People in Shanghai were once crazy about dairy. As my recent paper in Gastronomica shows, the eastern seaboard was famous for its butter, clotted creams, and curds between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. Sixteenth-century foodies loved cheese in particular. They ate it stretched, fresh, and preserved, lightly seasoned, or breaded. They consumed cheese inside their dumplings and pastries, savored it with their pork, fish, and shellfish, and added it to their sweets. The following recipe comes out of Song’s Book of Nourishing Life (1504). The author, a minor official and a descendant of the Song imperial family, apparently took great pride in his mother’s culinary prowess. He not only recorded all of her recipes, but also urged his descendants to preserve her knowledge of gastronomy. The dough is flaky and rich. The Central and Western Asian elements of this pastry are striking. The dough is a phyllo, and there is the sweet nut filling so typical of desserts from the Middle East. The recipe also uses fresh cheese or the rendered fat of cows or sheep to make a dough. But you will not taste the cheese here. The dairy adds richness to the dough and sturdiness to the paper-thin sheets. The recipe is also cooked on a hot oiled griddle. Voilà , layers of flaky pastry! The filling can be adjusted for allergies. Ingredients Flour, 2 cups Hot water (mix a half cup of boiling water with a quarter cup of cold water) Fresh unsalted paneer, ½ cup (follow steps 1-3 of Song’s recipe ) Salt, ¾ teaspoon Honey or sugar Pine nuts, 1/4 cup Walnuts, 1/3 cup Hazelnuts, 1/3 cup 1. Prepare the fresh paneer. You can heat the milk to 190 degrees and then add a little diluted vinegar. Strain the paneer in a cheesecloth. 2. Combine flour and salt. Then add the hot water slowly and incorporate it into the dough. 3. Crumble the fresh paneer and knead it into the dough. Let the dough rest for at least 30 minutes, preferably an hour, until it is soft and malleable. 4. De-skin the walnuts and hazelnuts by blanching them in hot water for a minute. Dry out the nuts in the sun or in a warm oven. Mince the nuts and mix. 5. Divide the dough into small balls and roll them out as thin as possible on a surface dusted with flour. A Chinese rolling pin, which is thinner than its Western counterpart, is best suited for this purpose. The dough should be virtually translucent and paper thin. You can also use a pasta machine. The dough should be almost translucent. 6. Oil a hot pan with a generous serving of vegetable oil or ghee, preferably one with a high smoke point. Wait until the oil is hot, and then carefully place a sheet of the dough on the pan. Leave the sheet on the pan until it has turned golden brown, then flip and repeat the process. Remove from the heat. 7. Add honey or sugar to one side of the sheet and then sprinkle on the nuts. Roll the pastry into a cigar. If you find the pastry too hot to handle, wait a minute or two before doing this. It will still be malleable. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. https://thecuriouseater.substack.com/?utm_campaign=profile&utm_medium=profile-page

Anyone who has done business in China knows the importance of luxury goods. No banquet is complete without a serving of something expensive: bird’s nest, shark’s fin, fine baijiu , for example. As a regular traveler to China, I have chewed on my share of abalone and even unwittingly ingested the flesh of endangered species. The love of luxury has been constant in China since ancient times. But Chinese views of luxury shift constantly, reflecting changing tastes and the laws of supply and demand. In recent years, people have begun to see abalone and baijiu as blasé. Foreign foods like truffles, which offer a touch of novelty, have displaced old goodies. On my last trip to China, the men at the party were doing shots of solid Spanish reds instead of baijiu . Matsutake mushrooms have supplanted abalone as the highlight of the evening. Long before the mushrooms became a banquet staple, ghee was a coveted luxury product in the eleventh century. The Song elite raved about the stuff: its rich flavor and fragrance. They also went to great lengths to buy ghee, shipping it over long distances. Like most pricey foods, ghee was too good to keep to yourself. Song elites shared their loot with friends and donated it to monasteries. The thank you notes, which took the form of short poems, survive to this day. The best ghee in the Northern Song period hailed from certain places in the north, from Xi’an and further west in Shaanxi and Gansu. Many Chinese believed that the superior flavor of the product owed much to the luxuriant grass that grew on the hills in these places year round. The grass fattened up local cows, producing creamy milk and marbled veal calves. In practical terms, this meant yogurt with loads of milk fat, yogurt that cooks could churn into a cultured butter and then heat to make clarified butter, or ghee. The ghee not only had a deeper flavor than regular butter, but enjoyed a long shelf life. Some of the stuff found its way into the vegetarian delights served in southern monasteries. This recipe offers clues about what Song-dynasty people did with their ghee. A fusion dish, it marries the flavors of the steppes to those of the tropics. The lychee, the other main ingredient, is native to Guangdong and Fujian, in the deep southeast. The sweet, fragrant fruit was popular in the Song dynasty, too. Well-heeled men and women feasted on the stuff. A renowned man of letters composed three hundred different poems about the fruit. Steamed lychee buns My efforts to reproduce the recipe presented mild challenges. Lychees are a seasonal product, available only during the early summer in Michigan. However, the canned product works just fine. Some versions of the recipe combine the lychees with coconut blossoms for a touch of sweetness. My search for the blossoms yielded no results. You can find coconut nectar online, but this may be overkill. Canned lychees, preserved in syrup, require no additional sugar. The ghee sold at grocery stores is moreover different from the Song-dynasty product. Ghee nowadays is synonymous with clarified butter. In medieval China, cooks made ghee by first churning yogurt into butter and then heating that butter. This laborious method survives in rural Turkey and parts of India. But I have yet to successfully replicate it in the modern kitchen. Whole milk is not what it used to be. The fat content of commercial milk is too low to make much butter from yogurt. You can buy true or “traditional” ghee on Amazon, but a six-ounce jar will set you back at least fifty bucks. My recipe is easier on the pocket book and still delicious. Filling Ingredients Lychees (four twelve-ounce cans, or five to six cups of the fresh fruit, peeled) Ghee Cinnamon, powdered ginger 1. Prepare the bun ahead of time with this recipe. 2. If using canned lychees, strain them well. Use a meat presser to squeeze out all of the liquid from the lychees. 3. Heat a wok, adding first the ghee and then the lychees. Sauté the fruit until the liquid evaporates and the fruits caramelize (be careful of hot oil splashes). Sprinkle powdered spices to taste, but go easy! They should add a touch of spice to the fruit, but not overwhelm the palate. Set aside and allow the lychees to cool to room temperature. 4. Prepare the buns in the usual way. Brush a little of the caramelized butter from the pan onto the buns before adding the fruit. Scoop up about two tablespoons of the filling and close the buns. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. https://thecuriouseater.substack.com/?utm_campaign=profile&utm_medium=profile-page

