Enjoying the Chinese Family Meal

Chinese meals fall into two basic categories: the home-style meal and the formal banquet. Each has its own pattern of service, number and complexity of dishes, and appropriate occasions for serving it. Needless to say, home cooking is most familiar to everyone, but even the most common and down-to-earth Chinese meal packs plenty of charm and grace. Here are some of the characteristics that define a classic Chinese home-style meal:

• Chinese family meals are served family style. Surprise. That means it's a communal affair where all the dishes appear on the table simultaneously for everyone to share, and all the diners help themselves to the goodies. No wonder so many Chinese households and restaurants have round tables: They're the fairest, easiest way for everyone to access the food.

• All the dishes revolve around a grain as focus. Rice plays this role most of the time, but in some regions (northern China, in particular), other starches such as noodles, millet, and steamed breads take on that role, too. The "main" dishes, delicious as they may be, are essentially there to flavor and complement the grain.

• The meal usually includes four or five of these auxiliary dishes, composed of a combination of meat, fish, poultry, seasonal vegetables, tofu, or eggs. This may seem like a lot of food, but spreading the dishes among everyone at the table prevents any one diner from overindulging. And because home-style dishes are simple and easy to make, a few auxiliary dishes don't take up a whole day of preparation.

• Just because traditional Chinese family meals usually include four or five dishes, your own meal doesn't necessarily have to; serve as much or as little as is appropriate. Depending on how many people you're feeding, the recipes can either be part of a multi-dish meal or can serve as main dishes for smaller groups. Use your own best judgment when planning how many dishes to make.

• Soups cleanse the palate between dishes and aid digestion. Therefore, they're not served only before the meal, as they often are in the West, but rather throughout and sometimes even after it. The clear soups can also do double duty as mealtime beverages.

• As for desserts, most family dinners end with some fresh fruit and tea instead of a decadent cheesecake or pecan pie. Here's one great way to cap off a meal: serve peeled and chilled lychees — translucent, juicy-fleshed fruits found in cans in the Asian food aisles of most supermarkets — served in a bowl on ice. Deeeelicious!!

Eating a Chinese meal

The Chinese have the most effective way to consume home-style meals. By contrasting and complementing tastes, textures, and ingredients, the Chinese chefs get the most bang out of each bite. Just grab your bowl of rice (the Chinese prefer to eat rice from bowls and not as a side dish on a dinner plate), take a bite, and then chase it with some meat, seafood, and vegetables, along with some of the sauce. Bring the bowl close to your mouth, and "shovel" the delectable combination in with your chopsticks. Follow that with a slurp of soup and then start again with a different mixture of rice and entrée.

By the way, slurping, sucking, and shoveling food won't get you sent to bed without dessert in China the way they can in the West. In fact, these perfectly permissible, even polite, practices are almost necessary when using chopsticks if you want to get all that rice and sauce into your mouth without spilling. And the Chinese penchant for steaming-hot soup makes slurping — and the slight cooling it gives the soup's surface — a must unless you have an asbestos tongue.

Communal, family-style dining, as practiced in China, isn't just a matter of convenience that lets all the diners get their share of the food before someone else does. It's actually very fundamental to the whole spirit of family togetherness that has helped hold Chinese culture together for thousands of years. The family that eats together stays together.

Making a marvelous menu: Planning a balanced Chinese meal

Now that you know the basics of a Chinese home-style dishes, shift your focus to orchestrating them into a simple, enjoyable dinner that everybody will love. This means getting to the heart of how to plan a menu. And whether you're making a small, romantic repast for two or feeding a crew of famished rugby players, the heart of putting together a home-cooked Chinese meal goes right back to your old friends: yin and yang.

Contrast, complement, balance: Whatever you call it, a good Chinese menu encompasses this dynamic duo of yin and yang. Keep that in mind, and you'll instinctively design meals that won't bore your guests or overwhelm the chef in the kitchen. These tips help you pick winners every time:

• Use different ingredients to create contrast and complement. Variety is the spice of life, after all. Think of the foods you have at your ready, and then mix them up. If you have an all-meat dish, make sure that an all-vegetable dish appears on the table, too. By tapping into a variety of ingredients, you inevitably work plenty of balance into the menu.

When it comes to vegetables, stick with the stuff that's fresh, seasonal, and local. You can't go wrong that way. Sure, you may want to contrast tender, delicate spring pea shoots in one dish with braised cold-weather cabbage in another, but you probably won't find both at their peaks at the same time. Plenty of other ingredients can create culinary balance, so choose the ones you know are fresh and at their prime, and look forward to enjoying the rest when their seasons roll around.

• Contrast and complement flavor within and among dishes. Sweet and sour, ginger and onion, and rice wine and soy are all classic pairings that allow one element's flavor to play off the other's. Serving too many subtle dishes will have your guests snoozing, while a 100-percent Sichuan, three-alarm chile feast is an obvious bad idea, too. So avoid extremes, and everybody will have an enjoyable dining experience.

If it works with the menu, serve the milder dishes at the beginning of the meal. Doing so keeps delicate flavors from getting lost among the saltier, tangier, spicier, and generally bolder dishes that come later.

• Looks count, so choose dishes that balance colors, shapes, and sizes. Who wants to eat a totally brown meal: braised pork in soy sauce, stir-fried mushrooms, and crispy-skinned roast duck, for example? Or a dish with nothing but finely shredded ingredients? These may taste great, but they won't satisfy visual appetites. By the same token, mix up the color scheme on the dishes themselves — in other words, don't serve pale steamed buns on a white plate.

• Serve dishes that vary in texture. Imagine these pairings: crackling roast duck skin and sumptuous, chewy rice noodles; crunchy stir-fried vegetables with smooth and silky tofu soup; crispy-fried salt and pepper prawns next to meltingly tender red-cooked pork. Are you drooling yet? Contrasting textures obviously keep the mouth awake, and contented.

• Use a range of cooking methods. Not only will a combination of stir-frying, steaming, braising, and deep-frying vary the flavors, textures, and colors, but it'll make the cooking go more smoothly, too. While a slow-simmering stew or roast is cooking, you can turn your attention to the hands-on dishes, such as the stir-fries.

The key to harmonizing the dishes in your Chinese home-style meal is to complement and contrast — not to clash. It's a subtle distinction, but one that you'll soon recognize as your skills and tastes develop.