Food in Chinese Culture

"This is more of an academic book, a collection of essays about food culture by leading China scholars which came out in 1981. It was probably the first book in English to bring serious academic scrutiny to Chinese food culture, and to use the scholarly techniques applied to other subjects to food, offering the views of different experts on different periods of Chinese history. There’s so much information in it. KC Chang was an archaeologist, so he wrote the introduction and the chapter about ancient Chinese food customs. Then you’ve got chapters on all the other main dynastic periods, and one on modern China. It remains a key work, and if you want to become more deeply informed about the history of Chinese food it’s a great place to start. It’s a real mixture. There are some things that are stunningly continuous in Chinese history. For example, there’s a text from the third century BC called The Root of Tastes , written by a merchant called Lu Buwei. Lu records how the legendary chef Yi Yin lectured his king on cookery in the 16th century BC. The way Yi Yin describes the arts of flavour and the control of fire is something that’s still applicable today. There’s also a very famous archaeological site in Hunan province, the Mawangdui tombs, which are one of the richest sources of information on Han dynasty eating habits. Not only did they contain a lot of bamboo strips inscribed with cooking techniques, the names of dishes and so on, but archaeologists also found a stash of actual food, as well as dining instruments and fabulous lacquer ware. Among the foods they found in the tombs were fermented black beans with ginger, and they look exactly the same as the ones you can buy in Chinatown today. So you have some culinary techniques that go back more than 2000 years, for example the use of fermented soy products to bring flavour to food. But then you also have massive historical shifts. One of the key moments in this respect was the late Ming, early Qing dynasty, when you had the arrival of new world food that transformed cuisines all over the world. In the case of China, the arrival of potatoes and sweet potatoes via Portuguese traders was one of the reasons that the nation was able to grow, because these foodstuffs made possible the cultivation of mountainous regions. Similarly, the chilli was first seen in China in the 16th century when it arrived in the eastern ports with the Portuguese traders. Inhabitants of the eastern provinces didn’t really develop a taste for it, but it found its way along the Yangtze to Hunan and Sichuan. It fitted in with the cosmologies of these regions, because there’s the idea in Chinese medicine that when the climate is very damp you need to eat heating foods to redress the balance of the body. In the past the Hunanese and Sichuanese had used things like ginger and other herbs, but suddenly the chilli appeared and suited them perfectly. Sichuan pepper is an ancient native Chinese spice. It’s one of the spices they found in the Mawangdui tombs. The Chinese word for pepper, jiao , originally referred to Sichuan pepper. Black pepper is known as hu jiao , meaning barbarian (imported) pepper. There’s a legend about a Han dynasty Chinese envoy called Zhang Qian who is supposed to have brought sesame, coriander, alfalfa and other things from Europe along the silk road. There are clues in the Chinese language about which things came across the land routes because they are prefixed by “ hu ”,which referred to the barbarians of the northwest. Hence hu jiao . Carrot is hu luobo , literally “barbarian radish”. The Yuan dynasty was Mongol, the invaders from the north, so they ate mutton and dairy foods. In northern China you can still see the use of mutton, which the southern Chinese don’t like at all, and the appearance of a few dairy products in the everyday diet."