I get a lot of questions about cheese these days. What do you mean that the Chinese cooked with butter? How do they digest milk products if they are lactose intoleran t? What did Chinese do with cheese? The Chinese actually did a lot with cheese historically. They made stews, sweets , and steamed buns . In fact, they beat Panda Express to the chase, producing cheesy wontons. The recipe below comes from sixteenth-century Shanghai: Mr. Song’s Book of Nourishing Life . As I explain in my recent paper in Gastronomica , Mr. Song recorded all of his mother’s recipes, many of which were for special occasions. This particular recipe turns up in his section on wheat products: noodles, pastries, pancakes, and stuffed pastas. Mr. Song’s family loved fancy noodles, some of which were made with duck eggs and others with cheese. This was one of three options for won tons. By the early sixteenth century, stuffed pastas had been around for more than a millennium. Chinese cooks had gotten in the habit of throwing just about anything into them (think lychees and persimmons ). The cheese reflected the culinary influences of the steppes. You can still find cheese-filled dumplings in Tibet and further west. (A phenomenal recipe for cheese momos appears in Beyond the Great Wall ). The cheese in the recipe is similar to paneer and can be made at home. You should, however, be mindful that our “whole” milk is watery compared to what was available to Mr. Song. The Holstein, the global work “horse” of the dairy industry, produces milk that is on average about 3.25% milk fat. Southern yellow cattle, however, makes milk that is 8% fat . So if cholesterol is not a concern, mix some heavy cream into your milk. It will make a smoother cheese! The poppy seeds present a second prominent element in the recipe. Like cheese, poppy seeds are rare today in southern Chinese cooking. This owes much to its connection to opium, which has a seedy past (pun intended). In fact, this recipe is missing from the 1989 edition of Mr. Song’s Book of Nourishing Life . Political sensitivities undoubtedly played a role in the editor’s decision to exclude the treat. But the Chinese used to consume many poppy products both as food and as medicine, including the seeds and husks, and not just the highly-addictive sap. In some places, they still do. Only a few years ago, police discovered that a cook in Xi’an had been adding poppy husks to enhance his noodle sales. The trick worked! Customers kept coming back for more. Filling Ingredients Whole milk, half gallon Scallions, one bunch (white parts only) Vinegar, ¾ cup mixed with equal parts water Salt (1/2 teaspoon) Cardamom powder (1/8 teaspoon) Sichuan peppercorns powder (1/4 teaspoon) Poppy seeds (2 tablespoons) Soup Ingredients 4 cups water Chicken or vegetable bouillon, 1 cube Scallions, 3 sliced Vinegar, ½ Tablespoon (or to taste) Sichuan peppers (1/8 teaspoon) Chinese dried licorice (2 pieces). If not available, do not substitute for Western licorice (it will overpower your soup). You can use one whole star anise instead. Preparations 1. Make the wonton wrappers according to these directions. You can also use pre-bought egg wrappers to save time. 2. Prepare the fresh cheese by following these directions. (Make sure that you do not heat the milk beyond 160 degrees, otherwise the curds will be grainy and hard to handle.) You can also substitute a creamy ricotta or a mascarpone if you don’t have time to make cheese from scratch. 3. Crumble the cheese and mix with the scallions, Sichuan peppercorns, salt, cardamom, and poppy seeds. 4. Fill the wonton wrappers with the fillings. When ready, boil them in a pot of water. The wontons should be done within 2 minutes (they will float to the top of the water when cooked). Remove from the water and strain. 5. Make the soup by combining the scallions, peppercorns, vinegar, and Chinese licorice with the stock. Add salt to taste. Heat and simmer for 10 minutes. When ready, serve a few wontons with soup. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. https://thecuriouseater.substack.com/?utm_campaign=profile&utm_medium=profile-page

Westerners were struck by the Chinese penchant for drinking their tea without milk or sugar. The English missionary, William Milne (1815-1863), remarked upon the Chinese way of consuming tea in Real Life in China (1857): “When decocted tea [in China] is drunk without any admixture of milk and sugar. These are used only by foreigners, and probably to mollify the désagrémus of the ‘black draughts’ they are so fond of ‘masking.’ As to sugar and milk, the former is superabundant in China, and used for every imaginable purpose except tea-drinking…” Milne’s remarks resonated with the observations of most Western visitors to China in his time. By the nineteenth century, Chinese rarely mixed black tea with milk or sugar. Things, however, had been different only two centuries before. The Chinese not only once enjoyed their “black draughts,” but Europeans also had their first taste of milk tea in South China. The description of the Dutch traveler, Johannes Nieuhoff, who visited Canton in 1655, defies expectations. Tea, of course, was familiar to him. The Dutch had imported it from Japan already for several decades. But the distinctly Chinese manner of drinking “the Herb” was different enough to merit note: At the beginning of the Dinner there were several Bottles of The or Tea brought to the Table, whereof they drank to the Ambassadors, bidding them welcom. This Drink is made of the Herb The or Cha after this manner: They infuse half a handful of the said Herb in fair Water, boyling it till a third part be consum'd; to which they add warm Milk about a fourth part, with a little Salt, and then drink it as hot as they can well endure. Nieuhoff’s Dutch-language account of China went into print just ten years later, in 1665. A French translation appeared the same year, and an English version followed four years later. Milk tea also turned up in another influential account of China. Representatives of the Dutch East India Company also sipped milk tea in Fuzhou in 1666, which they called “Bean-broth, mixed with warm milk .” The timing of these popular accounts are remarkable. Both appeared before tea became a staple in the English diet. They also circulated prior to the first descriptions of Europeans mixing tea with milk. In 1680, an aristocratic French lady impressed the famous writer La Fontaine when she served tea with milk in her salon. Not long afterwards, English paintings featured jugs of milk for tea. Over the next few decades, tea replaced the breakfast ale and afternoon sherry at the British table . We may never prove that Europeans learned to make milk tea from the Chinese. It is conceivable that they came up with the invention on their own. But tea did not become a popular drink in England until the late seventeenth century. This was decades after Nieuhoff’s influential account of China, begging the question whether the visit with the mandarin sparked an international craze. Chinese Milk Tea Chinese cookbooks contain a surprising number of recipes that marry black tea with dairy. The following recipe is a simple one. But one must get the milk right. Chinese milk in the sixteenth century was far richer than anything that we nowadays drink. In 1917, C.O. Levine and William Cadbury , two dairy scientists, tested the milk of the cattle breeds native to South China. They discovered that while Chinese cows produced little milk, their milk was preternaturally creamy: eight percent fat. The native water buffalo, however, averaged 12% milk fat. Compare this to the 3.25% of today’s whole milk, and you have a virtual milkshake. To achieve the right level of fat, I mixed a quarter cup of light cream with three quarters cup regular whole milk. This brought me closer to the eight percent that Levine and Cadbury described. The flavor was close to evaporated milk, which has about the same amount of fat. Not coincidentally, most shops make milk tea in Hong Kong with evaporated or condensed milk. While the usual explanation is that the use of canned milk reflected the lack of resources or refrigeration, culinary preferences also must have played a role. Milk, of course, is nowadays widely available on the island. Yet people in Hong Kong continue to make their milk tea with the canned product and complain that European milk tea is too watery. Black tea (pu’er or oolong), 1-2 teaspoons Evaporated or condensed milk, ¼- ½ cup Boiling water, 1 cup A pinch of salt or sugar (optional) 1. Steep the tea with the boiling water for 5 minutes. 2. Strain the tea of the loose leaves. 3. Heat the milk gently, until it is hot. Then pour the tea into the heated milk. 4. Add salt or sugar to taste. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. https://thecuriouseater.substack.com/?utm_campaign=profile&utm_medium=profile-page

