This year, Chinese New Year falls on a Tuesday. Monday night, if we’re being precise. Traditionally, it begins the night before. When I was growing up in San Francisco, the signs were unmistakable. My mother would stop cleaning. She’d tell us not to wash our hair. And in the refrigerator there would be a giant round disc taking up a shelf on its own. Brown. Homogeneous. Let me say this clearly: it’s nonsense that all Chinese families make dumplings for New Year. My mother was

This week I was inspired to write about beef after watching Eric Sze’s videos on Instagram about cooking dairy cattle. As it turns out, we have been discussing food taboos in my Eating Right class, which got me thinking about whether there are any Chinese food taboos. The following is the first installment of my Substack newsletter : This post grows out of a question I can’t neatly answer: was beef taboo in China before the late nineteenth century? Step into any Chinese rest

This post comes after a sleepless night. Not from the news, or even a sick child. From a video, posted to some Facebook group, about a medieval Chinese recipe. A young woman, dressed as a Tang-dynasty beauty in a flowing gown, prepares a translucent dessert filled with cherries. She adds sugar to draw out their sweetness. Yingtao biluo A chewy cherry strudel. Was it real? Is any of it real? An image generated by Gemini based on existing descriptions, with the usual historical

This blog is adapted from my Substack newsletter, The Curious Eater. Here, I revisit questions of what it means to eat right--both in China and in Europe in the fourteenth century. If you are curious about vegetarianism in China, you might also take a look at this older post of mine, from the pandemic days. It’s the fourteenth century. A blond noblewoman wrinkles her pale brow as she sprinkles ash into her porridge. Meanwhile, half a world away, her Chinese counterpart smiles

A few weeks ago, a ghost from lockdown resurfaced as I was scrolling through Instagram. No, it wasn’t empty grocery shelves. Or the sight of people carrying away the last rolls of toilet paper, or even unhappy children logged onto school-issued iPads. Rather, it was an old story, and a persistent one at that: Churros come from China. Some well-intentioned vlogger had repeated this piece of mythology for the umpteenth time. The Portuguese in the sixteenth century had visited C

This last week, my students from Food Crisis class did a final food preparation lab. This lab explored vegetarian and vegan alternatives to the meat-centered diet that we have been discussing all term, and we made two Chinese recipes: a Shanghainese vegan recipe made with braised gluten and a simple battered tofu recipe . Late Thursday night, however, I discovered that the Chinese market was out of dried gluten. Rather than admit defeat, I hopped onto the Chinese internet a

This week, I decided to try something different. Rather than write my routine food history blogpost, I interviewed Linh Trinh, who knows a lot more about Vietnamese food history than me. As some of you asked for phở resources, I steered the interview specifically in that direction. Linh was kind enough to supply her gorgeous pictures of phở and some excellent recipe resources. So don't forget to read her blog ! If you are a student enrolled in ASIAN 258, you can access a rec

A few weeks ago, ‘curry’ popped up on my YellowDig feed. I had just released a blogpost about Massaman curry , and that prompted a question about terminology. One student wanted to know whether we should even use the word ‘curry’. The question came from a good place: an interview by cookbook author Priya Krishna. Krishna thinks that we should ditch the term curry altogether. Here’s what she says: Curry was a word that was popularized as a way to make blanket assumptions about

Like most people, I’ve expanded my cooking repertoire since the pandemic began. In part, I credit Costco for this. On a lark, my husband ordered pork tenderloin. Expecting a pound of meat, we were surprised by an enormous log, seven pounds in total, sealed in a vacuum pack. “That’s a lot of pork,” my husband said with a sigh. “What can you make?” I looked through my recipes and smiled, “Vindaloo.” Vindaloo with guabao (April 2020) ***** While vindaloo is not yet a household

お久しぶり 。When Professor Brown heard that I was going to make sakura mochi (Sakura Rice Cakes) for Girls’ Day on March 3, she asked me if I’d be up for giving you all an entry on this traditional Japanese spring treat. Mochi, of course, have already made it into the US mainstream in some form, but today I’ll walk you through a couple of options that are more old school than, say, Trader Joe’s mochi ice cream. Mochi, as you already probably know, have a long history in Japan. H

