Steamed vs baked: scientists use China remnant DNA to reveal ancient regional cooking differences
- Archaeologists analyse type of gene in millet to reveal style of cooked food
- Discovered waxy food more common in east China, vanished in west
A great joy of travelling across China is enjoying the immensely diverse range of high-quality regional foods, ranging from spicy Sichuan peppers and Cantonese dim sum to halal Xinjiang cuisine.
This diversity is common worldwide, and new research out of China suggests that regional cooking differences stretch back to ancient times.
By analysing DNA from broomcorn millet remnants from between 1700BC and 700AD, archaeologists determined that the grain was usually steamed in the eastern parts of China versus being baked in the west of the country.
The study, published in the journal Antiquity, argues that, as millet spread westward, it was not accompanied by traditional cooking methods, leading to stark differences in regional cuisine.
Millet was the staple grain of northern neolithic China, whereas rice was more popular in the south, somewhat corresponding to the Yellow and Yangtze rivers, respectively.
“Food practices capture a paradox about human nature. Our cultural behaviour can seem extremely conservative, but that conservatism always contains the possibility of change, which may entail a journey into the unknown,” said Martin Jones, a study author and Senior Fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge in England.