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, have reconnected with my roots in the kitchen and have experimented with several home ingredients. I cooked Indian tandoori chicken curry using ingredients available at a local Indian store. Ingredients: For tandoori chicken: 1. 1 kg bone less chicken 2. 1/2 cup thick plain yogurt(curd) 3. 3/4 cup coconut milk 4. 1 lime 5. 1 piece of ginger 6. 1 pod of garlic (4 cloves of garlic) 7. 6 bits cinnamon 8. 6 flakes cloves 9. 2 cardamom sticks 10. green chilis chopped - as per taste 11. 1 bunch of coriander leaves - chopped 12. 1 tsp garam masala powder 13. 1 tb sp vinegar 14. salt to taste 15. 1/2 teaspoon of sugar 16. half medium onion diced For gravy: 1. 1/2 kg tomatoes 2. 3 tb sp. cashew-nuts- powdered 3. chili powder (as per taste) 4. pepper powder (as per taste) 5. 1 tsp. sugar 6. 1/2 cup of water 7. 100 grams butter 8. 100 grams fresh cream 9. green chilis (as per taste) Preparation: Crush ginger, garlic, cinnamon, cloves and cardamom. Chop coriander and green chilis into that mix. In a bowl mix all the ingredients except chicken and lime. Clean and cut chicken into pieces and rub with salt and lime juice. Mix the chicken with the plain yogurt and marinate it and leave it for 8-10hrs. As discussed by Colleen Sen in "Curry - A Global History" the starting point of any curry is a curry paste, wet or dry. When one prepares a curry paste, they need to balance the four elements in taste - spicy, sweet, sour and salty - with no one flavor overshadowing the other. Here I will be using a wet curry paste with a combination of water, yogurt and coconut milk. The curry paste can be used in a very similar way with vegetarian legumes. Cooking: Heat oil (your choice, preferably coconut oil) skillet over medium heat over medium heat. Once the oil starts simmering add garlic mix from earlier with onion and cook until fragrant. This is called bhunooing, which results in a creamy rich curry. The spices don't have to be grinded before they are fried with the oil and the oil extracts the essential oils of the spices while they simmer. Add the marinated chicken and stir well. Cook the chicken for 5 minutes, or until starting to brown. Cooking the spices before adding the chicken in the skillet enhances the flavors and aroma of these spices. Dry roasting those very same spices results in the compounds of those very spices reacting with another to create different earthy spices which may not work with the chicken. Add the scallions and coconut milk, increase the heat to medium-high, and cook for 15-20 minutes, until the coconut milk is boiling and begins to thicken. Season with pepper according to your taste. Chop and cook tomatoes with water. Then sieve and make a puree of 2 cups. Melt butter and lightly fry cashew powder to golden brown. Continue stirring. Reduce heat and add tomato puree, sugar, chili powder, black pepper and salt. Increase heat till it boils and stir, and cook for five minutes. Before serving, garnish with green chilis and coriander leaves. If you are unable to source the curry ingredients such as bay leaves and turmeric, or find the chili powder too spicy, I'd advice you to use curry powder from an Indian store which is quick and easy. You also don't have to use a skillet and can use a crockpot and leave it in there for 6-8hrs and not worry about it whilst it cooks. I wondered whether the dish would be just as authentic without these tools and ingredients. As we have learned from our lecture series turmeric, cardamom are pungent spices native to India (Brown, Lecture- Pilaf). The religious values and vegetarian diet of India has shaped the cultural matrix of India. However, by adapting the recipe to local tastes and ingredients available such as paprika and chili flakes, the cultural matrix of the Indian curry is not disposed and therefore its authenticity remains intact. As in Achjaya's Indian Food Ethos the use of elements such as oil, and fire to convert the ingredients of the dish reflect the culturally adaptive use of some of those ingredients. The use of fire and the cooking gradations confers the ritualistic purity on the dish and maintain the authenticity of the dish, in my opinion. The dish is eaten with Basmati rice, which is a staple in South East Asia. Basmati rice is long and non-sticky. This makes basmati rice distinctive to other rice based dishes. Pilau is different to steam boiled basmati rice. Pilau is cooked with dry roasted spices - cardamom, and gloves, saffron for the aroma and vegetables. The chicken curry can also be complemented with spiced yogurt to in other words - raita. Raita is a condiment made up of dahi (yogurt) which cools the palate, especially with all the hot spices. The yogurt is diluted and there are many variations which can be included such as sour pomegranates, spices cucumber or even mint. Notable raita vary region to region with the most popular including boondi which are tiny balls of fried chickpeas flour. We have seen that many foods in the Asian world have interconnected past. As we have seen it includes many regional cuisines and cooking practices. This has led to different cultural matrices and cultural adaptations. Some foods have been original to the Asian world and others not so much. I have been trying to find a clever thread which connects these dishes and reflects the underlying culture where they are from, but surely their uniqueness surely lies in the fact that there isn't one. I think that is what makes those dishes authentic.