In 1897, British diplomat and linguist, Edward Charles Parker (1849-1926), summed up conventional wisdom when he declared that Chinese consumed little milk. He did note, though, a curious exception. “A decoction known as nah-ch’a, or ‘milk-tea,’ is drunk at the Manchu court, and is served on state occasions; but it is merely a survival probably of Mongol rule.” Parker was correct on both counts. The Manchus kept an imperial dairy near Beijing. At the turn of the century, the Chinese also drank little cow’s milk. This, though, was changing: “But of late years the Chinese begun to fancy the sweetened tinned milks of Europe.” What Parker overlooked, however, was a long history of combining black tea with dairy, one predating the Manchu or Mongol invasions of China. People in China, in fact, had been drinking cream tea for centuries. In this regard, they were no different from their counterparts in Central and Inner Asia. Seven centuries before Parker, the famous “patriotic” poet, Lu You 陸游 (1125-1210), sang about infusing his morning brew with cow’s milk, churned into butter. Lu You was not alone in this. Popular Chinese cookbooks from the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries supplied detailed instructions for “pestle” tea ( leicha 擂茶). First pulverize soaked tea leaves with roasted sesame seeds, then add Sichuan peppercorns, salt, butter, and sugar to make a paste. Afterwards, pour in brewed tea and stir until the liquid froths, and warm over heat. You can also add ground chestnuts, pine nuts, and walnuts. If butter is unavailable, substitute dry flour. Dry ingredients for pestle tea Cream tea had a curious hold on the rich and powerful in China, especially in the South. Some versions of the beverage used ground goji berries, cream, and flour. Other versions, however, were simpler, comprising milk fats and black tea. One late sixteenth-century poet from the South urged readers to take a liberal hand with the butter or clotted cream. His point? The more cream, he wrote, the better. And indeed, most recipes specify that the proportion of dairy to tea should be three to one. A variety of recipes survive, too, from the early years of Qing rule (1644-1911). In the seventeenth century, a magistrate from Jiangnan instructed readers about how to prepare milk tea. Use low quality tea. Brew it strong and then beat it with a paddle until it acquires a deep red or brown hue before adding sesame paste and butter. Serve salty or sweet. It isn’t clear when, or if, this tradition died in China. Certainly, Tibetans, including those living in Yunnan, still make the stuff today, with brick tea, salt, and yak butter. Some versions of pestle tea persist in the Chinese-speaking world, albeit without the milk. Hunanese concoct a savory soup with tea, vegetables, and nuts. Hakkas in Taiwan also prepare a version of the drink with the same name. They use matcha green tea or oolong. Ground nuts and rice also go into the beverage. One contemporary rendition hints of its origins as a dairy-based beverage. Cook use soybeans, ground into a thick “milk.” The drink is sweet. Simple Cream Tea (seventeenth-century style) Don’t believe the name. The ‘milk’ ( naizi 奶子) refers *not* to fluid milk here, but to butter or clotted cream. Before refrigeration or canning, butter preserved fresh dairy, which was not only perishable but also seasonal. Heating butter will further extend shelf life. When properly stored, clarified butter, or ghee, will last at least a year, if not longer. People in southwest China still consume churned butter. But in coastal areas, clotted cream became more popular from the Ming dynasty. Foodies in the Shanghai area thought clotted cream went well into strong black tea. The key to making this recipe is blending until the mixture froths. This will ensure a smooth final product, otherwise the tea will have ungainly clumps of fat that float to the surface of your cup. You can do this with a hand-cranked butter churn. But Tibetans nowadays use hand blenders. Pu’er, oolong, or any black tea, 1-2 tsp (or to taste) Butter or clotted cream, 2 tablespoons, room temperature Chinese sesame paste, 1 tablespoon. (Do not substitute tahini, made from raw sesame seeds. If the Chinese product is unavailable, you can toast the sesame seeds yourself and mortar). Hot water, 1 cup Salt or sugar blender or manual butter churn 1. Brew the black tea for at least 5 minutes. It should be very strong. 2. Combine butter and sesame paste, and blend to mix. 3. Add hot tea and blend. 4. Add salt or sugar. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. https://thecuriouseater.substack.com/?utm_campaign=profile&utm_medium=profile-page

The idea for this post sprung from a run to the store. In 2002, I moved to Detroit Metropolitan and became a frequent visitor to the Arab groceries in the area. On one of my first visits, I encountered ma’amoul , a crumbly pastry with a rich date or nut filling, which reminded me of the mooncakes of my childhood. The wooden mold used to shape the dough also bore an uncanny resemblance to those used for the Chinese product. This inspired me to investigate how much of Chinese cuisine had its roots in the Middle East, and vice versa. Mooncakes would not be the only Chinese pastry with connections to elsewhere in Eurasia. The Manchus, who ruled China between 1644 and 1911, also liked sweets from further West. They introduced the Chinese to chak chak , a syrup-soaked fritter from Central Asia. Now known by its Manchu name, sachima , the pastry features in celebrations of Chinese New Year’s celebrations. Last month, I noticed a seventeenth-century recipe for a “fire roasted rose pastry from the palace.” After some fiddling in the kitchen, I was able to reconstruct the pastry. The mixed nuts spoke to culinary influences from the Middle East. So did the aromatic spices and the use of mint. The rose, the central attraction, is worth lingering over, for it supplies a further connection to the West. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Chinese were mad about roses. They not only baked decadent pastries with them, but also consumed them as candy. Some cooks pounded rose petals with sugar into a paste, while others deep-fried the fragrant petals or used them to make steamed rice cakes. According to botanist Shiu-ying Hu, the rose, or Rosa rugosa, is native to northern China. But the Chinese were hardly alone in devising culinary applications for the flower. People in the Middle East and Central Asia have long baked and cooked with roses. During the Crusades, Europeans picked up the habit from the Middle East and brought it to the Americas. Rosewater, in fact, was an American pantry staple, until someone figured out how to manufacture vanilla cheaply in the early nineteenth century. Unlike Americans, Chinese have never lost their gastronomical appreciation of the flower. Yunnan is famous today for its fresh rose cakes, and rosebud tea remains a popular drink. Oreos even come in rose flavor. Ingredients Dough 1. All-purpose flour, 1 ¼ cup 2. Sesame oil, 3 T 3. Granulated sugar, 3 T 4. Boiling Water, 3/4 cup 5. Salt, pinch Filling 1. Rose jam or candied roses, chopped 2. ¼ cup melon seeds (these are pricey, so you can substitute raw pumpkin seeds) 3. ½ cup of hazelnuts, blanched almonds, and skinned walnuts, coarsely chopped 4. Fresh mint, 3/4 ounces, stems removed, rinsed, and minced 5. Cardamom, ground, 1 teaspoon 6. Fennel seeds, ground, 1 teaspoon 7. White sesame seeds, ¼ cup Preparation 1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees and oil a baking sheet. 2. Mix dry ingredients for the dough with the sesame oil. Then add and incorporate the boiling water to make a ball. Cover with plastic wrap to prevent drying. 3. Divide the dough into small balls and roll out on a surface dusted with flour. You will want to make thin discs of about 4 inches in diameter. 4. If using rose jam, brush it on the disc in a circle of about 3 inches in diameter. Do not add too much jam (if using), otherwise it will leak out during the baking process. 5. Sprinkle a little of the mint, fennel, and cardamom on the rose jam. 6. Add about ¾-1 tablespoon of the nuts to the area that has been covered with jam. Be careful not to overload the dough. 7. Bring the edges of the pastry together to seal like one would when making mooncakes or a wife’s cake. I place the pastry seam-side down. 8. Flatten the dough a little and sprinkle sesame seeds on both ends. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. https://thecuriouseater.substack.com/?utm_campaign=profile&utm_medium=profile-page

