《纽约时报》介绍东北菜推荐东北菜

“People don’t write or talk about it much,” said Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, the Cantonese-born author of the authoritative “Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking,” which reaches no farther north than Beijing. Many Southerners look down on Dongbei food and consider it unrefined.

But that may be more a measure of China’s culinary wealth than of the quality of Dongbei food. Over the last five years, at least five Dongbei restaurants have opened in Flushing, Queens, providing some particularly enticing entry points to the cuisine, like lamb ribs crusted with cumin seeds and crushed chilies, fluffy salads of cilantro leaves and scallion shreds, wobbly braised pork belly, carrot-lamb dumplings, their version of sauerkraut, pumpkin fritters, corn on the cob and deep-fried sweet potatoes bathed in hot caramelized sugar.

“Our food is as good as anywhere else in China,” said David Liang, the pugnacious owner of Hong Yi Shun in Flushing, who is from the port city of Dalian, a major commercial hub for the North Pacific.

Dongbei, once known as Manchuria, stretches up toward Siberia from Beijing. Once a hotly contested pawn of empires and a flourishing industrial region, it has slid toward becoming China’s Rust Belt since the 1980s. Many of its young people now seek their fortunes elsewhere, including Flushing, where the regional cooking of China keeps putting out new and fascinating branches.

The region’s rich and warming food is especially welcome at this time of year.

Saturday will be New Year’s Eve on the Chinese calendar. At her restaurant Golden Palace, Jing Guang will make the soy-and-sugar-pickled pigs’ feet considered auspicious in her native province of Liaoning, in the far northeast of China. “The hoof can hold onto the things you want in the New Year,” she said. “Like children, and money,” she added, smiling.

At midnight, she will begin boiling fat homemade dumplings filled with pork and suan cai, pickled cabbage. Ms. Guang has what pastry chefs call a “white thumb” — a talent for working with flour. That’s important in Dongbei cooking. Along with dumplings there is bread. Lots and lots of bread: tortilla-thin pancakes, puffy steamed buns, stuffed rounds called bing and even steamed corn bread.

“We had bread and soup, bread and soup, every day,” said Yue Ma, a native of Changchun and the installations manager at the Museum of Chinese in America, in Chinatown in Manhattan. Ms. Ma, 40, grew up when the region was noted mostly for poverty, potatoes and cold. “Rice was only for special holidays,” she said.

Only a small amount of rice is grown in Dongbei. It is medium-grained, pearly, and mostly exported to wealthier parts of China.

Dongbei’s turbulent history has made it a culinary crossroads for centuries.

All three Dongbei provinces — Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning — border on Inner Mongolia to the west, and Russia or Korea to the east. (Kimchi, called “soaked vegetable” in Chinese, is placed on the table with a plate of roasted peanuts when you sit down to eat at a Dongbei restaurant.) After railroads provided access to the Pacific, the Dongbei region became embroiled in decades of conflict among China, Russia and Japan. Its population, largely Chinese, also includes millions of descendants of Koreans, Mongols and Russians, who were sent to Manchuria during occupations or conquests.

But any suggestion that Dongbei cooking is not fully Chinese seems bizarre when eating the expert stir-fries of the chef Weiliang Chen. Mr. Chen, who is from Shenyang, is the chef at Northeast Taste Chinese Food, the biggest of the Dongbei restaurants in Queens, with a huge menu that reflects his decades of kitchen experience in Beijing and New York. The unfortunately unhelpful English menu includes hundreds of mysterious dishes like “health fried beef chip” and “sea fish cooker,” and the region’s commitment to nose-to-tail eating is evident in “crispy colorectal” and “exploding lamb kidney.”

But one signature is as straightforward and delicious as can be: di san xian, a Dongbei classic that loosely means “three delights from the earth.” It is a stir-fry of golden fried potatoes, eggplant wedges and crisp green peppers, laced with vinegar and studded with garlic, that tastes like much more than the sum of its parts. (There’s a recipe at nytimes.com/dining.)

