Dishing up sweet and salty sides, including snake bites that delight

One of my most memorable encounters in Wuxi was with a snake - and it involved several bites.

Fortunately, I was the one doing the biting.

A hunk of the creature was served in a salty soup, and its tender flesh flaked off its ribcage when prodded with my chopsticks.

I'd eaten serpent twice before - once grilled on a skewer in Beijing (hated it) and once in Cambodia, shredded with minced garlic, chilies and herbs (loved it).

But Wuxi's snake takes the cake. Even though it's not necessarily one of the delicacies for which the area is celebrated, it was one of my favorites.

That said, I also enjoyed the local specialties hailed as icons of Wuxi cuisine. While the city's white fish deserves its reputation for soft meat and scant bones, the other two of the "three whites" from Taihu lake - tiny silver fish, typically served in thick broth, and blanched white shrimp - are also scrumptious. So, too, are hundun (soup dumplings), lake crab and xiaolongbao (steamed buns), saluted as standout dishes in the city.

Encyclopedia of Wuxi Cuisine Chief Editor Xu Qiaomeng is correct when he says it's misleading to criticize Wuxi food for being too sweet, since every cuisine has some sweet dishes.

The difference is that perhaps most Wuxi dishes are somewhat saccharine. Many locals say: "If it's not sweet, it's not Wuxi cuisine."

I also agree with the local gourmands who believe the common criticism of Wuxi fare is unwarranted. Sure, there's plenty of sugar, but it's customarily accompanied by comparable quantities of another, very different, white-granule ingredient - salt.

That's why Wuxi fare isn't solely a collection of offerings that would otherwise be considered desserts.

While I wouldn't dare say Wuxi fare resembles American food, this is perhaps an area of similarity. American sauces are typically a mix of sweet and salty. Ketchup, honey mustard, barbecue sauce and comparable condiments are both saccharine and savory. In fact, most have more sugar than salt.

But the commonalities essentially end there.

Not only are the ingredients and presentation different from those seen in other countries and Chinese regions but so, too, are the customs surrounding the dinner table.

A case that shows all three is puffer fish soup, upon which I dined in Jiangyin, a county-level city in Wuxi.

First, Westerners (and many Chinese regions' natives) don't eat puffer fish. Second, Westerners would typically take out the bones and rarely eat fish in soup. But most interesting is the third dimension, the entirely local cultural element: My host explained that Jiangyin's men like to dine on the fish to prove their bravado, since the creature can contain the potentially deadly tetrodotoxin.

It's fascinating to see how some of the traditions surrounding Wuxi food are changing.

My Jiangyin host says it is common for families to serve guests - especially women whom men aspire to court - hundun with boiled eggs in broth.

In the past, if the woman drank the broth and insisted she was too full afterward from the delicious soup to eat the dumplings and egg, it hinted at probable interest in her hopeful suitor. Eating the solids was the traditional equivalent of turning off the light in the "hot-or-not" Chinese TV dating show If You Are the One, in which women flip off the pedestal lights illuminating guys they're not interested in.

But now, even interested women will clean the bowl, since "people today don't want to waste", he says.

Epicureans point out that health concerns about sugar and the expanding input of ingredients and influences from outside - coupled with rapid economic growth - are contributing to Wuxi cuisine's development.

But despite the flux that comes with modernity and consequential integration with the outside world, Wuxi fare and related culture will almost certainly retain their distinctive native characteristics for the foreseeable future.

As to how it develops, well, I hope to have many chances to return to enjoy both the old and the new of what will cover and surround Wuxi's tables in the coming years.