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

The idea for this blog goes back a ways. Five summers ago, I was sitting at a table with Yang Yong, a visiting student from China. We were doing what scholars usually do: acting like gluttons for punishment. So we decided to translate a group of medical manuscripts, discovered in a tomb from ancient Northwest China (first century AD). Each day, we sat at my desk on the fifth floor of Thayer and put our endurance to the test. Character by character, we transcribed the Chinese

A picture of noodles on a plate in Canton My first encounter with food history was in the sixth grade. One evening, my father came home to tell us over dinner that he had served as a judge in a cooking case. A local group had invited him, San Francisco’s Public Defender, to adjudicate a longstanding controversy: Who invented pasta, the Chinese or Italians? At the time, I did not grasp the import of the question. I was also unfamiliar with the story of Marco Polo bringing past

January 6, 2021 was supposed to be another gloomy morning in Ann Arbor. At about 9 am, I awoke, still groggy from a night of wrestling Sofía to sleep. I crept downstairs to the kitchen and started the coffee. As I waited for the caffeine to coarse through my veins and vivify my brain, I reached for my phone and scanned Twitter. That morning, something had caught my attention. It was not the images of crowds breaching the Capitol. That would not happen for another four hour

Shellfish in Xiamen (SE China, Nov 2019) Ever wonder why Asians put tapioca pearls in milk tea? The origins of sushi, tempura, or ramen? Or whether it’s disrespectful to Chinese people to order Orange Chicken? If so, you’re in the right place. Welcome to ASIAN 258. If this were a regular semester, I would be congratulating you on making it into the class. After all, most of you are seniors; some of you have even been waiting years to take this introductory course. But to

Twenty years ago, I found myself in China during the Mid-Autumn Festival, living a stone's throw from the Forbidden Palace. The holiday was particularly memorable. Someone had gifted me a big box of assorted mooncakes, made in Taiwan. These pastries were different from the standard lotus root and bean paste varieties I grew up eating in my Cantonese family. The Taiwanese fillings were full of fruity, creamy flavors: matcha, taro, pineapple, candied melon. A veritable mooncake

By Benjamin Guan, Alison Li, and Andrea Lin April 26th, 2020

*Written by Ying-Ying Tiffany Liu One sunny day, I had lunch with two South African-born Chinese (SABC) friends at a northern-style...

Hello to all my peers in ASIAN 258! I hope you are all safe and healthy during this pandemic. During this pandemic, I like most of you,...

Whenever I look for recipes online, I try to find at least two to compare and end up going with kind of an average between the two...

Like you, I wonder about the summer. I think about the first thing I will do when I can leave my house. I also imagine various futures. Like most people in middle age, I dream about alternative careers. Should I have been a lawyer, a campaign manager, or a restaurateur? Say I woke up one morning and decided to sell high-end Asian? This is admittedly a weird thought. Anyone who has read the news knows better. It's a terrible time to be in food services. Restaurant workers make

As the parties awaited the verdict , temperatures soared outside. Not that this would have surprised anyone. It was late July in Taipei. By noon, the thermometer hit ninety-seven degrees, with fifty-four percent humidity -- a perfect time for a tall serving of energizing boba, or bubble tea. Picture the boba. Sweet milky tea poured over cubes of ice, with a generous scoop of black tapioca pearls. Maybe you have a preference for the flavoring -- taro, lychee, even matcha? Wh

I’ve always been a fan of crystal skin dumplings. They are quite popular in Guangzhou and Hong Kong -- if you have eaten dim sum, you’re already familiar with har gow ( xiajiao 蝦餃 ) and chive dumplings. Variants are also found in other parts of Southeast China -- and in Southeast Asia. I'm looking forward to trying a recipe for a Vietnamese tapioca starch dumpling soon. Start by selecting your starches. You can make the dumplings with a combination of wheat starch and tapio

I wrote the original version of this blogpost about a year ago, right as the COVID-19 crisis sent us all into lockdown. At the time, anti-Chinese sentiment had already spun out of control. America saw its worst spike in anti-Asian hate crimes in decades. And pictures of bat soup began to circulate on the internet. Then elected officials further stoked the flames of hatred and intolerance. There was first talk of "the Chinese virus" (Donald Trump), followed by racist comments

The name of this blog might as well be the title of the class. If there's a time to be upfront, that would be now. The end of the term draws close, and we must square the circle. So what is the orange chicken challenge? You might be imagining two guys sitting at a table eating as much of the stuff as they can keep down in an hour. Or battling chefs, vying to make the most appetizing plate for TV. If that were the challenge, I'd flunk. I am too much of a snob to eat orange chi

The Chinese are present in many ways in Buenos Aires (Argentina). But there’s a special type of restaurant that marries elements from the...

About twenty years ago, I found myself eavesdropping on a conversation about imperialism. The woman sitting next to me had taken issue with airline regulations. She thought it was outrageous that English was the lingua franca of air traffic control. “American imperialism,” she scoffed. “You Americans impose your culture, your language, your junk food on the rest of the world. You conquer with McDonald’s and KFC.” At the time, I was inclined to agree about the fast food. Wha