Sweet and sour
cooking method
Sweet and sour is a generic term that encompasses many styles of sauce, cuisine, and cooking methods common to Eurasia. Sweet and sour sauce has remained popular in Asian and Western cuisines since the Middle Ages.
By region
East Asia
Chinese cuisine
Sweet and sour dishes, sauces, and cooking methods have a long history in China. One of the earliest recordings of sweet and sour may come from Shaowei Yanshi Dan (Chinese: 燒尾宴食單; pinyin: shāowěi yànshí dān; lit. 'Shaowei banquet menu'), a menu of the food served in Tang dynasty (618–907) written in 708. It included many sweet and sour adjacent dishes and recorded that they were invented by Chancellor Wei Juyuan under Emperor Zhongzong of Tang when he hosted the Emperor at his house. Some authors say that the original sweet and sour sauce (Chinese: 糖醋醬; pinyin: tángcùjiàng) came from the Chinese province of Henan, but the sauce in this area is a light vinegar and sugar mixture not resembling what most people, including the Chinese, would call sweet and sour. Many places in China use a sweet and sour sauce as a dipping sauce for fish and meat rather than in cooking, as is common in Westernized Chinese cuisine.
This style of using sauces is popular amongst Chinese who tie certain sauces to particular meats such as chili and soy for shrimp and vinegar and garlic for goose. There are, however, some dishes, such as the Cantonese sweet and sour pork or loong har kow (sweet and sour lobster balls), in which the meat is cooked and a sauce added to the wok before serving.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sweet and sour” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.