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 approaches. In this case, I found two recipes that described two different preparations of shrimp mee goreng: Indonesian and Malaysian style. The version I cooked (and will describe here), used aspects of both recipes and was also limited by the ingredients available to me. Sauce ingredients: 1 ½ tbsp soy sauce 1 ½ tbsp soy sauce & 2 tbsp brown sugar combined 1 tbsp fish sauce 1 tsp worcestershire sauce ½ tbsp sesame oil 1 tbsp chili garlic sauce Chili flakes (to taste) ½ tsp white pepper 4 tbsp ketchup A small amount of ginger paste A small amount of mango pickles Other ingredients: 5 cloves garlic 1 cup of carrots, julienned 1 to 2 cups of greens Some mushrooms ¼ cup green onions ¼ cup fennel ~200g shrimp (I used half a bag of Aldi frozen shrimp) 2-3 tbsp canola oil 2-3 eggs Cilantro for garnish Sauce components Double boiler operation to heat 1 ½ tbsp soy sauce & 2 tbsp brown sugar for kecap manis Step 1: Boil your noodles. Cook them for only 1 minute or so. Drain them, rinse in cool water, put a little oil in there so they don’t stick, and set them aside. (They don’t need to be fully cooked at this stage, because you’ll be heating them again later.) Step 2: Heat the 1 ½ tbsp soy sauce & 2 tbsp brown sugar together until it thickens. Then mix all of the sauce components together in a small bowl. Step 3: Chop all veggies. Step 4: In a tablespoon or so of oil, sear your shrimp. Once they’re cooked, take them out of the pan and set them aside. Don’t clean the pan. Step 5: Add a bit of oil to the pan and saute garlic, fennel, and most of the green onion. Save some green onion to put on top of the finished product. Step 6: On medium-high heat, add half the sauce and all non-tomato veggies. Toss until greens are wilted, 1-2 minutes. Step 7: Push veggies to the side of the pan, add a little oil, and put your eggs in the pan. Scramble them a bit and let them cook halfway, then mix together with the veggies. Step 8: On medium-high heat, add shrimp, noodles, and remaining sauce. Stir/heat until the sauce is absorbed and the temperature is even throughout. Step 9: Turn off heat, mix in tomatoes and remaining green onion. Step 10: Top with cilantro garnish (if you want) and serve! Finished product! The end result was a satisfying meal. Though I had not quite nailed the sweet part of the sweet and savory blended flavor I had been aiming for, my parents and I happily ate our fill. There are several ingredients that are intriguing to find in a Southeast Asian dish: particularly ketchup, chili peppers, and tomatoes. The presence of all of these items is a result of the Columbian exchange. As Crosby notes in his book “The Columbian Exchange,” on page 170, both chili peppers and tomatoes were first cultivated in the Americas, and brought back to Asia and Europe via the Columbian Exchange. Neither of these items were seen in any Asian cuisine until after 1600 (Dr Brown lecture 2/10/2020, slide 28). Ketchup presents a more complicated story. In Andrew Smith’s “Pure Ketchup : A History of America's National Condiment with Recipes,” the author suggests that tomato ketchup is a product of local adaptation. The word ketchup is likely a loan word, borrowed from Cantonese qiezhi / keizap, and was originally made as a preserved fish product (Dr Brown lecture 2/12/2020, slide 24). Tomato ketchup’s predecessors— including peach, walnut, fish, and walnut ketchup— were different from the tomato ketchup we know today. As these ketchups grew even more popular in the U.S., more economical and locally available ingredients were used to replace expensive fish and walnuts. Tomatoes, which are cheap and plentiful in the U.S., were a perfect way to locally adapt this recipe. Another mark of modern Heinz tomato ketchup is the addition of sugar to suit the American cultural matrix. Once tomato ketchup was perfected for mass-production, the product spread around the world. Such an “American” kitchen staple like ketchup is the product of centuries of contact between the Americas and the Old World, and became a key ingredient of dishes like mee goreng. This shows the layered influence and piecemeal adoption of Western food items into Southeast Asian food culture. The original recipe of shrimp mee goreng was shaped by locally adapted components like ketchup, and the recipe as I made it was also informed by local adaption. Because of COVID containment measures, I only used ingredients that were already in my parents’ kitchen. Costco salad green mix was used in place of heartier cabbage, fish sauce combined with worcestershire sauce substituted for oyster sauce, and I made my own kecap manis following this recipe I found. Even the noodles were not quite as suggested— I used wide egg noodles (the kind that usually accompany Swedish meatballs, in my house) instead of mee or instant noodles. With so many adaptations to the recipe, I found myself wondering: did I really make authentic shrimp mee goreng? I didn’t even use a wok! What constitutes authentic food, anyway? One reason I like to use more than one recipe as a reference when I am cooking is to get an idea of how different people make the food, so that I can emulate its original style more closely. But if I don’t have the exact same tools or ingredients, is it possible to claim authenticity? Or just good taste? Authenticity is an incredibly challenging concept to define. My intuitive definition of authentic food centers around the idea that the food is made by following the right recipe, using the right ingredients and tools, and probably by people who have been making and eating this kind of food for their whole life, and their ancestors probably made that same type of food for years before they were born. One relevant example to challenge this intuitive definition is pad thai. Although it is now popularly understood as the definition of authentic Thai food, pad thai became the national dish through a government-supported campaign to improve public health by championing and adopting the originally Chinese dish. Does this history affect the authenticity of pad thai as quintessential Thai food? Over the course of this semester, we ASIAN 258 students have learned countless ways in which different food and people interact and change each other. It’s nearly impossible to find a food culture or even a singular dish comprised of components that come from exclusively its own culture. As we struggle to define authentic food, I think it’s equally important to interrogate our fascination with authenticity. What is so important about food being “authentic,” especially when we can’t even put our finger on what defines food as such? Perhaps authenticity of food is not as important as understanding the food’s history and how it came to be.

The Chinese are present in many ways in Buenos Aires (Argentina). But there’s a special type of restaurant that marries elements from the Chinese tradition with those of Peru’s coastal cities. These are Chifa restaurants, which started popping up in Buenos Aires as Peruvian migration grew in importance during the 1990s and early 2000s. Chinese migration to Peru To understand the origins of this cuisine, we should go back to the 19th century. Chinese workers were brought to Peru in 1849 to replace African slaves in the sugar plantations and the guano fields. They also filled numerous jobs as artisans, servants, and cooks for wealthy families in the capital. The coolie trade, which brought more than 100,000 single Chinese men to Peru, lasted until 1874. As most contracts were 8 years long, by the 1860s, some of these indentured labours were already working as butchers, pastry cooks, or in various jobs in little restaurants, or fondas. The first versions of these small, low-status restaurants for the working class offered cocina criolla (creole food, the hegemonic diet in Lima) that many of them had learned to cook when working as servants and domestic cooks. Then, by the first years of the 20th century, some of these restaurants started offering Cantonese cuisine. But it wouldn’t be until the 1930s that the word Chifa replaced the word for restaurant. So, Chifa is first a restaurant and then a cuisine. It then became part of the spoken language before turning up in posters and advertisements. In order to adapt to the tastes of clients, Chinese migrant chefs began to include local products in their plates, such as cuy (guinea pig), chuño (potato starch used to thicken sauces) and pisco. Through these fusions, Chifa began constructing its identity as a culinary tradition. As it happens with other cuisines in different contexts, Chifa travels with people of Peruvian origin. Why and how Chifas did establish in Buenos Aires? The arrival of migrants from neighbouring countries and Peru in Argentina grew in the 1990s, when it increased fivefold. It was in this context that Peruvian restaurants started appearing in Buenos Aires. At first, they were aimed at the Peruvian community. Then, with