Eating with the season

Five seasons, not four

A Chinese kitchen does not cook the same way in April and in August, and the difference is not a mood. It is a small, specific set of substitutions that a grandmother makes without discussing them: one more sour thing in spring, a bitter green at the height of summer, a handful of barley in the humid weeks, pears when the air turns dry, and the long-cooked pot from the solstice onward.

The scheme behind those substitutions has five terms rather than four. The fifth is 长夏, chángxià, late summer: the weeks between the peak of the heat and the first clear autumn day, when the air is heavy and food spoils quickly. In the Huangdi Neijing the five seasons are laid alongside five flavours, five colours and five organ networks, so that the year and the plate use the same vocabulary. That correspondence is the reason a food list in this tradition reads like a calendar.

None of what follows is a rule. It is what a Chinese household does, written down for someone who shops in a Western supermarket, and the last section is the shopping list.

Spring: sour, green, and less of it

Spring belongs to wood and to the liver network, and the classical advice for it is about movement rather than about food: get up earlier, walk, let the body uncoil after the winter. The canon says it in a sentence that is three parts instruction and one part poetry.

On the plate, spring is the lightest season of the year. Bitter and sour greens come in — young mustard greens, watercress, dandelion, the first shoots of anything. A little vinegar. Chinese kitchens eat a great deal of chive and spring onion in March and April, and much less pork. Portions get smaller after the winter, and the household starts steaming instead of braising.

The one thing worth borrowing wholesale is the change of cooking method, not the ingredients. If you do nothing else in spring, move from the oven to the steamer and from stew to soup.

Summer: bitter, and the cold-drink argument

High summer belongs to fire and to the heart network, and its flavour is bitter. A Cantonese summer table is full of things a Western palate reads as strange: bitter melon, chrysanthemum steeped as a drink, mung bean cooked soft and eaten barely sweetened, winter melon soup, lotus leaf. All of them are described as cooling — a word about how a food is understood to behave in the body, not about the temperature it is served at.

Which brings us to iced water, and to the question we are asked more than any other. Chinese medicine has no argument with cool food. It has a very old argument with cold liquid taken in quantity, and the argument runs through a metaphor. The digestive middle is described as a pot over a small fire; the fire does the work of turning food into something the body can use. Pour a litre of iced water into the pot and the fire has to be spent bringing the pot back up before anything else happens.

We are not going to dress that up as physiology. It is a metaphor, and it is two thousand years old, and it has never been shown to be a mechanism. What we can say is that it is the most consistently reported observation in our own intake forms: people who describe bloating after meals, loose stool and a heavy feeling after eating very often also describe drinking everything with ice. When they stop — not room temperature turned hot, just ice removed — a good number of them write back within a month to say the bloating went. That is a description of what people report, and nothing more. It is discussed at length in The middle burner.

Late summer: the damp weeks

长夏 is the season Western calendars do not have: three or four weeks of heavy, wet heat before the air clears. In Hangzhou it arrives with the plum rains and the whole city smells of damp plaster. It is the season the tradition worries about most, because the quality it describes — dampness — is the one it says accumulates rather than passing through.

What a Chinese kitchen adds in these weeks is a short and consistent list: Job’s tears (薏苡仁, coix, sold in Western shops as pearl barley’s tougher cousin), adzuki beans, poria, white radish, barley tea, dried tangerine peel, and a good deal more ginger than usual. What it drops is dairy, sugar, fried food, cold food and anything raw and watery in quantity. Aromatic and drying is the whole instruction: cardamom, ginger, spring onion, coriander seed.

The pattern language for what these weeks produce — heaviness in the limbs, a thick tongue coat, a head that feels wrapped, a stool that will not settle — is set out in the patterns section. It is the single most common picture in the readings we write for people living in humid places, and the single most responsive to a change of shopping list.

