Hunan food in Beijing: Eating with the Great Helmsman

Hunan was Mao Zedong's home province, and he is sometimes still held in a kind of awe there which no longer prevails elsewhere in China.

Locals and other Chinese may tend to connect Hunan's production of Mao and numerous other revolutionaries and soldiers with the culture and cuisine of their home province. As in some other cultures (including the West, at least until quite recently), strong connections are drawn in Chinese thought between food and character. The spicy character of Hunanese food is linked with forthright behaviour and revolutionary fervour in particular. Forget what you've imagined or been told about Sichuan food; Hunanese is the stuff even the Sichuanese consider hot. There is a joke that while Sichuanese are not afraid of any chili-heat, the Hunanese are afraid of food that isn't hot.

This doesn't mean that everything is blastingly spicy, or that westerners less accustomed to chili-heat won't find things to enjoy - just tread carefully.

My trip to China last October did not include a trip to Hunan. However after touring Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, whose great southern gate is now adorned with that famous huge portrait of Mao, there was a certain appropriateness to my companions and I adjourning more or less by chance to the nearby Hunanese restaurant Yuelu Shanwu ('House at the foot of the Yuelu mountain') on Lotus Lane, a pleasant boardwalk that skirts Qianhai Lake.

While making cautionary comments, I should note that we didn't take the plunge and order the frog or baby turtle dishes at Yuelu Shanwu, but these are traditional. We did eat some other things that are typically Hunanese: Changsha noodles (at room temperature, with sesame and other flavours), Dong'an chicken (parboiled, then stir fried and seasoned with vinegar), steamed fish head with chili (saying "with chili" in this post is probably redundant...), and "Chairman Mao's" braised pork belly - a traditional dish that was a favourite of the Great Helmsman.

Apart from the chili heat, Hunanese food includes plentiful vegetable dishes (we had braised green beans) which involve distinctive use of "stinky tou fu"(dou fu ru) and la rou, a smoked meat comparable to bacon, as flavoursome ingredients to increase the savour of blander, bulk foods.

American readers will know one quasi-Hunanese dish whether they realize it or not: "General Tso's Chicken" (in Boston and some other places, inexplicably, "General Gao's Chicken"). It takes its name from Tso Tsung-t'ang (Zuo Zongtang), a nineteenth-century general and another famous Hunanese warrior. This is actually a sort of emigre dish, invented in Taiwan by Hunanese exile Peng Chang-kuei, who later took it to the USA and adapted it to American tastes by (wait for it...) adding sugar. It often ends up as one of those battered-and-sticky things that we might normally associate with bad westernized Cantonese food, but with chilies. Few Chinese, let alone Hunanese, have ever heard of it. Go for the Dong'an chicken, or Ma la zi ji (hot and peppery chicken, a dish shared with Sichuan), or go to another restaurant.

The West and modernization have not been all bad to Hunanese cuisine however. The food of Hunan was given a great leap forward (sorry...) in the West in 2006 with the publication of Fuchsia Dunlop's Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, a not-so-little red book coloured by an only-partially tongue in cheek Mao theme. To come to grips with Hunan food, leave General Tso and take a walk with Fuchsia and Mao to Changsha or, if you're just in Beijing, along Lotus Lane by the scenic Qianhai lake.

Yuelu Shanwu, 19a Qianhai Xiyan, Beijing.