French vs Chinese Food: 14 Surprising Similarities!

France and China: Surprising Similarities in Food Culture

France and China, renowned for their distinctive and celebrated food cultures, surprisingly share more similarities than one might initially think. This article explores fourteen reasons why these two cuisines, despite their differing tastes, exhibit striking parallels in food philosophy and techniques.

Introduction

The experience of spending two weeks eating in France sparked a reflection on the parallels between French and Chinese food. While the cuisines taste distinctly different, a closer look reveals unexpected common ground in their approach to food and cooking methods. This exploration aims to highlight these similarities.

A Culinary Collaboration

Peter joins in this culinary exploration at Passage de Panorama, one of the world's first shopping malls. These passages are known for their bustling atmosphere and reliably good restaurants.

Learning a Language Through Immersion

Rosetta Stone is mentioned as a helpful language learning app, emphasizing its immersion-based approach. The app uses repetition, audio-visual matching, and story-reading to facilitate language acquisition, particularly highlighting the importance of pronunciation in languages like French and Mandarin. A discount link is provided for those interested.

Similarities in Cuisine

1. Using "Untraditional" Proteins

Both French and Chinese cuisines utilize proteins considered unconventional in other cultures. Examples include:

• Rabbit

• Pigeon

• Duck

• Frog

• Snails

In France, snails are often enjoyed with baguette. While the bread can sometimes be distracting to the overall taste, it provides a convenient vessel for the snails. Snails also bring to mind river snails eaten in China, especially in Guilin, where the minced meat is re-inserted into the shell.

Frog legs, prepared in the style of Provence, highlight another shared protein. Frog is considered tender and a mix of fish and chicken. This ingredient may have been selected due to a lack of access to better food products.

2. Nose-to-Tail Consumption

Both cultures value using the entire animal, minimizing waste. Menus in France often feature offal such as liver, kidney, and calf head, ingredients not always common in other Western cuisines. This mirrors Chinese cuisine, where every part of the animal is utilized. Back in the days, poor economic stances may have forced both countries to get creative with more affordable cuts of meat. In Chongqing, ordinary people created spicy hot pot with intestines, the only affordable cut available.

3. Foie Gras and Offal Transformation

A visit to a Parisian food store highlights foie gras, a fatty duck or goose liver. While considered offal, it's often transformed into a delicacy. In contrast to China, where offal is served more directly, French cuisine sometimes disguises it. Foie gras, enjoyed with jams or chutney, mirrors the Chinese tradition of serving duck with sweet sauces to cut through the richness.

4. Staple Carbohydrates: Bread and Rice

Bread in France is akin to rice in China – the essential carbohydrate. While France excels with wheat products, China showcases mastery of rice.

5. Creative Uses of Staple Carbs

Both countries demonstrate creativity with their staple carbohydrates. Examples include:

• People on Chinese social media jokingly call Baguette a weapon.

• Three days old Baguette can be ground back into flour, made into French Toast, or used as croutons.

• French toast is the prototype of french toast, known as le pain perdu.

6. Eating in Public

Taking a nibble of the baguette is acceptable in France. The best part of the baguette is the bum.

7. The Story Behind the Baguette

The length of the Baguette allows for better baking processes and shorter time than big loaf of bread. The law prohibited baking chefs from working before 4am.

8. The Quality of a Good Baguette

The inside of the baguette should be chewy and soft, and the outside should be crunchy.

9. Duck: A Shared Culinary Obsession

Duck features prominently in both French and Chinese cuisines. A restaurant entirely dedicated to duck underscores this shared culinary passion.

10. Alcohol in Cooking

Both French and Chinese cuisines frequently use alcohol in cooking. French cuisine utilizes wine in dishes like beef bourguignon and coq au vin, tenderizing the meat and infusing it with flavor. Similarly, Chinese cuisine uses Shaoxing wine as a staple ingredient.

11. Served Breast Meat

In China you'd rarely see the duck or poultry served like this as a chunk of breast meat without bones at least somewhere close by.

12. Mold in Cuisine

Both cultures incorporate mold in food. French cheeses often involve fermentation and mold. Chinese cuisine features "毛豆腐" (Mao Doufu) from Anhui, a fermented tofu with edible mold.

13. Intellectual Approach to Food

Both cultures demonstrate a technical and intellectual understanding of food. In China, the philosopher Su Shi designed the recipe for Dongpo Rou. In France, Jean Brillat-Savarin wrote Le Physiologie du Goût, a foundational text on the science of cooking and taste.

14. Foie Gras

The process to make foie gras is cruel. Workers insert pipes down the throats of male ducks twice each day pumping up to 1kg of grain fat into their stomachs or geese three times a day up to two kg daily in a process known as gavege.

Conclusion

Despite their distinct flavors, French and Chinese cuisines share surprising similarities in their food philosophies, techniques, and ingredients. From utilizing unconventional proteins and valuing nose-to-tail consumption to their creative use of staple carbohydrates and intellectual approach to food, these two cultures offer a fascinating parallel in the culinary world.