Guangdong cooking is one of China's four major regional styles and, despite northern critics decrying it as too uncomplicated to warrant the term "cuisine", it's unmatched in the clarity of its flavours, the attention paid to the ingredients' natural characteristics, and its appealing presentation. The style itself can be subdivided into Cantonese , emanating from the Pearl River Delta region; Chaozhou , from the city of the same name in the far east of Guangdong; and Hakka , from the northeastern border with Fujian, named after the Han subgroup with whom it originated. Though certain Chaozhou and Hakka recipes have been incorporated into the main body of Guangdong cooking - sweet and sour pork with fruit, and salt-baked chicken, for instance - it's Cantonese food which has come to epitomize its principles. With many Chinese emigrants leaving through Guangzhou, it's also the most familiar to overseas visitors, though peruse a menu here and you'll soon realize that most dishes served abroad as "Cantonese" would be unrecognizable to a local resident.

 

Spoiled by good soil and a year-round growing season, the Cantonese always demand absolutely fresh ingredients . To prove the quality of their product, restaurants keep their ingredients alive and kicking in cages, tanks or buckets at the front of the restaurant for diners to select themselves. Westerners can be repulsed by the collection of wildlife outside some Guangdong establishments, and even other Chinese comment that the Cantonese will eat anything with legs that isn't a piece of furniture, and anything with wings that isn't an aeroplane. The cooking itself concentrates on the natural aspects of the food, designed to keep textures distinct and flavours as close to the original as possible, using a minimum amount of mild and complimentary seasonings to prevent dishes from being bland. Fast stir-frying in a wok is the best known of these procedures, but roasting , and slow-simmering in soy sauce and wine are other methods of teasing out the essential characteristics of the food.

No full meal is really complete without a simple plate of rich green and slightly bitter choisam , Chinese broccoli, blanched and lightly dressed with oyster sauce. Also famous is fish and seafood , often simply steamed with ginger and spring onions, and nobody cooks fowl better than the Cantonese, always juicy and flavoursome whether served crisp-skinned and roasted or fragrantly casseroled. Guangzhou's citizens are also compulsive snackers, and outside canteens you'll see roast meats, such as strips of cha shao pork, waiting to be cut up and served with rice for a light lunch, or burners stacked with claypots , a one-person dish of steamed rice typically served in the cooking vessel with vegetables and slices of sweet lap cheung sausage. Cake shops selling heavy Chinese pastries and filled buns are found everywhere across the region. Some items like custard tartlets are derived from foreign sources, while roast pork buns and flaky-skinned mooncakes stuffed with sweet lotus seed paste are of domestic origin.

Perhaps it's this delight in little delicacies that led to the tradition of dim sum ("snacks"; dian xin in Mandarin) really blossoming in Guangdong, were it has become an elaborate form of breakfast most popular on Sundays, when entire households pack out restaurants. Also known as yum cha - literally, "with tea" - little dishes of fried, boiled and steamed snacks are packed inside bamboo steamers or displayed on plates, then wheeled around the restaurant on trolleys, which you stop for inspection as they pass your table. On being seated you're given a pot of tea which is constantly topped up, and a card which is marked for each dish you select and later surrendered to the cashier. Try rice porridge juk, spring rolls, buns, cakes and plates of thinly sliced roast meats, and small servings of restaurant dishes like spareribs, stuffed capsicum, or squid with black beans. Save most room, however, for the myriad types of little fried and steamed dumplings which are the hallmark of a dim sum meal, such as har gau, juicy minced prawns wrapped in transparent rice-flour skins, and shao mai, a generic name for a host of delicately flavoured, open-topped packets.