If you are looking for a savory brie, you’ll be disappointed. There’s not much cheese in palace “cheese.” The standard English translation not only misses the mark, but also does little justice to the delicate curd. More akin to a flan than a brie, it sports a sweet taste profile. Beer-set curd with osmanthus sugar Nowadays, people regard the curd as a unique Beijing local food, one synonymous with the culinary traditions of the Manchus, China’s rulers during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). Hence, the palace in the name. What is more, the curds are sold in dairies owned by Muslim Chinese families, who advertise it as a halal food. A Chinese Muslim Dairy, Beijing (2017) The recipe, however, tells a story different from the modern marketing. For it features only three ingredients: milk, a dash of sugar, and fermented glutinous rice ( jiuniang 酒釀). The last is the coagulant. Loaded with a rennet-like enzyme , the juice from the rice transforms warm milk into a smooth curd. Picture the consistency of silken tofu. According to Carolyn Phillips, fermented rice has long been a popular ingredient in Chinese cooking. People in China consume it like pudding or use it to make sweet rice dumplings for New Year's. Young people even add it to their bubble tea. But as I discovered last year in Shaoxing over Thanksgiving, the fermented rice can deliver a buzz. Sweet Boozy Rice (Shaoxing, 2018) The fermented rice is also a byproduct of traditional beer making practices. Crush a ball of Chinese yeast and deposit the powder into a jar of steamed sticky rice. After a couple days, you will get a boozy liquid, which can be consumed as a dessert or used to make curd. Wait a few weeks longer and you’ll have a mild Chinese sake. Shaoxing rice beer, Thanksgiving Day, 2019 Historical sources reveal that Manchus were not alone in appreciating the curd; rich southerners also relished it as early as the seventeenth century. The first mention turns up in the memoirs of a Hangzhou literatus and bon vivant , Zhang Dai (1597–1684). According to this Mr. Zhang, one prepared the treat by “using beer to congeal milk.” A eighteenth-century Yangzhou cookbook similarly notes: “Cow’s milk curdles with beer.” Western visitors to China confirmed that the curd enjoyed popularity in the Pearl River Delta. In 1888, a Scottish travel writer and painter, Constance Gordon-Cumming (1837-1924), came across it in Canton. The lady mistook the rice beer for vinegar, an understandable mistake (rice beer can taste like vinegar when kept too long). Nevertheless, she got the broad outlines right: “[A] preparation of milk and sugar, curdled with vinegar, is so much appreciated, that in South China there are cows’- milk saloons where, on warm summer evenings, epicures may indulge in this luxury.” The beer-set curds have since lost their luster in the eyes of Southern foodies. Present-day Cantonese prefer a distinct, but related, product called “ Ginger Collides with Milk .” As the name announces, the main ingredient is ginger juice and buffalo milk. Like rice brew, ginger contains a rennet-like enzyme. Given its historically broad popularity, it is curious that the curd is now a signature Beijing treat and even an ethnic food. Indeed, the rebranding of dairy products in the twentieth century is a rich topic. But that’s a blog for another day. Ingredients: Whole milk, 200 ml Fermented Glutinous Rice ( jiuniang ), 100 ml (for a homemade recipe by Phillips, click here ) Granulated sugar, 10 ml Equipment: Instant Pot or steamer Four 6-ounce ramekins 1. Measure out the milk and sugar. 2. Take 100 ml of fermented rice. This is the combined weight of the rice and juice, and not just the liquid (too much liquid will result in a curd with holes and an overly alcoholic flavor). 3. Strain out the fermented rice and reserve the juice. Squeeze the rice to get as much liquid as possible. For every 100 ml of the stuff, you get about 60 ml of liquid. 4. Heat the milk and sugar in a pot over a low flame, stirring occasionally. Once a few bubbles form at the surface of the milk, shut off the heat. 5. Let the milk cool to 43° C (110°F ), at which point a skin should form at the surface. The milk will be warm but not scalding hot. 6. Stir the fermented rice juice into the milk. Mix to incorporate evenly. 7. Pour the liquid into the ramekins. The fermented rice liquid tends to settle at the bottom of the pot. To prevent uneven consistency in the curds, try adding a little of the liquid first into each of the ramekins and then add a little more from the bottom of the pot. Stir to mix evenly. 8. Steam the ramekins in the Instant Pot for 20 minutes (high pressure). If using a regular steamer, cover the ramekins with foil and steam them over a medium flame for the same amount of time. 9. Allow the curds to cool before removing. The curd should be soft, with the consistency of a flan. You can add osmanthus syrup, raisins, sunflower seeds, and peanuts, but the curd is also good on its own. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. https://thecuriouseater.substack.com/?utm_campaign=profile&utm_medium=profile-page

It goes by many names – halva, halawa, marzipan, huasheng sutang . For something that gets around so much, halva’s not much to look at. Unremarkable squares. What makes the sweet memorable, however, is the texture: it teaches the mouth that sugar can be delicious even in a sandy form. Mung bean & sesame halva (NW Yunnan) Like most foods with legs, halva is not only a name changer, but a shapeshifter. In the Mediterranean, it’s made with semolina and has a pudding texture. In the Middle East, it becomes tahini buttressed by syrup. (Zingerman’s sells a Jewish version in dark chocolate). In China, halva is now mostly a crumbly peanut candy, held together with maltose. Halva’s presence in China is startling. Let’s face it, the Middle Kingdom has a reputation for insularity. Halva’s enduring presence in the Chinese-speaking world, however, softens the usual narrative, hinting of an open palate. Our story begins relatively late in Chinese history -- in the fourteenth century. Halva made its debut in a wildly popular almanac, which instructed well-to-do Chinese families on the finer points of good living (for translations and discussion, see Buell's article in the Mongol Empire and its Legacy ). In those days, halva was just a grain-based sweet, akin to present-day Iranian and Greek varieties. The family resemblance is no coincidence, of course. The earliest recipe made no bones about its foreign origin: not only did halva have an exotic-sounding name, but it turned up in the section on “Muslim” recipes. Predictably, halva made its debut while China was still under foreign rule. When the Mongols conquered the land south of the River Huai in 1279, they did far more than reunite people in Shanghai with their brethren up north; they inserted China into a massive Eurasian empire, stretching as far west as Eastern Europe and as far south as Vietnam. Along the way, the Mongols connected China to a wider world of trade and material exchange. Under their rule, Persians, Turks, and Arabs circulated throughout the Chinese world, leaving their mark on the khan’s kitchen in Beijing. (For the eclecticism of the Mongol table, read the magnificent translation of the Essentials of Diet by Paul Buell, Charles Perry, and Gene Anderson). Known as “men with colored eyes,” these Muslim newcomers did far more than trade, translate, and administer a massive realm on behalf of the Mongol khan. They also introduced their foodways to the Chinese-speaking world. The Southern Chinese elite may have distained their Mongol overlords, but this did not stop them from appreciating the fruits of their rule. Chinese cooks not only learned from Muslims how to make halva, but also lamb-stuffed eggplants, Iranian kashk, baklava, and börek. The most popular cookbooks, in fact, boasted of sizable collections of foreign recipes: Jurchen roasts, Tangut innards, and Central Asian pastries. The cosmopolitanism persisted in the Chinese kitchen for centuries – long after the departure of the Mongols. Popular Chinese cookbooks continued printing foreign recipes up until the seventeenth century. Halva's stay in China did not end with the demise of the “Muslim” recipe section. In the seventeenth century, a second kind made a splash in the coastal south. Unlike the medieval variety, the early modern version was a fancy treat. Cooks mixed flour with pine nuts and clotted cream, two pricey ingredients. Pinenut halva (after 17thc recipe) By the seventeenth century, Muslim foods faced competition from Manchu delicacies. Eager to win over their new overlords, Chinese merchants learned the ropes of the Manchu banquet. