Tradition of hard work
Since the 1990s when a revival of their mother tongue brought about something of a cultural renaissance, Hakka culture has become a mainstream area of study, and the cuisine has also become an important cultural symbol and a subject of exploration.
Researchers agree on the main features of the cuisine. The food is salty, fragrant, and oily; steaming, boiling and stir-frying are the preferred cooking methods, and the Hakka’s superb pickling skills mean a diverse range of preserved food, all results of their early migration history and demanding lifestyle.
The original Hakka people were Han Chinese who lived around the Yellow, Yangtze and Huai River basins in China. Because of the impact of various natural disasters and wars, large numbers of these people migrated to Southern China around Fujian, Guangdong and Jiangxi provinces between the end of the Tang and throughout the Song Dynasty. As the relatively flat lands were already inhabited by other ethnic groups, the Hakka were forced into the mountains and hill regions.
Due to the harsh environment and barren lands of their new home, they had to reclaim and cultivate new fields with their labor, thereby developing a diet full of salt and fatty foods necessary to maintain physical strength and replenish the salt lost after a day of hard farm work. Working-class Hakka people often describe someone who lacks energy as “not eating salt”—showing that Hakka people have enjoyed salty food since early times.
And because of the lack of contact with outsiders and the shortage of food in their mountain home, Hakka people developed superb pickling skills to preserve food. This usually involved extracting the juice from vegetables before drying them in the sun and salting for preservation. Mustard greens, for example, were made into three different pickled products: xiancai, fucai and meigancai. The drier and older they were, the richer the flavor became. And in order to save time and resources, their cooking methods were simple: mainly steaming, boiling and stir-frying, and less often smoking and deep-frying. Excess meat was stewed or cooked with red yeast and eaten sliced or added to soups. It was hearty convenience food that also helped meet their body’s need for salt.
Yang Chao-ching, associate professor in the Department of Chinese Culinary Arts, National Kaohsiung University of Hospitality and Tourism, says that in the Hakka classic “four stewed and four stir-fried” dishes, such as xiancai wen zhudu (鹹菜炆豬肚/hog maw in pickled mustard greens), dried bamboo shoots stewed in rich broth, or pig’s lung stir-fried with pineapple and wood-ear mushrooms, pig’s organs and blood are used as ingredients for delicious gourmet meals. Dried bamboo shoots added to the broth absorb some of the greasiness, at the same time reducing the acidity of the bamboo shoots, gaining the best of both worlds. Ethnology expert Chuang Ying-chang regards Hakka pickling skills as “an adaptation strategy for a relatively unstable ecological environment.”
As Hakka communities move into the tourism and leisure industry, restaurants with a sense of the Hakka tradition are mushrooming. The photo shows Beipu Shitang.