Chaoshan cuisine: pure, clean flavor

Sugar Encrusted Deep Fried Yam Sticks. [Photo provided to China Daily]

First on the table are appetizers. Pig trotter jelly is characteristic of the chef's frugality. This is a collagen-rich dish made by slow-cooking pig feet until they melt off the bone. The meat, skin and tendons are then stripped off and poured into a container with the cooking liquid, and chilled until firm before being sliced and served.

Up next may be rolls of prawns or liver, wrapped in tofu skin and deep-fried. Minced prawns and pork are bonded with sweet potato starch and rolled into little portions. They are called hae cho, or prawn dates, because they look like giant Chinese jujubes.

However, I was told prawn rolls are not the original recipe, and the truly authentic roll calls for liver from either a goose or duck. A sort of Chaozhou foie gras in a wrapper.

It makes sense in a cuisine where nothing goes to waste, because braised goose or duck is another major feature. The birds are stewed long and slow in a gravy spiced with cinnamon, ginger and shallots. One distinct characteristic is that the duck or goose is always served boned, in delicate slivers neatly arranged on top of tender fried tofu whose sole purpose is to soak up the aromatic cinnamon-scented gravy.

Only a master chef can succeed in achieving a tender bird that still holds its shape well when sliced that thinly.