Autumn: dryness, pears and white food

Autumn belongs to metal and to the lung, and its problem is dryness: dry lips, dry cough, dry skin at the shins, a nose that bleeds in a heated room. The kitchen answers with moistening white foods — pear above all, but also white fungus (tremella), lily bulb, lotus root, almond, honey, tofu, white radish.

The dish every Chinese household knows here is steamed pear: a pear cored from the top, a spoonful of rock sugar and a few strips of white fungus put into the hollow, the lid replaced, steamed for forty minutes and eaten warm with the juice. It costs nothing, it takes one pan, and it is the most reliable seasonal recipe we hand to Western readers, because a pear is a pear in any supermarket on earth.

Autumn is also when a household starts cooking its fruit rather than eating it raw. Stewed apple, poached pear, baked quince. The tradition holds warm and soft to be easier on the middle than cold and firm, and autumn is when it starts to matter.

Winter: long cooking

Winter belongs to water and to the kidney network, and its whole theme is storage. The classical advice is almost embarrassingly simple: sleep earlier, get up after the sun, keep the lower back and the feet warm, and do not sweat heavily out of doors.

The food follows. Cooking times get longer — three hours rather than thirty minutes. Roots come in: lotus root, yam, carrot, chestnut, black beans, walnut. Warming aromatics appear, cinnamon bark and dried ginger and star anise. Black and dark foods are grouped with the season by colour, which is exactly the kind of correspondence a Western reader should hold loosely, but black sesame and black beans are good food regardless of the reason they got onto the list.

One family habit, offered as a habit and not as advice: from the winter solstice until the New Year our kitchen keeps a pot at the back of the stove — jujube, a piece of ginger, a handful of black beans, water, and whatever bone there is. It is refilled, not remade. It is the taste of winter in the house, and half of what it does is that somebody is always in the kitchen.

Why congee exists

Congee — 粥, zhōu — is rice cooked in eight to twelve times its volume of water until the grain has broken down completely. It takes an hour, it needs no skill, and it is the most written-about food in the Chinese dietary canon. Li Shizhen gave it its own section in the Bencao Gangmu, the compendium he compiled over twenty-seven years and had printed in 1596 with 1,892 entries in it, and listed more than sixty versions of it.

The reason congee occupies so much space is structural rather than sentimental. It is warm, it is soft, it is already broken down, and it carries whatever you put in it: ginger and spring onion when the weather turns; mung bean in August; pear and white fungus in October; jujube, yam and black sesame in January. One technique, five seasons. That is a very efficient thing for a tradition to own, and it is why congee appears in nearly every reading we write for someone whose intake describes a difficult morning.

In a Western supermarket

Almost none of this needs a Chinese grocer. Here is the practical translation, season by season, with everything available in an ordinary supermarket.

• Spring. Watercress, rocket, spring onion, chives, young spinach, radish, cider vinegar, lemon. Steam and blanch rather than roast. Smaller plates.
• Summer. Cucumber, courgette, celery, mung beans, mint, chrysanthemum or green tea drunk warm, watermelon eaten at room temperature. Bitter leaves — radicchio, chicory, endive — instead of bitter melon.
• Late summer. Pearl barley, adzuki or red beans, sweetcorn, white radish, plenty of fresh ginger, cardamom, coriander seed. Less dairy, less sugar, less fried food, nothing iced.
• Autumn. Pears, apples, almonds, honey, oats, tofu, white beans, mushrooms. Cook the fruit. Steamed pear with a little honey if you cannot find rock sugar or tremella.
• Winter. Carrot, parsnip, swede, sweet potato, chestnut, black beans, walnuts, black sesame, cinnamon, dried ginger, star anise. Long, low, covered cooking.

Change one thing per season, not five. The change that gives most people the clearest answer is the simplest one on the list: a warm, cooked breakfast for a fortnight, and the ice out of the glass.

药食同源 — food and medicine share one origin. It is the oldest idea in this part of the tradition, and the most modest one. It does not claim that dinner does anything dramatic. It claims that dinner is where the slow, unremarkable, cumulative part of looking after yourself actually happens, three times a day, for the whole of a life.