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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The question is a real one. It was something that the Japanese government actually considered only a few years ago. In 2006, the Japanese government decided it had to act. The number of Japanese restaurants overseas had swelled, reaching in the tens of thousands. Some officials were thrilled (what a great opportunity, they thought, to exercise "soft" power). Others were alarmed. On their travels abroad, Japanese officials discovered that the "Japanese" food often looked and t

You don’t need to see it, because you can guess the plot. Ramen Girl (2008) is a cross between Karate Kid (1984), Tampopo (1985), Lost in Translation (2003), and your standard rom com. The story goes as follows. American girl (the late Brittany Murphy ) meets boy and trails him to Japan. Boy dumps girl. Girl drowns her sorrows in a bowl of ramen. Then she finds herself. She apprentices with a tough Japanese ramen chef, discovers the beauty of traditional Japanese culture,

Spicy, fragrant, and mint, this pastry reportedly came out of the emperor's own kitchen. Read all about it.

Nowadays, we associate Tibetans and Mongols with milk tea. But the Chinese once could not get enough of the stuff.

Who came up with the idea of mixing milk with black tea? If you think Europeans were the first to do this, think again.

Think cheese wontons were invented in the USA? Think again. Here's a 16th-century recipe!

Buttery, fluffy, and fragrant -- these steamed buns used to delight people in the Song dynasty.

Wanna get away from milk, but not sure about soy? There’s good news. I have an ancient Chinese recipe. It tastes better than the almond milk

If tapioca pudding doesn’t sound like a Chinese food, you’d be right. In my mother’s kitchen, it was much more. It was also medicine.

Milk consumption is on the rise in China. Some predict this will lead to a billion tummy troubles. Here's why they are wrong.

You don't need European genes to enjoy dairy.

Are Chinese Lactose Intolerant? Traditional Chinese Medicine says otherwise.