Message: | Anyone - please correct me.The types of ingredients, the cooking styles and the flavorings.
My best source, is a Chinese language guidebook called something like Zhongguo Luyou Shoutse, published in Beijing in 1981. Of the six "classic" Chinese cuisines it mentions, two are Szechwan and Shandong - Mandarin (they differentiate between Shandong and Beijing).
The characteristics of Szechwan food that the book cites are a strong attention to color in presentation, a palate of seven flavors - sweet, bitter, salty, sour/acid, sesame-flavored, piquant, and "strange". Szechwan is noted for several subtle types of boiling, (zhu, firepot), and Gan-shao, or dry cooking (cooking in a hot pot until most moisture is removed, leaving a chewy texture). There's more, use of fresh water fish and prawns, several classic dishes like Ma-po Tofu, Szechwan versions of Kungpao dishes, hotseed dishes, twice cooked pork, Sesame-spicy firepot.
Mandarin dishes are a difficult term. It's a western term. If it's used for "northern chinese", then the only major classic cuisine is Shandong, and some famous dishes of Beijing. Carp, seafood, esp. prawns and sea cucumber as a delicacy. Strangest beasts include camel (hoof and hump) and bear (paws), very expensive and about as common as fresh caviar or shad milt in the west. Peking duck, mu-shu dishes, yellow river singed carp, etc. In Beijing, some dairy in suan-nai, and in Moslem butter cookies. Seasonal variation in food, winter foods differ from summer foods - it snows. Many dishes with green peppers, eggs. Roasted maize is also eaten. Shandong and Beijing food has many wheaten dishes, like mantou and wheat doughs stuffed with forcemeat, etc. Instant-boiled mutton and mongol based dishes have been assimilated, as have turkic shashliks (yangrou zhuan). Greater consumption of lamb because grazing areas are nearby (in contrast the cantonese kitchen has little lamb or even beef).
Elegant cuisine in north esp. Beijing is strongly influenced by Qing dynasty court cuisine. Beijing is its own thing though as it was the capital from just after 1400 to 1911, so cooks and dishes from around the country influenced the city's cuisine (more rice was eaten in Beijing itself than in all of Hebei/Zhili province). Also, the shandong kitchen uses fruits more common in temperate regions like apples, pears, and Western-Chinese melons as opposed to the tropical and sub-tropical fruit found in Canton and Taiwan. Sauces in the north are either quite light, or may have sesame flavorings. Most Pekinese I met thought that Szechwan food was much too hot.
The book I have treats Hunan food as a minor subset of the complex Szechwan kitchen. There are some specialties like the Hunan ham, certain teas, etc. There seems to be a more liberal use of oil in the Hunan kitchen. But Hunan is also seen as the birthplace of the Tan Family cuisine, which was brought to the capital and is kind of a Chinese equivalent of the Escoffier tradition, in that the chef and his dishes are noted by name.
BTW, most restaurants here aren't big sticklers. You'll find mu-shu (sometimes even called mu-hsi) dishes on menus with mostly Cantonese dishes, and you'll find sweet and sour pork on Mandarin menus here (although honestly, Gu-lao rou which is sweet and sour pork is considered by the guidebook to be a great dish of Canton, along with Long-hu Dou, dragon tiger struggle - [civet] cat meat with three kinds of snake, stir-fried).
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