You don’t see a lot of cheese in Chinese cuisine. It would seem obvious that this is because there hadn’t traditionally been a lot of dairying in that part of the world.
But have there been exceptions? To what extent has cheese consumption or cheese making made inroads in the Far East, or for that matter, India (where there are plenty of cows), and the Middle East? Or is it still largely an imported delicacy of limited popularity?
I suppose similar questions can be posed about other dairy products such as ice cream.
As a person who enjoys asian cusine, to the point where I can discuss regional variations, I learned that the Chinese eat damn near anything. But almost NO dairy products.
Many asians are lactose intolerant (as a percentage against other ethnicities). If this is a product of a non dairy consuming culture and history, or a cause of the avoidance of dairy products isn’t known.
Just as a westerner may have an aversion to some Chinese traditional ingrediants and recipes (Ever had Pickled Pork Uterous… I have… chewy and oddly sweet), Many traditional/old world asians feel that allowing milk to rot until it clots and possibly changes colour is disgusting! A friend of mine, who is Chinese Canadian tells me that his mother became nauseous at the mere idea of cheese, which is where I learned the previously mention description.
So I wonder if the quarter pounder with cheese is selling with a handicap over yonder.
Many of my Asian friends look at me with undisguised horror when I eat anything cheese-laden. A few who have been here a while have adapted, not sure if that means they’re tolerating the runs or they’ve somehow aclimated.
Anthropologist Martin Harris addresses precisely this issue in many works, and particularly in Good to Eat, where he points out that there are no cheese sauces or cream dishes in Chinese cuisine, and says that, to many Chinese, the idea of drinking a glass of milk is “as appealing as drinking a glass of cow saliva”. He, as others here in this thread, points gout how ,most Chinese are lactose-intolerant, and goes into some depth exploring the consequences and possible origins of this. It’s worthwhile reading.
But the question in the OP is worth looking into. Even Harris admits that many Chinese restaurants serve ice cream, and that this and other dairy dishes are making inroads in Asia. Certainly China abuts India, which has a dairy-based cuisine. There’s a lot of yak dairy in Tibetan cuisine, I understand. Surely, at the fringes of Chinese influence there must be a zone where dairy diffuses into Chinese culture. And what about the Siberians? Just as there are communities that had Chinese Jews for hundreds or thousands of years, I’ll bet there are places in China that had some tradition of yogurt dishes, or something. But I don’t know anything about them.
Lactose intolerant people can generally eat hard cheese.
Chinese people don’t eat cheese for the same reason that we don’t eat preserved duck eggs. It’s not a part of their culture’s cuisine. Every culture has their own fermented foods, and the strong flavors of these often don’t cross culture lines well. Hard, aged cheese is not a universal thing- it’s a particular specialty of European cuisine. So when you go to a Chinese supermarket, you are going to find it in the foreign food section just like we find fermented bean curd in the foreign food section of our supermarkets.
Note that some minority groups do indeed make cheese- mostly cottage cheese/paneer like deals, though I believe there is a Tibetan cheese that is aged.
Yogurt (or what is sold as yogurt- often just thickened milk) and small sachets of milk are pretty easy to find in China. Ice cream is big and there is a great variety of ice cream based popsicles- although I wouldn’t be suprised if a lot of those ended up being non-dairy. Dairy products are nowhere near the staple that they are in the west, but they are pretty present.
One thing I’ve found intresting is that there is a whole iconography in China related to dairy products. In the west, when we think of dairy, we think of sunny green pastures and a smiling milkmaid. In West Africa, milk is associated with a tattooed Fulbe woman with a decorated gourd full of milk balanced on her head. In China, milk seems to be about rolling green hills and some kind of yurt. Anyone know what area or culture this is referring to?
Ditto what China Guy said in regards to Japan (though you didn’t ask about this area.) Pizza and hamburgers and whatnot are all pretty popular. Small glass bottles of milk are also pretty popular as a sort of treat. You do see quarts of milk, so I assume that it is being used in the home, but I’m not sure whether they drink it or if they use it more in recipes and such.
Lots of them are lactose intolerant, but the popular conception is that if you drink lots of milk as a kid that you’ll grow up to be tall and have large breasts. (No I’m not kidding.) I think that the first of those is actually true given the visible height change in the Japanese people over the last three generations.
I believe that lactose intolerance usually appears as people start hitting their teens or late teens, so its not a problem for the younguns. And of course cheese and yoghurt in smaller doses is perfectly fine for most lactose intolerant people.
tough to find but Tibetans do have a brie type soft aged goat and/or yak cheese that is incredible. their staple are really hard dried curds, that go in the yak butter tea (an acquired taste that is really yummy). Tibetans also have a yak cheese that’s maybe like fesh mozerella that’s very nice.
the area is Inner Mongolia. oe of chiina’s biggest domestic dairy producers is Meng Niu. Meng = mongolian & Niu = dairy. mengniu produces in inner Mongolia.
