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