The Dongbei talent for mixing meat and fish bubbles away in Mr. Chen’s hot pot of pork belly, cellophane noodles and firm tofu, adorned with a whole fried fish (always served with the tail facing the most honored guest at the table). But even one of the region’s most humble dishes — thin and floppy sheets of tofu, stir-fried with thick slices of medium-hot green chilies — here has the addictive char-flavor “breath” of the wok that keeps you plunging your chopsticks in for more. Mr. Chen makes an elegant, tender version of a popular Dongbei stir-fry of lamb with dried chilies, made fragrant and crunchy with cumin seeds — a legacy of the nomadic Mongols who long ruled Central Asia, carrying spices on horseback along with their arrows. Lamb is considered a Northern taste and excessively “strong” by many Chinese cooks; it is always cooked with powerful aromatics, like chili peppers and garlic, to subdue it.

But the most breathtaking version of this dish, which has tender meat and all the lusciousness of the fat under the skin, is at the bright and friendly Fu Run, formerly Waterfront International, on Prince Street. The dish called Muslim lamb chops emerges triumphant as whole slabs of lamb ribs, long-marinated, slow-braised and then torched to crisp the skin and laminate the cumin seeds into a crackly crust. “Some people shy away from the gamy taste of lamb, but we embrace it,” said Xuefang Zhou, the restaurant’s manager. (Like most people quoted here, she spoke through an interpreter.)

Fu Run also stuffs lamb and minced carrots into juicy boiled dumplings — excellent for dipping in black vinegar, one of the region’s favorite seasonings. Round boiled dumplings stuffed with pork and celery, leek or cabbage are served at all the Dongbei restaurants, most authentically for breakfast. At Golden Palace, Ms. Guang makes juicy patties of pork and minced cabbage encased in a precariously thin, wonderfully crunchy golden crust. In her “spring roll combination,” thin pancakes arrive with a hot stir-fry of shredded pork and vegetables, to be rolled into tight cigars with bean paste and “tiger vegetable,” a bright toss of cilantro leaves and scallions that is somewhere between a salad and a garnish, adding coolness, salt and juice to the mix.

She also happens to make Flushing’s best version of another Dongbei classic: chicken pieces braised with wild mushrooms in a star anise and cassia-scented broth; hers has the clearest flavor, without too much mushroom murkiness. (At Northeast Taste, the same dish is called “stupid” chicken stew: an accurate translation for the Chinese term for free-range birds, which are allowed to grow slowly instead of being rushed to slaughter.)

Around the corner from Golden Palace, at M & T restaurant, the chef Jun Liu brews endless and wonderful soups, some white with fish bones and creamy with tofu; others electrically orange with the natural oils from shrimp and lobster. The golden pumpkin pancakes are not to be missed, and his whole fish with cumin is an extraordinary juxtaposition of ocean and earth.

Mr. Liu’s cuisine represents the province of Shandong on the Yellow Sea, just across from Dalian. Shandong was the main source for a vast early-20th-century migration to Dongbei that was encouraged by the Chinese government to strengthen its foothold in the north. “Many Shandong dishes have become part of Dongbei food,” said Ms. Ma, pointing out that the two places are separated only by a narrow strait.

Thus, sorting out what is and is not Dongbei food is not always easy, or even possible. One dish found on every table is Dongbei liangpi, the northeastern version of a western Chinese dish that has become a popular street food in Beijing. The base is wide noodles made from mung-bean starch. (The dish is often called something cryptic like “green bean sheet jelly.”) On top may be almost anything: a tangle of cucumber slivers, strands of jellyfish, chunks of garlic, strips of pork and scallion, thinly shredded omelet. The whole affair is tossed with a nose-teasing dressing of soy sauce, sesame paste, sesame oil and two kinds of vinegar — one clear and sweet, the other dark and rounded. The extreme bounce and chew of the noodles makes it deeply satisfying.

A taste for vinegar, which is poured straight as a dipping sauce for the region’s rumpled, delicious and juicy boiled dumplings, is a hallmark of the Dongbei palate. As in many cold climates, sour flavors are used liberally to break up the monotony of meat and starch. All these cooks brew their own suan cai — salted, cold-fermented green cabbage that is virtually identical to sauerkraut. They serve it straight with sausages and pickled meats; or, more delicately, to perk up a brew of pork bones and cellophane noodles known as Dongbei hot pot (translated as “stewed sliced pork with sour cabbage”).

“That is real Dongbei mommy food,” Mr. Chen said.