Local Specialties

Basic southwestern Chinese dishes are available throughout the province, but minority cuisine and tasty local specialties enhance the Yunnan eating experience. Some restaurants exist primarily to serve these dishes, such as the many in Kunming that offer the capital's own mingcai (special food)-over-the-bridge rice noodles (guoqiao mixian). This consists of a big bowl of steaming chicken and herbs broth, served with rice noodles and a plate of thin strips of meat (mostly pork) and items like chopped scallions, tofu skin, pigeon egg, etc. The diner empties the plate into the soup, which cooks the meat, adding salt, chilli, soy sauce and vinegar to taste. The meal is said to have been invented by a Mengzi scholar's wife, who delivered it daily to him while he studied at a pavilion in a pond, reached by crossing the bridge from the land. To keep the soup hot enough to cook the meat, thinly sliced to facilitate the process, she added oil to it.

Another dish peculiar to Kunming is rose rutabaga, fried with slices of pork tenderloin. A popular local snack is dajiujia-rice flour cakes fried with ham, eggs and vegetables. In Yiliang County, just east of Kunming, the specialty is roast duck. Several restaurants offering this lie bunched together at the edge of town, on the Lunan road, while girls stand outside them trying to flag down customers coming back from the Stone Forest. In Lunan County itself the mingcai is fried slices of goat cheese (rubin), lightly browned and served with black pepper. Further east Luxi has the province's best red peppers, Xuanwei the finest ham, while Qujing's specialty is cold pea jelly. This is made from soaked, crushed white peas which are filtered, baked and cooled. The jelly slices are then flavoured with ginger, soy sauce, prickly ash oil, sesame oil, chilli oil, Amomum tsaoko and aniseed oil.

South of Kunming Yuxi is known for its unique sweets. These include the delicate pastry saqima, sweets rolled in baked soybean flour and the candied wax gourd. The latter is supposed to cool the body's insides, relieve coughs and moisten the lungs, besides being tasty. The lotus root dishes in Chengjiang are reputedly Yunnan's most delicious. Lying near the tip of Fuxian Lake Chengjiang's other specialty is the lake fish called kanglang ("braving the waters"). The best fish served in Jiangchuan are the anti-current fish from Fuxian and the big-head fish from the shallow waters of Xingyun Lake.

A little south, around Qilu Lake in Tonghai County, fish is not the mingcai, but eel. And it doesn't come from the lake itself but from the feeder streams, notably around Peacock Hill, where the Mongolian villages lie. Restaurants on the main road in front of Xingmeng specialise in preparing eel. A few serve Beijing-style roast duck and Kunming residents, as well as Chinese tourists from the north, drive four to five hours down here to patronise these restaurants and marvel at how much the taste resembles that in Beijing.

Continuing south, Shiping is famous for its bean curd (tofu). In the evenings groups of people hover over charcoal grills and dine on grilled tofu cubes, dipping them in soy sauce and chilli powder. In Jianshui the mingcai is chicken cooked in an earthen pot (qiguoji). A small steam tube rises from the middle of the pot. The meat is lightly flavoured with pseudo-ginseng. The county is also known for its unique grass sprout (caoya), a candle-sized plant shaped like a miniature elephant tusk, with a consistency like bamboo shoots.

In the tropical south bamboo shoots are a regular part of the diet. The Dai in Xishuangbanna pickle some, which they lightly fry and then boil with fish in a soup. Glutinous rice is a local favourite, too, often coloured brown and sometimes cooked in a pineapple. The Dai also cook rice inside bamboo tubes, turning them over an open fire until done. Another Dai way of grilling chicken or fish is by wrapping it in lemon grass.

Dai sauces are pungent and the favourite combination of flavours is hot and sour. Dai food in Dehong, Simao and Lincang is similar and restaurants in the towns serve from big pots containing the various, already prepared selections. Dehong can boast of perhaps the province's best rice, from Zhefang township, for it was a specified item of tribute demanded by the Qing court.

The cuisine of the south is much influenced by the tastes of Southeast Asia, while that of the central and northern plateaux is the creation of Ming-era Han immigrants. The mingcai of the west are mostly the special dishes of the minority nationalities. Mushrooms and other edible fungi are popular and, in the Yi areas, different preparations of mutton. The Yi of Chuxiong occasionally hold a grand banquet in which they cook an entire ram. The first set of dishes comprises up to thirty assorted cold selections, prepared from the hooves and parts of the face and head of the ram, dipped in soybeans with mint. These are taken with jiu. The next set consists of thirty types of mutton, including meat fried, steamed, dried, boiled, wrapped in egg rolls, in rice wafers, and roasted in a bamboo tube which is set aflame and waved around the table before it is broken open and its contents served.

The mountains behind Dali provide some wild vegetables for the local cuisine. Among these are gaohe greens, boiled and dipped in sesame oil, shutoucai leaves, minced with ham, mailancai stems and roots, which are pickled, and the tops of wild pepper trees, fried in oil. The lake supplies people with various kinds of fish. The small species known as "oily fish," from its glossy scales and high fat content, smells like chicken when cooked. Bigger fish go into casseroles with bean curd, bamboo shoots, egg rolls, mushrooms and cubes of meat cooked along with the fish. Dali also has goat cheese, but cut in strips and deep-fried, as well as a large-sized, crispy snack made from cream called the fan-shaped cream cake.

In Lijiang the Naxi sometimes indulge in the Eight Bowls Dinner. This comprises three kinds of pork, chicken with fungus, fish, ham, cheese wafers and salted eggs. Among the snacks consumed at the night stalls, or served as a separate dish during meals, is mabu, a Naxi word for a sausage of glutinous rice cooked in pig's blood. Among the Yi in the mountains the common snack, and often main filler of the meal, is the buckwheat bread called baba, shaped like a thick pancake and cooked in a wok. In Yongning the Mosuo specialty is three-year-old dried pig. Removing the intestinal parts after slaughtering it, the Mosuo use the carcass as a pillow in the mean time. Symbolically the dried pig represents wealth. Girls stand on it at their puberty rites and in the past it was part of the tribute paid to the tusi and the monastery.

On the Tibetan Plateau in Diqing Prefecture barley is the staple crop. A portion of it each year is converted into qingkejiu, but most is ground into flour and consumed as tsampa. Stored in lidded bowls, it is taken with a spoon and tossed into the mouth. In the monasteries monks add buttered tea to a lump of barley flour, knead it into a ball and eat it that way.

While Tibetans like pork, goat and chicken the meat specialty is dried yak. Sometimes they have it freshly butchered, but as the yak is a big animal, much of the meat is dried and as jerky lasts for months. Yak milk is made into both butter and cheese, with each area's cheese slightly different. Zhongdian's is a bit sour, Benzilan's sweet and Deqing's a touch salty and served with melted butter.

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