global awareness of Peruvian cuisine, led by state-sponsored gastro-diplomacy, Peruvian restaurants became relevant in Buenos Aires’ new "ethnic cuisine" scene. Among this diversified offerings of Peruvian restaurants, Chifa restaurants started to pop up in Buenos Aires in the mid-2000s. Over the course of 2019, I conducted ethnographic observations in these restaurants and interviewed chefs and owners. I found that most of their cooks had previous experiences in Chifas’ kitchens in Lima. They were all Peruvian and of non-Chinese descent. They began working in the lower-level positions back in Lima, where they learned from Chinese cooks in charge of these kitchens. The encounters in those kitchens described by Chifa cooks were marked by tension, friction, and conflict. The kitchens represented sites of encounter between people with different knowledge, cultural backgrounds, languages, and positions in workplace hierarchies. In short, they were encounters between individuals unequally positioned in the social world. And, at the same time, they were also transnational and transcultural spaces. The process of learning new tasks and culinary techniques was described by Peruvian cooks as especially conflictive. The first barrier was language. Since most Chinese cooks in Chifas don´t speak Spanish, the learning process they described was mostly observational. Mastering the wok technique was both a key and challenging task. The process of learning is practical and bodily, it involves observation, practice, and grasping how the body was to move through feeling. It involved correction and multiple attempts. The decision to settle in Argentina, in all my interviewed cases, came down to an offer to work in a Chifa in Buenos Aires. Thus, transnational migrant networks – the sets of interpersonal relations that link migrants with relatives, friends or fellow countrymen at home - played a significant role in defining population mobilities - in these cases between Lima and Buenos Aires. Like the food, the decorations in Chifa restaurants in Buenos Aires contain objects that evoke both China and Peru. They locate stereotypical images associated with each of these countries and their cultural landscapes. For example, there are Chinese lanterns next to pictures of Machu Picchu, Chinese traditional paintings next to soccer shirts of Peruvian teams. What does this decoration convey? Is the decoration also a fusion product? No chopsticks are used. Customers eat with knife and fork. There aren’t round tables (typical of traditional Chinese restaurants), but only square ones. All of them have a bottle of soy sauce on top (siyao as it is named in Peru). As for the menus, they are only written in Spanish, which reveals who are the expected customers. But they also recreate images associated with China, mainly by the use of a certain typography and the presence of red color. In many cases, the customers' experience is marked by nostalgia. Nostalgia overtakes not only the food itself, but other cultural consumptions that take place in these spaces. The ambience is reinforced by TVs playing Peruvian soccer matches and loudspeakers playing Peruvian cumbia. Like any cultural product, Chifas aren´t homogeneous. In Lima you can find Chifas that use ingredients more associated with the Cantonese culinary tradition, and others that offer plates related to the Peruvian criollo cuisine. Still others only serve combinations of them, such as “Monstrito”. When Peruvian migrants settled in Buenos Aires in the 1990s and 2000s, they re-created this culinary tradition once more. As cultural practices and identities don´t always overlap, in the migratory context of Buenos Aires, eating in a Chifa increases “Peruvian-ness”. It is a practice performed by Peruvian migrants to create their identity – even though many of them don´t identify as Chinese. Sources · Cerruti, M. (2005). La migración peruana a la Ciudad de Buenos Aires: su evolución y características. Población de Buenos Aires, 2(2), 7–28. · Lausent-Herrera, I. (2011). The Chinatown in Peru and the Changing Peruvian Chinese Communities. Journal of Chinese Overseas, 7, 69–113. · Rodriguez Pastor, H. (1993). Del Kon Hei Fat Choy al Chifa peruano. En Olivas Weston, R. Cultura, Identidad y Cocina en el Perú. Universidad de San Martín de Porres: Lima. · Yuan, Y. (2028). La comida china en el Perú: una nueva identidad multiétnica. Religación. Revista de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, 3(10), 128-138.