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the foodways of a new kind of foreign devil began to menace the pages of Chinese cookbooks. Shanghai housewives learned to prepare meat roasts, pork chops, cream soups, and bread in the Anglo-American style. Our subject matter too changed with the times. In the nineteenth century, it retired its foreign-sounding name. It’s been known as “flaky sugar” ever since. Nut halva has moreover spun off into a million, cheap varieties. Peanuts, sesame seeds, and mung bean flour now vie as the recipe’s lead ingredients. Peanuts, of course, enjoy certain advantages over its rivals. The New World legumes grow just fine on poor soil (something for which China does not lack). Today, flaky sugar is just another Chinese food. Eaten during the Lunar New Year, it conjures up memories of hearth and family. In this respect, it is like the pumpkin pies we Yankees consume at Thanksgiving. But things were different several hundred years ago. Long before it reminded my Chinese mother of a distant homeland, halva offered her ancestors a touch of foreign sophistication. Recipe This recipe appears in cookbooks from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its authors assumed that the reader had a basic understanding of the procedures and omitted relevant cooking information like quantities and cooking times. By looking at several modern recipes with similar elements, I was able to reconstruct the proportions. Pine nuts, 100 grams (you can substitute raw peanuts) Salt, 2 grams Flour, 20 grams Sugar, 30 grams (or maltose, available at Chinese supermarkets) Water 1. Prepare a pan, lined with wax paper and coated generously with unsalted butter (or clotted cream). 2. Toast the nuts over low heat until golden. For peanuts, you can use a toaster oven and bake at 180 degrees F. Three minutes is enough, but if using pine nuts, keep a close watch over them. Pine nuts brown quickly and become bitter if overcooked. 3. Once cool enough to handle, grind the pine nuts with a food processor. If using peanuts, first rub off the skins. If using a food processor, be careful not to over blend, as the oil and nut paste will separate. 4. Toast the flour on a pan until slightly golden (about 10 minutes on low heat). Stir to prevent the top from being under-cooked and the bottom from being burnt. 5. Combine flour and nut paste with salt. 6. Prepare the syrup. If using sugar, mix four parts water to one part sugar. Heat until the sugar reaches 245 degrees F on a candy thermometer. At that point, the syrup will acquire a golden hue and thicken. If using maltose, heat it with a few drops of water in a pan so that it becomes semi-liquid, or microwave the mixture for 10 seconds. Stop after the maltose runs. 7. Incorporate the flour and nut paste into the syrup with a silicone spatula, and pour it into the prepared pan. 8. Allow the mixture to cool until it is slightly warm. Cut the halva into slices before it has cooled to room temperature, otherwise it will break. Thanks for reading! 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On February 24, The New York Times published an opinion piece , “Why Did the Coronavirus Outbreak Start in China? Let’s Talk about the Cultural Causes of This Epidemic.” Its author, Yi-Zheng Lian, blamed the recent epidemic on the scholarly Chinese medical tradition. For millennia, elite writers supposedly implanted misguided ideas about health and virility into the “Chinese collective consciousness.” Such ideas, Lian charged, have come at a high cost to global health. The op-ed is a study in fuzzy thinking. In case you’re wondering, Lian is an American-educated economist, not an expert on Asian history or epidemiology. His grasp of the Chinese medical tradition is shaky, too. That tradition doesn’t encourage folks to consume either pangolin or civet for sexual gratification. So what do Chinese do with wild animals like pangolin and civet? According to Lian, they purchase these animals in order to fill the energy void. “For men,” he writes, “it is most important to fill the energy void, which is related to virility and sexual prowess; for women, the stress is on replacing blood, which improves beauty and fertility.” Curious whether Chinese medicine doctors use pangolin, I checked the standard classics of Chinese pharmacology. My search turned up no sex or skin care applications. I also consulted professional Chinese medicine healers. Guess what? Lian is wrong. To be sure, some physicians used pangolin products up until a few decades ago, but not to improve male potency. (The ancients, incidentally, had fixes for erectile dysfunction , a real condition, and I translated some of them with Yang Yong.) Instead, they used small amounts of pangolin scales to treat serious conditions like abscesses, or female disorders like amenorrhea and problems with nursing. So what about the dreadful civet, Lian’s choice of clickbait? Civet is the small mammal suspected of being the source of the original SARs outbreak. It’s also the fruit-eater that poops out half-digested coffee beans for Western coffee connoisseurs . You can buy the cage-free variety on Amazon for a premium. Civet © Trustees of the British Museum The Chinese medicine doctors I asked drew a blank. My own search through databases turned up no formulas made with civet. Admittedly, some old books on diet mentioned the life-giving properties of the mammal. They also did the same for everyday ingredients like rice and wheat. Instead, the Chinese have long valued the quadruped for its soft texture and jade-white flesh. The great Song-dynasty poet, gourmand, and official, Su Shi (1037-1101) was once a fan. He left a famous poem about eating the tropical mammal while in exile. Su Shi was not alone in his esteem for civet. Foodies adored its meat pickled or coated in sticky rice and cooking beer, served with scallions and numbing peppercorns. Civet remained popular into the twentieth century. There are other problems with Lian’s treatment of Chinese medicine. He has a habit of bringing everything in Chinese medicine back to sex: “virility and sexual prowess, “penises of bulls or horses,” and “erections.” Needless to say, this leaves the impression that Chinese medicine is just about men having sex. This is like claiming that the American healthcare system exists solely to sustain erections. Viagra does generate 640 million dollars a year in revenue. But our doctors also heal bones, deliver babies, and treat cancer. Lian is also off the mark about Chinese medical philosophy. He acts as if “filling the energy void” ( jinbu 進補) is the main concern. The “void” here is Lian’s rather creative – or sophomoric – rendering of the Chinese. Jinbu simply means “to take food as a supplement.” But doctors did not just supplement deficiencies in the body. They also addressed problems of excess and circulation . At the end of the day, Lian and I can agree about some things. Wildlife consumption needs to be strictly regulated, and endangered species must be protected. And some Chinese folk remedies, such as diet tea, should be retired. Then again, a well-trained Chinese doctor knows better than to prescribe lethal amounts of mahuang (ephedra). But I disagree with Lian about Chinese medicine. In reducing a complex healing tradition to a handful of bedroom and beauty hacks, he paints a distorted picture of an effective healthcare system used by millions around the world each year. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. https://thecuriouseater.substack.com/?utm_campaign=profile&utm_medium=profile-page

