《Module3ForeignFood》学案外研版高中英语选修八.doc

Adapted from K.C. Chang, Food in Chinese Culture: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977 …… In the Chinese culture, the whole process of preparing food from raw ingredients to morsels ready for the mouth involves a complex of interrelated variables that is highly distinctive when compared with other food traditions of major magnitude. At the base of this complex is the division between fan, grains and other starch foods, and tsai, vegetable and meat dishes. To prepare a balanced meal, it must have an appropriate amount of both fan and tsai, and ingredients are readied along both tracks. Grains are cooked whole or as flour, making up the fan half of the meal in various forms: fan (in the narrow sense, cooked rice), steamed wheat-, millet-, or corn-flour bread, ping (pancakes), and noodles. Vegetables and meats are cut up and mixed in various ways into individual dishes to constitute the tsai half. Even in meals in which the staple starch portion and the meat-and-vegetable portion are apparently joined together, such as in . . . wonton . . . they are in fact put together but not mixed up, and each still retains its due proportion and own distinction. . . . For the preparation of tsai, the use of multiple ingredients and the mixing of flavors are the rules, which above all means that ingredients are usually cut up and not done whole, and that they are variously combined into individual dishes of vastly differing flavors. Pork for example, may be diced, slice shredded, or ground, and when combined with other meats and with various vegetable ingredients and spice produces dishes of utterly diverge, shapes, flavors, colors, tastes, and aromas. The parallelism of fan and tsai an the above-described principles of tsai preparation account for a number ( other features of the Chinese food culture, especially in the area of utensil To begin with, there are fan utensils and tsai utensils, both for cooking an for serving. In t