Picture it now A Japanese lunch appears on a red lacquer tray. Your eyes first espy the cold tofu garnished with wasabi. Then they shift to the stewed vegetables called oden , and then the potato salad flanked by daikon. A few moments later, your brain registers the main attraction. It’s the tempura: a few slices of crispy eggplant, kabocha, and lotus root covered in batter. You grab your chopsticks and decide to start there, while the food is still hot. Picking up a slice o

A few weeks ago, we had a crisis at home. Sofi was demanding Dino-nuggets, but we were out of ketchup. This took us by surprise. Like most households with preschoolers, we buy tons of ketchup. That day, I decided to capitalize on the crisis. What an opportunity to teach Sofi some food history! So I put the question to her, “Do you know where ketchup is from?” Sofi grinned and without missing a beat, she proclaimed, “From tomatoes!” Well, yes and no. ----- Nowadays, ketchup

Last time, I ended with the case against Asian Doughnut Theory No. 1. No, the Portuguese did *not* bring churros from China. Churros are *not* from China. Those sugar-laced delights had been around on the Iberian Peninsula for centuries. A Real Portuguese Legacy Having dispelled one food myth propagated by the media, it’s time to focus on the real Portuguese legacy . The biggest impact the Portuguese had on Asia? It’s not their delectable ports, their heavenly sardine pâté

A few months ago, I awoke to find it there. On my Facebook feed. “Hey Conejita! Thought of you when I saw this.” I groaned. It was the same darn story, “ The Secret History of Churros ” from 2011, but by another writer and with a slightly different name, “ How Spanish Chefs Stole Chinese Dough and Turned Churros into a Classic Dessert .” In a nutshell, the claim: Churros are from China. Or, to quote one of the earliest versions, “ The history of the churro is ancient and rev

“Massaman curry is like a lover,” King Rama II of Siam (1768-1824) once wrote, “As peppery and fragrant as the cumin seed. Its exciting allure arouses. I am urged to seek its source.” Those lines, quoted in Coleen Sen’s section on Thai curries, might be corny, but they connect well to our journey through Asian food history. They express our shared conundrum. In a world where recipes have flowed freely between kitchens and continents, and mutate rapidly, how do we pin down the

In March 2012, a chance trip to a restaurant changed my life. No, I didn’t meet Barak Obama, the Dali Lama, or Brad Pitt. For the budding food historian in me, it was more momentous. I encountered Biryani. I was in Toronto, playing hooky from a dreary conference. Tired of panels, I decided to wander around the city with my husband, checking out all of the hipster cafes. By early evening, the exercise left us famished. “I’m hungry,” the husband declared. “What’s the plan?” We

Guess who made these? About a year ago, I awoke to find the famous dumpling map whirling around on the interwebs. That map, lifted (!#@)...

おはよう！Professor Brown has invited me to step in and take you to Japan for a quick tutorial on the food associated with the Japanese holiday of Setsubun 節分 (literally the seasonal divide, but as a holiday, the change from winter to spring). Below, I’ll give you a brief background and then walk you through how to make your own ehōmaki 恵方巻 (lucky direction roll), a traditional dish for Setsubun that is supposed to have originated in Osaka in roughly the 19th century. Now, as some

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet -- Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet Mr. Shakespeare was admittedly not thinking about food when he wrote those lines about young love. But he should have. Roses taste great in Yunnan rose pastry. Such quibbles aside, these three lines capture our shared conundrum. For the last few weeks, we have debated whether ‘mint bibimbap’ is ‘bibimbap’ and whether Chinese wheat noodles or sopa de fideos can

In 1996, I found myself eating often at vegetarian buffets in southern Taiwan. On most days, I ordered plates of braised gluten. The gluten not only looked like meat, but also mimicked the flavor and texture of the real thing. It was also surprisingly tasty. Served in thick sauce and flanked by hearty mushrooms, gluten was the meat lover’s solution to meatless living. Vegetarian pork (Beijing 2019) I frequented vegetarian restaurants, because in those days, I didn’t eat meat