Chen-Ning Yang at the table

A Chinese meal has no successive courses of starter, main, and dessert: a staple starch (主食 zhǔshí — steamed rice or rice noodles) is placed at the center of the table, surrounded by several 菜 (cài), savory small dishes that each person picks up with chopsticks into their bowl of rice. Everything arrives at once and is eaten communally. Sweets (cakes, fruit) and tea are taken separately, often outside the meal, and major festivals — New Year, Mid-Autumn — add their symbolic dishes. This is the table, from Hefei to Princeton, that Yang always recreated at home.

A common thread of this table: the deep umami obtained through fermentation. Brewed soy sauce, lightly fermented river fish in the Anhui style, salted egg yolk at the heart of mooncakes — everywhere, time and salt transform matter, like a slow controlled reaction. A cuisine of patience, where flavor is built even before the flame is lit.