China than in any other country. That wealth, which if permitted would be expended in flattering the vanity of its possessors, is now applied to the purchase of dainties to pamper the appetite.”
The proportion of animal food is probably smaller among the Chinese than other nations on the same latitude, one platter of fish or flesh, and sometimes both, being the usual allowance on the tables of the poor. Rice, maize, Italian millet, and wheat furnish most of the cereal food; the first is emphatically the staff of life, and considered indispensable all over the land. Its long use is indicated in the number of terms employed to describe it and the variety of allusions to it in common expressions. To take a meal is chih fan, ‘eat rice;’ and the salutation equivalent to how d’ye? is chih kwo fan? ‘have you eaten rice?’ The grain is deprived of its skin by wooden pestles worked in a mortar by levers, either by a water-wheel or more commonly by oxen or men. It is cleaned by rubbing it in an earthen dish scored on the inside, and steamed in a shallow iron boiler partly filled with water, over which a basket or sieve containing the rice is supported on a framework; a wooden dish fits over the whole and confines the steam. By this process the kernels are thoroughly cooked without forming a pasty mass, as is too often the result when boiled by cooks in Christian countries. Bread, vegetables, and other articles are cooked in a similar manner; four or five sieves, each of them full and nicely fitting into each other, are placed upon the boiler and covered with a cowl; in the water beneath, which supplies the steam, meats or other things are boiled at the same time. Wheat flour is boiled into cakes, dumplings, and other articles, but not baked into bread. Maize, buckwheat, oats, and barley are not ground, but the grain is cooked in various ways, alone or mixed with other dishes. Italian millet, or canary-seed (Setaria), furnishes a large amount of nutritious cereal food in the north; the flour is yellow and sweet, and boiled or baked for eating, often seasoned with jujube plums in the cakes. Its cultivation is easy, and its prolific crop makes up in a measure for the small seeds; ten thousand kernels have been counted on one spike in a good season.
VEGETABLES EATEN BY THE CHINESE.
The Chinese have a long list of culinary vegetables, and much of their agriculture consists in rearing them. Leguminous and cruciferous plants occupy the largest part of the kitchen garden; more than twenty sorts of peas and beans are cultivated, some for camels and horses, but mostly for men. Soy is made by boiling the beans and mixing water, salt, and wheat, and producing fermentation by yeast; its quality is inferior to the foreign. Another more common condiment, called bean curd or bean jam, is prepared by boiling and grinding black beans and mixing the flour with water, gypsum, and turmeric. The consumption of cabbage, broccoli, kale, cauliflower, cress, colewort, and other cruciferous plants is enormous; a great variety of modes are adopted for cooking, preserving, and improving them. The leaves and stems of many plants besides those are included in the variety of greens, and a complete enumeration of them would form a curious list. Lettuce, sow thistle (Sonchus), spinach, celery, dandelion, succory, sweet basil, ginger, mustard, radishes, artemisia, amaranthus, tacca, pig weed (Chenopodium), burslane, shepherd’s purse, clover, ailantus, and others having no English names, all furnish green leaves for Chinese tables. Garlics, leeks, scallions, onions, and chives are eaten by all classes, detected upon all persons, and smelt in all rooms where they are eating or cooking. Carrots, gourds, squashes, cucumbers, watermelons, tomatoes, turnips, radishes, brinjals, pumpkins, okers, etc., are among the list of garden vegetables; the variety of cucurbitaceous plants extends to nearly twenty. Most of these vegetables are inferior to the same articles in the markets of western cities, where science has improved their size or flavor. Several aquatic plants increase the list, among which the nelumbium covers extensive marshes in the eastern and northern provinces, otherwise unsightly and barren. The root is two or three feet long, and pierced longitudinally with several holes; when boiled it is of a yellowish color and sweetish taste, not unlike a turnip. Taro is used less than the nelumbium, and so are the water-caltrops (Trapa) and water-chestnuts. The taste of water-caltrops when boiled resembles that of new cheese; water-chestnuts are the round roots of a kind of sedge, and resemble that fruit in color more than in taste, which is mealy and crisp. The sweet potato is the most common tuber; although the Irish potato has been cultivated for scores of years it has not become a common vegetable among the people, except on the borders of Mongolia.
COMMON TABLE FRUITS.
The catalogue of fruits comprises most of those occurring elsewhere in the tropic and temperate zones, and China is probably the earliest home of the peach, plum, and pear. The pears are large and juicy, sometimes weighing eight or ten pounds; the white and strawberry pear are equal to any western variety. The apples are rather dry and insipid. The peaches, plums, quinces, and apricots are better, and offer many good varieties. Cherries are almost unknown. The orange is the common fruit at the south, and the baskets, stalls, and piles of this golden fruit, mixed with and heightened by contrast with other sorts and with vegetables, which line the streets of Canton and Amoy in winter, present a beautiful sight. Many distinct species of Citrus, as the lemon, kumquot, pumelo, citron, and orange, are extensively cultivated. The most delicious is the chu-sha kih, or ‘mandarin orange;’ the skin, when ripe, is of a cinnabar red color, and adheres to the pulp by a few loose fibres. The citron is more prized for its fragrance than taste, and the thick rind is now and then made more abundant by cutting it into strips when growing, each of which becomes a roundish end like a finger, whence the name of Fuh shao, or ‘Buddha’s hand,’ given it. It will remain uncorrupt for two or three months, diffusing an agreeable perfume.
Chapter [VI.] contains brief notices of other fruits. The banana and persimmon are common, and several varieties are enumerated of each; the plantain is eaten raw and cooked, and forms a large item in the subsistence of the poor. The pomegranate, carambola or tree gooseberry, mango, custard-apple, pine-apple, rose-apple, bread-fruit, fig, guava, and olive, some of them as good and others inferior to what are found in other countries, increase the list. The whampe, líchí, lungan, or ‘dragon’s eyes,’ and loquat, are the native names of four indigenous fruits at Canton. The whampe (Cookia) resembles a grape in size and a gooseberry in taste; the loquat or pebo (Eriobotrya) is a kind of medlar. The líchí looks like a strawberry in size and shape; the tough, rough red skin encloses a sweet watery pulp of a whitish color surrounding a hard seed. Grapes are plenty and cheap; in the northern cities they are preserved during the winter, and even till May, by constant care in regulating the temperature.
Chestnuts, walnuts, ground-nuts, filberts (Torreya), almonds, and the seeds of the salisburia and nelumbium, are the most common nuts. The Chinese date (Rhamnus) has a sweetish, acidulous flesh; the olive is salted or pickled; the names of both these fruits are given them because of a resemblance to the western sorts, for neither the proper date nor olive grows in China. A pleasant sweetmeat, like cranberry, is made from the seeds of the arbutus (Myrica), and another still more acid from a sort of haw, both of them put up for exportation.
Preserved fruits are common, and the list of sweetmeats and delicacies is increased by the addition of many roots, some of which are preserved in syrup and others as comfits. Ginger, nelumbium roots, bamboo shoots, the common potato, and other vegetables are thus prepared for export as well as domestic consumption. The natives consume enormous quantities of pickles of an inferior quality, especially cabbages and onions, but foreigners consider them detestable. The Chinese eat but few spices; black pepper is used medicinally as a tea, and cayenne pepper when the pod is green.