The 10-course feast
THE Shanzhou culture laid on a 10-course feast for special occasions such as weddings, funerals, holidays or big get-togethers.
The menu included pork, chicken, various vegetables and local mountain specialties such as day lily buds and fungi.
The dishes for the feast are cooked on a special device called the chuanshan range. Seven pots are placed on a slope, and inside, hearths are connected with each other. Upward air current controls the temperature of each hearth, allowing different cooking methods, such as steaming, stir frying, deep frying and braising.
One of the best 10-course feast chefs is Xue Minghui, who owns a restaurant in a pit yard. His restaurant is the most popular for both wedding and funeral banquets. Xue says it took him four years to acquire the skills of cooking seven dishes at a time.
“Each feast requires three hours of preparation,” he said. “The key is to master the heating and timing for each dish, and that requires experience.”
Although no luxury ingredients are used for the feast, Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908) was thrilled by the food when she and the royal family were on their way back to Beijing from taking refuge in Xi’an after the siege by the imperialist powers.
Cixi tasted the dishes and said the feast perfectly fit its name, a reference to the fact that the number 10 symbolizes perfection or fullness in Chinese.
Since then, the reputation of the feast has spread across China and become a specialty of Shanzhou.
If you go
There are high-speed trains linking Shanghai and Sanmenxia. Take a Bus No. 5 at the Sanmenxia High-Speed Train Station and disembark at the Traffic Bureau Station, where sightseeing buses to the pit yard sightseeing zone are available.
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