Curious Cook: The reasons for good food

Amalgamation is often more commonly used with Asian dishes like sweet and sour pork. — Filepic

I confess to dining out recently at an Asian buffet restaurant in the town about 50km from my home here in France. I have exhausted my meagre repertoire of Asian dishes several times over and just wanted to taste again other dishes from the past. Overall, the experience was not brilliant because the food was at best a verisimilitude of real Asian food, but it was good enough – and everyone else who came along thought it was great.

But it did make me think about the differences (and similarities) between Asian and French cooking. It would be easy to ascribe the distinction to seasonings and ingredients, but the dish that results from a French cook using just oil, a piece of good meat, flour, salt and pepper will not taste the same as the dish from a Chinese chef using the same ingredients. The French version would probably involve coating the meat with seasoned flour, pan-frying in a thin layer of oil till lightly brown, then finishing off in an oven. The Chinese version would probably require the meat to be sliced, coated in more heavily seasoned flour, and then deep-fried in oil till golden.