Over the last couple of weeks, we have tackled the role of colonialism in Asian food history. Since the sun is finally out and the weather has warmed up, it's time to change our tune and leave behind this sad history. As Linh Trinh pointed out on Thursday, it would be a mistake to chalk up everything in Asian food to European imperialism! I wholeheartedly agree! This week and next, we'll look at how human migration has done its part to make Asian food a lot yummier. This is a subject obviously close to my heart. I am the daughter of a Chinese immigrant, whose ancestors had been part of the historic flow of southern Chinese into Southeast Asia. Unfortunately, that flow gets little of the attention that it deserves. As we will see, it not only reshaped the DNA of Southeast Asia, but also altered the culinary landscape. A food lab from a happier time Our subject matter: We all know its charms: chewy rice noodles line the plastic takeout box, drenched in sweet and sour goodness. There’s a touch of tang, usually delivered in a light pink sauce. Maybe a few slices of chicken or prawn, paired with scrambled eggs. Then comes the crunch: raw mung bean sprouts topped with toasted peanuts and a wedge of lime. I like to say that Pad Thai is to millennials what sweet-n'-sour pork was for my generation. But I may be wrong. You Gen Z also look upon it as comfort food . If you believe Quartz ’s Roberto Ferdman, pad Thai deserves to be sold at a restaurant called No Thai, Ann Arbor’s favorite chain. That’s because the dish really isn’t Thai -- even if we Yankees associate the 12,000+ Thai restaurants around the world with it. The fried noodles, Ferdman asserts, are actually Chinese. Our favorite food turns out to be an imposter. Hence the cringeworthy title, “The Strange and Potentially Stolen Origins of Pad Thai.” (Yes, I get it: it's clickbait, but still....) But should we regard pad Thai as illegitimate? Did Thai cooks really just steal the recipe from the Chinese and pass it off as their own? This begs the question what it means for something (or someone) to be Thai, or Chinese -- or, for that matter, really anything. It's a question that we have wrestled with *a lot* this term. We've seen it with vindaloo , tempura , and ketchup . The conundrum has also come up with curry , biryani , noodles , and dumpling s . One of you recently posted about it on YellowDig. You asked: at what point does a variant of a dish become its own thing? An answer will proceed less from the facts than in their interpretation. The origins of the dish are clear enough from the name and the star ingredient. The Thai name for pad Thai, kway teow pad, makes no bones about its Chinese origins. Kway Teow is a Chinese loan word , based on the southern Chinese [Hokkein] pronunciation of guǒtiáo 粿條 (strips of rice cakes). According to Mr. Ferdman, the name matches the reality. There’s really nothing Thai about the dish: not the rice noodles and certainly not the preserved radish. Only the chilis are truly “Thai,” Ferdman says without a hint of irony. If you are in my class, please laugh: you really should be thinking, Columbian Exchange . But the reporter must be forgiven. He has not taken ASIAN 258, so I do not yet haunt his every meal. So what did the Chinese contribute to the dish? Quartz is not entirely wrong. Rice noodles are, in fact, a common feature of Southern Chinese cooking. Made by grinding dried rice into flour, rice noodles represented the southern Chinese solution to wheat shortages. Wheat does not grow well in hot and humid climates (for which sub-tropical South China does not lack). So cooks made noodles from what was readily available in a classic example of local adaptation (i.e., tweaking recipes or culinary products to reflect the local palate, resources, or cultural matrix ). But rice noodles involve a more laborious process than their wheat-based counterparts. You first have to make a batter, then you steam that batter in thin layers, cut those layers into strips, and dry. Rice noodles represents an art form in Southern China. In the Southwest province of Yunnan, they go by different names: fine vermicelli are mixian 米線 (“rice threads”), whereas the thicker, chunkier ones are erkuai 餌块. In the Canton area, rice noodles come in different forms. Flat noodles shaped like fettuccine go by hefen 河粉 . The tender rolls encasing pork and shrimp have a strange name: changfen 腸粉 (“intestine powder”). Ignore: they are heavenly when seasoned with roasted sesame paste: a legacy of the Silk Road. Rice noodles (microwave edition) So how did a Southern Chinese rice noodle make it to Thailand? For the better part of a millennium, southern Chinese men have been leaving China. Rich men. Poor men. Pirates. Merchants. Traders. Political refugees. Curious men. Daredevils. Some crossed the Pacific, setting up shop in California, Mexico , and Peru . Others stayed closer to home. Large Chinese communities sprung up in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, as well as Vietnam and Thailand. We know that the largest waves of migration took place in the last few centuries, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when China was poor, overcrowded, and war-torn. My grandfather was part of that migration into Southeast Asia. Thailand was a popular destination for Chinese migrants. Less than fifteen percent of Thais call themselves Chinese today. But scholars estimate that up to forty percent of the Thai population is of Chinese heritage. This would make Thailand the home of one of the world’s largest and most powerful Chinese diasporas. The founder of the Thai royal family was part Chinese. So are many members of the Thai business and political elite. This includes the stunning Yingluck Shinawatra (the prime minister ousted by a military junta in 2017 and now a proud citizen of Serbia). But don’t forget Plaek Pibulsonggram, or Phibun. Phibun is today best known as the fascist prime minister who championed pad Thai during World War II. He designated the stir-fried noodles the national dish of Thailand, encouraging street vendors to make the noodles and going so far as to issue a standard recipe. But Phibun was a curious figure; he put into place a number of anti-Chinese policies. His grandpa was like mine; he too was Cantonese. Cantonese family overseas (find my mamma!) Given the heavy layer of Chinese genes in the region, Thai cuisine is naturally full of influences from the Middle Kingdom. Pad Thai may be the most famous, but it is only one example of the phenomenon. The now-defunct foodie mag, Lucky Peach , ran a photo spread with gorgeous shots of Thai noodle plates a few years ago. They are mostly rice based, but not all: Kuay Tiaw Phat Puu Koi See Mee Pad Mee Hong Kong Pad Macaroni (I dare you to click on this link ) Rat Na (a chicken-based dish, see below) Pad See Ew. The last, Pad Se Ew, in fact, is a dead ringer for a classic Chinese takeout staple: beef chow fun. (I tell this to my husband, but he insists on ordering this every time he goes to No Thai). This brings us to pad Thai: is it just a crypto-Chinese dish? Well… up to a point. If we compare the Thai version to its Cantonese ancestor , a different story emerges. The Chinese inspiration cooked with dark soy sauce, scallions, bean sprouts, ginger, and beef. The Thai version , however, sports a very different set of flavoring agents. The soy sauce, for one thing, is MIA – the umami, in fact, comes from fish sauce ( nam pla ), the amber juice that left sixteenth-century Persian visitors dumb struck. This is not the only sign that Thai cooks remade the dish to their taste. If we look carefully at the ingredient list, it becomes clear that Thai cooks relied on other staples of their kitchens to produce complexity and depth. Cooks add whole dried shrimp (Chef Ryan adds dried shrimp powder). For tang, they relied upon ingredients uncommon to the Chinese kitchen: kaffir limes ( the name needs to be changed), galangal, and tamarind paste. All of these should ring a bell. Remember my blog on Thai curries ! At the end of the day, I don’t think it’s fair to call pad Thai just another Chinese dish. This is like saying that my daughter Sofi is a Chinese person. Sure, pad Thai has Chinese roots. But stir-fried rice noodles are like biological organisms. They mutate, mix, and multiply as they move across time and space; along the way, they also pick up new culinary influences. Some of them have different ideas about their identities. Those layers of influence tell much about the resources, palates, and cultural matrixes that the dish encountered on its journey around the world. Pad Thai, furthermore, is also not done evolving. From Bangkok to San Francisco to Mexico City to Shanghai and back to Canton : The dish is a little different in every place. Sometimes, the distinction comes marked in the noodles. I found the rice noodles elusive in Mexico City , hiding under a bed of sprouts. Other times, it is the flavoring. The pad Thai sauce we find at the grocery store is far more corn syrup than tamarind. Other times, however, it is the source of umami. Many Americans choose to ditch the fish sauce. Regardless of how you make it, one thing is for certain. Pad Thai’s a globe trotter, a shape shifter, a time capsule of layered influence , and ultimately an American