Today, my mom taught me to make jinsi bing (金丝饼) – Chinese fried spiral pancake. Remember that Miranda told us that bing (饼) has long existed in China, though the main ingredient, wheat, was not native to China. One modern variant of the bing is jinsi bing (金丝饼) – literally meaning “golden thread pancake.” It’s also called qiansi wanlü (千丝万缕), meaning “countless threads.” This name refers to its long, numerous spirals, which can be pulled out. It’s the result of centuries of experimentation and innovation. The ingredients are the same as those for the standard bing. We made several different kinds of bing with one big kneaded dough. 600g of wheat flour yielded about 7 pieces of bing (though this will depend on how big you want them to be). This time, 2 of them were jinsi bing (my mom made the first one, and I made the second). The ingredients are below: For the dough: Unbleached wheat flour: 600g Water at around 60 degree Celsius: 240g Salt: 3g For the You Su (油酥), which prevents the layers or threads of dough from sticking together: Unbleached wheat flour: 30g Vegetable oil: 30g First, we made a dough by mixing the ingredients at the top together. We put all of the ingredients into a breadmaker and set it to dough setting. You can also knead the dough by hand, cover it in plastic wrap, and leave it for about 1 hour to rise. Meanwhile, we made the You Su. We heated the vegetable oil in a pan. Once it became hot (at least around 90 degree Celsius), we poured it into a small bowl with wheat flour. We mixed the ingredients well and reserved for later use. Once the dough was ready, we separated it into 7 pieces for the 7 pieces of bing. We prepared a clean surface and a rolling pin. To prevent the dough from sticking to the surface, pin, or hands, we sprinkled additional flour. We rolled one piece of the dough at a time with the rolling pin. Here I’ll describe the specific recipe for jinsi bing. For jinsi bing, the ideal shape would be a rectangle, but it’s okay as long if it’s even, thin, and not too far from a rectangle. Then we poured about 1/7 of the You Su onto the dough and used a spatula (optional) and our hands to spread it evenly on the entire surface of the dough. Then, we folded the rectangle along the long side into a trifold, and cut the middle part into multiple thin threads (WARNING: don’t cut all the way to the two ends! Leave about 3-5 cm at the ends for holding with your hands). Next, we carefully held the two ends and stretched them so that the threads became longer and thinner. Don’t use too much force – my mom has broken the threads! But don’t worry too much if it breaks – you can still make it delicious. The stretching part is similar to stretching noodles, and you can stretch them one half at a time. If you’re afraid it will break, hold the midpoint and one end, carefully stretch, and repeat for the other half. After that, we put the threads on the clean surface again. Starting with one end, we folded the whole thing into a spiral, bit by bit, and we hid the other end at the bottom to make it look good. We pressed the spiral with our hands to flatten. This made it easier for us to roll it one last time. We rolled the flat spiral with the rolling pin evenly again, to make it into a bigger thinner pie. Ensure that your final product is even before it goes into the pan, otherwise the thin part will be burnt before the thick part is cooked. Finally, we heated a pan and greased the bottom with some vegetable oil, and fried the thin spiral dough with high heat. We flipped it when the bottom was spotted with golden brown, and repeated for the other side. We flipped it a few more times to ensure that the surface enlarged through exposure to the air. That was when the bing was ready! You can lift a thread and unravel the spiral. The slightly brown surface is crispy, while the inside is soft and al dente. Don’t leave it too long, otherwise the moisture would ruin the crunchy threads. If you like, you can eat it with some sugar, honey, or anything else! The threads of our product still stuck a little bit to each other, so we suggest that you make more You Su if you want a more perfect spiral. Also, the ideally thin, even threads take a lot of practice -- we’ll practice more and see if we can make some progress!

Best to make & enjoy while listening to Banana Pancakes by Jack Johnson. Today I'm sharing with all of you one of my favorite breakfast foods, which I now have plenty of time to make due to recent events. These are super easy to make and once you master the basic recipe you can start adding things in (I like to add blueberries to mine, but chocolate chips would also be delicious). I'm going to put my reflection on making these pancakes here, but if you aren't interested in reading it and just want to see the recipe, you can skip down to the TLDR; at the end of this post. I have always loved to cook, specifically because I've always loved to eat. I find food to be a creative outlet -- it gives me something to do and it gives me a way to experiment and be adventurous and make people happy. In times of crisis, food is a constant calming presence, it offers tradition and faith and love. Usually at school I don't have as much time to cook as I would like, and so I tend to focus on quick meals that require little clean-up afterwards, but recent events have given me more time and so a goal I've created for myself in this time of social distancing is to cook more and try more recipes. I also run a small food blog, so this offers me a good way to get more into this hobby. Today, I wanted to try making banana pancakes -- an excellent example of local