Cantonese (Yue) Cuisine

Cantonese cuisine comes from Guangdong Province in Southern China, or specifically from Guangzhou (Canton). It draws upon a great diversity of ingredients, besides pork, beef, and chicken, Cantonese cuisine incorporates almost all edible meats, including organ meats, chicken feet, duck and duck tongues, snakes, and snails. Many cooking methods are used, steaming, stir-frying, shallow frying, double boiling, braising, and deep-frying being the most common ones in Cantonese restaurants, due to their convenience and rapidity, and their ability to bring out the flavor of the freshest ingredients.

For many traditional Cantonese cooks, spices should be used in modest amounts to avoid overwhelming the flavors of the primary ingredients, and these primary ingredients in turn should be at the peak of their freshness and quality. And there is no widespread use of fresh herbs in Cantonese cooking.

Traditional dishes:
    Chinese steamed eggs
    Congee with century egg
    Cantonese fried rice
    Sweet and sour pork
    Steamed spare ribs with fermented black beans and chili pepper
    Stir-fried vegetables with meat (e.g. chicken, duck, pork, beef, or intestines)
    Steamed frog legs on lotus leaf
    Steamed ground pork and salted duck egg meatballs
    Blanched vegetables with oyster sauce
    Stir fried water convolvulus with shredded chili and fermented tofu

Cantonese Seafood:
From the Cantonese perspective, strong spices are added only to stale seafood to cover the rotting odor. The freshest seafood is odorless, and is best cooked by steaming. For instance, only a small amount of soy sauce, ginger, and spring onion is added to steamed fish. The light seasoning is used only to bring out the natural sweetness of the seafood. However, most restaurants would gladly get rid of their stale seafood inventory by offering dishes loaded with garlic and spices. As a rule of thumb in Cantonese dining, the spiciness of a dish is usually inversely proportional to the freshness of the ingredients. Some examples are:
    Steamed fish
    Steamed scallops with ginger and garlic
    White boiled shrimp
    Lobster with ginger and scallions
    "Urinating shrimp" (a type of slipper lobster)