sensation. Views about pad Thai? Ideas about how to talk about it? What do you want me to say to Ferdman? See ya on YellowDig! Further Resources of Chinese Foodways in Southeast Asia: Sidney Cheung ed., The Globalization of Chinese Food (Curzon, 2002). Andrew Tam, “ Singapore Hawker Centers: Origins, Identity, Authenticity, and Distinction ,” Gastronomica 17.1 (2017): 44-55. David Y. H. Wu and Tan Chee-beng eds., Changing Chinese Foodways in Asia (The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2001). Chef Ryan Waddell’s Recipe for Phat Thai 4 ounces dried rice stick noodles 3 tablespoons grated palm sugar or dark brown sugar 2 tablespoons tamarind concentrate 2 tablespoons fish sauce 5 tablespoons peanut oil 1 large shallot in small dice 2 large cloves of garlic finely minced ¼ cup preserved shredded radish 6 ounces extra firm tofu diced ½ tablespoon dried shrimp powder 8 ounces large shrimp deveined or sliced chicken breast 2 eggs beaten 6 chives finely sliced 4 ounces bean sprouts For the garnish: Lime wedges White sugar Red chili powder Crushed roasted peanuts Yield: about 2 servings Method: Soak the rice noodles in warm water for about 30 minutes; they are done when you can wrap the noodle around a finger. Drain the noodles and cut into 6” lengths. Mix the palm sugar, tamarind concentrate, and fish sauce and set aside. Heat 3 tablespoons oil in a pan until hot under medium to high heat. Add the noodles to the pan and stir to coat the noodles. Add the sauce and stir to coat the noodles. Move the noodles to the outside of the pan. To the open area of the pan add the shallots, radish, shrimp, and tofu, and cook until the shrimp are about half cooked; move aside. Stir the noodles but keep separate. Add to the open area of the pan the beaten eggs and cook until nearly dry. At this point if the noodles are not cooked enough you can add some water and cook until desired softness is achieved. Now mix half the bean sprouts and chives along with the egg, noodles, and shrimp mixture off the heat. Garnish with the remaining ingredients that can be mixed on the plate to taste. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. https://thecuriouseater.substack.com/?utm_campaign=profile&utm_medium=profile-page

Dear ASIAN 258 students: I’m sad that we didn’t get to do our dessert lab. So I thought I would pass along a very easy mochi recipe, which you can make in ten minutes. I have adapted the recipe by Namiko Chen . The key to mochi is the texture. Good mochi is soft, not stiff. It should melt in your mouth, but still be a little chewy but not rubbery. It’s best to make mochi in small batches and consume it right away. Mochi stiffens in the refrigerator. For this recipe, you just need: 1. Glutinous Rice Flour Asian market rice flour (cheaper) 2. Water 3. Sugar (I got brown sugar to work, too) 4. Filling. Typically, this is made with red bean paste. But my husband hates sweet red beans. So I substitute peanut butter mixed with a little maple syrup, or kaya (Singaporean coconut jam). 5. Starch. I prefer potato starch, but corn starch will do just fine. So how much mochi to make at a single sitting? I have discovered that 1/3 cup of glutinous rice flour will yield four pieces of mochi. You first measure out your flour, then add the sugar. Recipes vary in their proportions. Some cooks insist on 2:1 sugar to rice flour. Others go as little as 1:4 sugar to rice flour. I have opted for the middle path: 1:3 sugar to rice flour. I typically use water. Equal parts rice flour, water. But I sometimes add a little almond milk if it’s lying around or a half teaspoon of coconut milk powder. If you do use almond milk, add an extra half teaspoon or teaspoon of water to thin out the batter. The key now is to mix everything with a spoon to produce an even batter. Then pour it into a *shallow* bowl and cover. Stick it in the microwave and zap on high for 30 seconds. Then take it out and stir. I repeat this process at least two more times. By 1:30, you should have a white dough. Getting there... Stir one more time and return to the microwave for 15 seconds. Check. If there are still some liquid parts to the dough, stir with a fork and return to the microwave, heating for 10 seconds at a time and checking. I almost never have to heat the mochi dough for more than 2 minutes from beginning to end. You can also steam your mochi in the Instant Pot. This will produce a more even dough that glistens. If you elect to spend the extra time, stick the mochi in a heat-resistant bowl like a Pyrex and steam on high for 15 minutes. The next part is the trickiest. Now, take a decent amount of potato or corn starch and pour it onto a surface. I often line my countertops with silicon mats, but any clean surface will do. You should use about ¼ cup of the starch. Coat your fingers with the stuff and don’t be stingy. While the mochi is cooling slightly, take out your bean paste or peanut butter. Scoop out a teaspoon of the stuff and place it in the palm of your hand. Roll it into a ball and reserve, close to your rolling surface. Take the hot mochi and put it on the starch-dusted surface. Using a silicon spatula or a big spoon (dusted, of course, with starch), flatten out the mochi into something like a square. Dust the top of the mochi with more starch. Cut the square into four even pieces. Add the filling in the middle of the square. There are different ways of folding. I typically fold the mochi on one side and then press down the three other ends to seal. Or you can first try bringing two ends of the mochi squares together diagonally. Then bring the other two edges together. Seal by pinching. Make sure you have enough starch on your fingers and on the surface. Take the mochi and roll it gently on the dusted surface to make a ball. If there are any loose ends, pinch to seal. Serve it on a plate lightly dusted with starch. Questions? Wanna do this in real time? Let me know. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. https://thecuriouseater.substack.com/?utm_campaign=profile&utm_medium=profile-page

We continue our ruminations on the impact of Chinese migration on Asian eating. But instead of merely calling attention to this phenomenon, I would like to bring the discussion back to a larger problem that we touched upon earlier in the term. Can we talk about a cuisine having an "essence"? Are there drawbacks to thinking about cuisines as being "owned" by particular cultures? How do we demarcate the boundaries of a culture in a world where people move and recipes are shared? These were the issues a number of you raised a few weeks ago on YellowDig as we probed the history of Massaman curry and the fluid nature of foreign culinary influence: should we think of culture, or cuisines, as discrete, solid entities? Or should we take our clues from watery metaphors and conceptualize culinary influences in terms of waves -- waves that reshape the terrain and leave behind traces? Lumpia from a happier time in ASIAN 258 A few years ago, Filipino food became trendy on the East Coast. A restaurant called F.O.B . opened in Brooklyn, the hipster capital of the world. F.O.B. offered Americans their first taste of Filipino food – and in a cheeky setting, to boot. Some predicted that Filipino food was poised to become the next big thing. So the New York Times ran an article , “Filipino Food Finds a Place in the American Mainstream.” Despite the glowing reviews, Filipino food remains obscure to most Americans. Let’s face it: You’re probably asking yourself now: What’s Filipino food like? Surprisingly enough, this turns out to be a tough question. It’s also a question that goes to the heart of this class. ***** There are two ways of answering the question. One is to think about what makes Filipino food different – or distinct from Chinese, Thai, or Malay. Is it a seasoning, a dish, or perhaps a texture? The other is to do the opposite, to focus on overlapping elements: ingredients, dishes, and techniques that span places. You look at the connections to the Muslim and Malay world, to coastal China, and the Spanish and American empires. The New York Times reporter, Ligaya Mishan , chose the first. She opens her account with an anecdote about José Rizal (1861-1896), the great patriot executed by the Spanish. Before he became a revolutionary martyr, Rizal was just a medical student in Spain. In an attempt to keep a taste of home with him, he brought a jar of bagoong , preserved seafood paste. But it