adaptation, because I don't have pancake mix and can't find any in the stores, but had the ingredients on hand to make these kinds of pancakes instead. The recipe to make them is very simple: it requires 1 banana (mashed up), 1 egg (the recipe called for 2 but the first time I made them with 2 eggs they felt more like weirdly scrambled banana eggs than pancakes so I decided moving forward 1 would be enough), 1 tablespoon peanut butter, cinnamon, and then I put my own spin on them, adding a dash of turmeric and some blueberries. Once you mix all the ingredients together into your "pancake" batter, you cook them the same way you do regular pancakes: medium-low heat on a pan with some butter, flipping over once you see them start to bubble. After I fixed the recipe to my own liking (re: omitting one of the two eggs), I thought they turned out really well and were a fun way to motivate myself in the mornings to stick to my routine without class and my on-campus job existing as reasons to be awake. Eating pancakes also reminds me of home, because my family tradition is to eat pancakes every Saturday morning. Unfortunately, I am currently unable to return home because the situation with COVID-19 is significantly worse in my home town than it is here in Ann Arbor, and because I do not want to risk potentially having the disease and transmitting it once I get home to my parents and grandparents. The connection of this breakfast to my own home traditions makes it particularly special, and was another reason that I was happy to try to make them. Perhaps now when I do return home, banana pancakes can also be integrated into our traditional Saturday morning meals. I also found it fun to create this new kind of "pancake" because it illustrates how a recipe can change over time due to cultural matrix and other examples of local adaption. As I was writing this, I looked up the history and origin of pancakes, and came across a fascinating National Geographic article, which detailed how pancakes may have actually originated in prehistoric times, and how cultures from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the original settlers of the USA to the French up to modern times have eaten pancakes differently and how many different recipes exist for them (Rupp, 2018). Especially in thinking about how this new recipe came about as people today are very focused on healthy eating and how to make their favorite foods "healthier," it is interesting to think about how this recipe might be categorized and archived for future generations. TLDR; Basic recipe for pancakes: - 1 banana - 1 egg (note: a lot of recipes on the internet say to use 2 eggs but I usually find this makes them way too eggy and you end up eating banana scrambled eggs) - 1 tablespoon peanut butter - dash of cinnamon optional add-ins: - turmeric (a very small dash of this for health benefits) - blueberries Steps: - mash up banana in a bowl - crack egg into the bowl and scramble it until mixed in with the banana - add a tablespoon of peanut butter and your cinnamon - mix together until it resembles pancake batter (pretty smooth) - heat a little butter in a skillet and cook the way you would usually make pancakes, flipping once you see them starting to form little bubbles (if you're adding blueberries, make sure to put them in before you flip) - enjoy!

Chopsticks are ubiquitous in Asia. They are so essential to everyday life that the region -- which encompasses China, Korean Peninsula, the Japanese archipelago, parts of Mongolia, and mainland Southeast Asia – is also known as the “chopsticks cultural sphere.” This is not just the impression left on most visitors to the region. Many Asian chopsticks users think that chopsticks are more important than other eating utensils. Previously, some Japanese food scholars have posited that chopsticks are an “exclusive” tool for the Japanese—when eating their meals, Japanese don’t usually employ other utensils. But chopsticks were not always the primary eating tool in East and Southeast Asia. As both the archaeological and textual evidence reveals, the spoon was actually not only the earliest, but also the most basic eating implement for ancient people. Why? Until the tenth century AD, millet was the staple cereal in North China, Korea, and parts of Japan. Millet was – and remains -- best cooked as a porridge or gruel. This is because its grains are smaller than that of rice. If millet were to be prepared like rice--brought to boil by applying high heat to the right amount of water and then simmered until soft and fluffy—the millet grains on the bottom of the pot would have been burned while those in the middle would remain undercooked. Because millet porridge was the most common grain-based dish in the ancient world, the spoon became the most convenient tool because it helped people eat the food elegantly. As grain has always been the most significant part of an Asian meal, the tool that transports it best becomes the most essential. So what changed? As in the case of millet porridge, boiling was the basic cooking method in Asia, and elsewhere. In ancient times, cooks boiled not only grains but also non-grain food; of the latter, according to the Classic of Rites, a text from Han China (206 BCE - 220 CE) or before, stew (羹geng in Chinese) was most common—“geng (stew) and fan (grain) were eaten by all, from the princes down to the common people, regardless of status.” The same text also enjoins that when one eat geng (stew), one should use chopsticks because they are more efficient in picking up the foodstuff (e.g. vegetables) from a stew or any soupy dish. (This incidentally is the