This video explores the skewer roasting technique that originated during the Han Dynasty, and how this technique has survived through the years, especially with the advent of, and eventually increasing popularity of, other cooking techniques in China.

Bibliography

E. N. Anderson. The Food of China. New York: Yale University Press, 1988.

H. T. Huang. Fermentation and Food Science. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

“Lamb: Warm your Kidney Yang in Winter.” Ping Ming Health. Accessed on 7 October 2019. https://www.pingminghealth.com/article/257/lamb-winters-heat-source/.

Transcript for reference:

This is a kitchen scene incised on a stone slab in an Eastern Han tomb in Chu-Chheng county, Shantung Province, which can also be found on page 87 of Needham’s book, Science and Civilization in China (6.5) The previous page of his book provides a detailed description of the scene. For this video, however, I will be focusing on just the roasting technique. One of the names for this technique is chuan, and what’s interesting is that the character for Chuan is actually really easy to remember, because you could say that its essentially a kebab skewer – two small rectangles crossed with a vertical line.

According to Needham, the earliest record that we have on this technique of roasting is found in a story in the Han Fei Tze about the Duke Wen of Chin and his chef, in which he threatened to punish and kill the latter upon finding a strand of hair in his roasted meat. This story is of value and it provides us with details of how the raw meat is prepared before being roasted. Firstly, “My knife was sharpened on the grindstone until it was as sharp as the keenest sword.” As we know, having a sharp knife would make it easy for the chef to cut the meat on the bias, allowing for a large surface-to-volume ratio, and consequently, fast cooking. Secondly, “When I carefully pierced the meat piece on the wood skewer”. This tells us that wooden skewers were used, as we can understand due to practical reasons, and we can also imply that these meat pieces would also have been in small, bite-sized pieces. It has also been discovered that between the single piece skewer or the three-pronged forks, the former was used more frequently to roast during the Han times. And lastly, “When I placed the skewers on the stove, the charcoal was red hot. The meat quickly cooked through.” This would then bring me to my next point.

The importance of skewer roasting as a cooking technique did not last. What did last and become the “characteristic method of cooking” is of course, stir-frying. Let’s find out why. In Anderson’s Some Basic Cooking Strategies, he mentioned that “Chinese cooking is, first and last, materially efficient, in which the cooking would need to be done over high heat”, thus allowing for a quick job. In contrast, cooking techniques that use up a lot of fuel, like roasting, increasingly became virtually absent as the years go by.

With that being said, this technique of cooking did continue to exist within the minority ethnic groups in China, in particular of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang. Furthermore, it might also be possible that this roasting technique was also done by the Uyghur people in hopes of reaping the medicinal properties of lamb meat. As Muslims, the dietary requirements limit the options of meat for consumption, thus understanding the role of lamb meat in traditional Chinese medicine would be beneficial for them. Lamb meat is warm in nature and is able to disperse cold. It has “kidney yang” meaning that it has the function of the kidney through its energy, in enabling the warming of the body, help with the development of sexual organs as well as immune system, out of many.

While the roasting technique of cooking has its pros and cons, it is not surprising that it has managed to survive through the years and evolve to become what it is now, due to the simple method of cooking, as well as its flexibility in adapting to different recipes across the world.