was all for naught. The jar broke during his journey, and the scent overwhelmed the non-Filipino passengers on the boat. This leads Mishan to reflect on what makes Filipino food unlike anything else in the world. She contemplates the pungent fishiness of the bagoong . She muses about the soul-piercing sourness that pervades sinigang , a sour soup, the dipping sauces for lumpia, and palm vinegar . For Mishan, the saltiness and sourness define Filipino cuisine. While I admire Mishan’s storytelling, I can't help but think she's on a fool's errand. She’s looking for something that does not exist -- the essence of Filipino cooking. So why shouldn’t she look for an essence? ***** For a start, the Philippines isn’t really a single place, but rather a collection of seven thousand islands. The 100 million people who call themselves Filipinos are also a diverse bunch. They speak a wide array of tongues, live and work in different places around the world, and follow dissimilar faiths. Yes, more than 90 percent of Filipinos are some kind of “Christian” (as if Pentecostals and Catholics were identical). But there’s also a sizable Muslim minority in the south, with their own foodways . If you have been following the news, there was, until recently, also an insurgency movement. The foodways of the Philippines add to this complex picture. A glance at the dishes that Mishan names in her article reveals a grab bag of culinary influences: native, Chinese, Spanish, South Asian, Japanese, even American. Think of the leche flans , bread rolls , and kesong puti (a soft white cheese made like paneer and queso blanco ). Or Filipino adobo (click here for a cooking video of adobo made by Kevin Kwok, UC Irvine undergrad). At this point, you should be having flashbacks of Goa , another long-time Iberian colony. Then picture banana ketchup. Yes, it’s sweet and closer to American ketchup than to the fishy stuff. But how do you think it got there? We occupied the Philippines for almost five decades (1898–1946). Chicken Adobo (Dish & Photo by Kevin Kwok) Shellfish in Pampanga (Photo by Marcos Calo Medina) Buffalo Milk Flan in Pampanga (Photo by Macros Calo Medina) Cooking in Pampanga (Photo by Marcos Calo Medina) Mudfish in Pampanga (Marcos Calo Medina) Pork in Pampanga (Marcos Calo Medina) Meat Stew (Marcos Calo Medina) Hot Chocolate (Marcos Calo Medina) ***** But let’s rewind and go back to the lumpia, which Mishan mentions only in passing. She calls it the “cousin” of the spring roll and overlooks the clues it offers. Lumpia in Pampanga, Photo by Marcos Calo Medina) In a nutshell, lumpia is a Southeast Asian spring roll. Its name is a loan word, borrowed from the southern Chinese dialect in Xiamen. We have already done a virtual tour of Xiamen . It’s the coastal city in Fujian formerly known as Amoy. Remember the fishy ketchup ? If I were a betting woman, I’d guess that Rizal ate far more than bagoong . Like many Filipinos, he probably also consumed lumpia. He had Chinese ancestors on both sides of his family. Immigrants from Fujian brought lumpia to the Philippines. By the time that Rizal faced the firing squad, Chinese had been in the Philippines for centuries. Some say they began coming in the ninth century. Others insist it was the eleventh century. But one thing is clear. Beginning in the seventeenth century, Southern Fujian supplied a steady stream of immigrants to the Philippines. This is something acknowledged (advertised?) by the Philippines' controversial current president, Rodrigo Duterte , who has been both an ally and at adversary of China. The Chinese community in the archipelago was large. At one point, Chinese immigrants and their descendants outnumbered the Spanish by a significant factor. Relations with the Spanish -- and the natives -- could be tense . Other times, they could also be amicable. Many of these immigrants started families with native women. Scholars estimate that 15-25 percent of the population has some Chinese blood. ***** Lumpia was not the only food that made its way from coastal China to the Philippines. Southern Chinese also brought fried wheat noodles, tofu, filled buns, dumplings, wontons, and even bird’s nest. They also taught the natives to carve up the pig in special ways. The Tagalog words for the different cuts of pork derive from Chinese. Obviously, lumpia did not stay the same after reaching the Philippines. Like most foods with legs, lumpia morphed and multiplied. Like stir-fried rice noodles , it too was subject to the forces of local adaptation . Take Lumpia Ubod , a fresh spring roll. The recipe features ubod, or the heart of palm. This is naturally an ingredient abundant in the Philippines. Or ponder turon . Ignore the Spanish name. It’s another variant of the spring roll, but sweet. Saba bananas are plentiful in the Philippines and find their way into the ketchup. You make turon by dredging sugar on the bananas or sometimes jackfruit. Roll the sweetened fruit pieces into a spring roll wrapper and deep fry. Another version of lumpia is still more intriguing (check the notes to the recipe). Take coarsely pounded peanuts, wansoy leaves, bihon noodles, and dried nori. Chop to make the filling. In case you’re wondering, wansoy is a loan word from Chinese. It’s the Chinese word for coriander ( yansui 芫荽). Bihon are rice or starch vermicelli, also originally from the Middle Kingdom. The peanuts? Well, you should be thinking of the Columbian Exchange and the Manilla galleon. Then there’s the nori. That’s probably Japanese influence, but when exactly? The Japanese occupied the Philippines during the Second World War. But this was not the first, or last, time that Japanese cooking turned up on the archipelago. Japanese came to the Philippines before the 1940s. Halo halo is one clear case of borrowing. If you’re curious, Anthony Bourdain did an episode on it. ***** So why did Mishan downplay external influences in her article? I suspect that this is not a simple case of ignorance. It has to do with the way people look at Chinese cooking in the Philippines. As Doreen Fernandez points out, these elements have been around so long in the Philippines that they are no longer “foreign.” In this regard, they are a bit like hamburgers. When was the last time you thought “German” when you grabbed a Blimpy burger ? Lumpia confounds the search for a Filipino essence. Then again, most food systems are composites, too. Next time you eat, I dare you to inspect your instant ramen or frozen samosa, or the ketchup. Is there really any food that hails from one place? Take a bite and you’ll find a bit of lumpia in all of it. Thoughts about Filipino food? Opinions about essences, or understanding cuisine outside of the framework of 'culture'? See ya all on YellowDig! Recipe resources: I got addicted to Filipino cuisine about 15 years ago, after eating papaya chicken soup at the home of my former colleague Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen. I bought a book of Filipino recipes and got in the habit of making the dish (in those days, one still had to buy books, but today you can just check out Panlasang Pinoy ) . Then I invited Professor Ramirez-Christensen (a.k.a. ERC) over for dinner and watched nervously as she took her first bite of papaya chicken soup. Since the recipe is solid, I thought I would share: Further reading: The Philippines has yet to receive the attention it deserves -- especially from Americans (who colonized the archipelago). Predictably, the study of Filipino foodways is in its infancy, even though the United States has a sizable population of Filipino immigrants. Besides the Fernandez article hyperlinked above, I offer some resources below, which will be useful for thinking about Filipino foodways and Southeast Asian cuisine(s) more generally. My friend Marcos Calo Medina recommends Memories of Philippine Kitchens by Amy Besa, Romy Dorotan, and Neal Oshima (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2014). Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Doreen G. Fernandez, "Culture Ingested: On the Indigenization of Philippine Food." Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Winter 2003), pp. 58-71. [UM library access] Shirley Geok-lin Lim, "Identifying Foods, Identifying Selves," The Massachusetts Review , Vol. 45, No. 3, Food Matters (Autumn, 2004), pp. 297-305. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. https://thecuriouseater.substack.com/?utm_campaign=profile&utm_medium=profile-page