traditional way to savor Japanese miso soup, though many outside Japan use a spoon today.) As grain food was more important than non-grain food in a meal, chopsticks however were a supplementary implement. This role was clearly suggested by the paleographic form “zhu” 筯, or the Chinese word for chopsticks in early days. The growing appeal of wheat in first-century China was a game changer. This was especially the case after the widespread adoption of the millstone for milling wheat into flour, which helped chopsticks make inroads and undermined the primacy of the spoon. By the tenth century, wheat succeeded in dethroning millet as the most consumed grain among the northern Chinese, followed also by the Koreans. Wheat-flour foods, such as noodles and dumplings, combined grain and non-grain ingredients in one form, and to eat noodles, chopsticks evidently was the better tool, because the spoon could not easily transport such foodstuffs. Chinese also customarily used chopsticks to eat dumplings. To this day, noodles and dumplings are arguably the favorite wheat flour foods in the region. Their popularity has turned chopsticks into a popular eating implement than the spoon. Not only do the East Asians use chopsticks to enjoy noodles, but one study suggests that medieval Turks also used chopsticks to eat “macaroni,” possibly due to Mongol influence. In modern days, the most well-known noodle dishes around the world perhaps are Japanese ramen and Vietnamese pho--both are best eaten with chopsticks. The second “push” for the ascent of chopsticks in history was the increased consumption of rice throughout Asia, from Vietnam and South China to North China and then to Korea and Japan, from the eleventh century onward. The introduction of early ripening rice from Vietnam was a factor. Since cooked rice, which is more consistent than millet, can be transported in clumps, one could jettison the spoon. Because non-grain foods—i.e. stew and others—have traditionally been conveyed by the use of chopsticks, so gradually, a pair of chopsticks was all that was required to handle daily meals in the region (something also noticed by Japanese scholars). However, if chopsticks became an “exclusive” eating tool in Japan, then the same could be said about China and Vietnam. Korea is an exception because to this day, spoon and chopsticks are still used together as a set by Koreans to eat. However, this Korean eating etiquette reflects more a cultural decision than a culinary need, since rice’s consistency also allows Koreans to carry it with chopsticks, and many Koreans do just that in informal settings, such as a family meal. Besides milling wheat flour, the millstone is also used by the Asians to grind rapeseeds and other vegetable seeds for cooking oil. Once cooking oil was readily available from the third century, a new cooking method was born: stir-frying. Over time, stir-frying, or sautéing, became a quintessential way of cooking Chinese food and continues to this day. In preparing stir-fried dishes, foodstuffs are precut to bite-size morsels for fast cooking. Due to this, chopsticks also become a convenient utensil to pick the cooked morsels, for they could allow their users to transport the desired amount of food to their mouths more precisely than a spoon would. In pre-modern times, this way of eating was also more hygienic because the small sizes of chopsticks minimized the chance of passing on germs to food in communal eating. In sum, though invented in antiquity about 7,000 years ago, chopsticks were not always as essential as one tends to think. There’s a rich history behind the indispensable utensil that defines the “chopsticks cultural sphere.” That history is reflected and registered the remarkable changes in the culinary traditions and dietary practices. Moreover, the story is still unfolding today—the growing global appeal of Japanese sushi and the ubiquity of Chinese restaurants and takeout around the world have all left their indelible marks on the use, appeal, and appearance of chopsticks. For more information on the history of chopsticks, see Q. Edward Wang, Chopsticks: A Cultural and Culinary History

The interloper chile pepper, arriving in China around 1570, ultimately surpassed the native Sichuan pepper in popularity. Why did the Chinese so enthusiastically embrace this introduced plant, even to the extent of displacing a long-treasured native spice? Our Two Protagonists Sichuan Pepper in the prickly ash family Rutaceae family, Zanthoxylum bungeanum (Chinese, often huajiao花椒or Chuanjiao川椒) Sichuan pepper (also known as fagara) is the seed pod from a short tree indigenous to China. It has a distinctive, pungent flavor. In addition, it has a numbing or anesthetic property. It has been used in Chinese cuisine and medicine since ancient times. Chile Pepper Solanaceae family, Capsicum annuum The chile pepper is native to Central America and northern South America. While there are several species currently cultivated around the world, until the 20th century, varieties grown in China almost certainly came just from the species Capsicum annuum. The capsaicin compound in the chile seed pods gives them their spiciness. The Chinese use both fresh and dried chiles. Initial naming and use of chiles imply a similar culinary use to the native Sichuan pepper as a pungent flavoring. Chinese authors from the 17th century write about the chile as a substitute for Sichuan pepper. Over the course of the 18th century, Chinese increased their use of chiles well beyond merely substituting it for the native spice. They endorsed and capitalized upon the versatility of the chile pepper, developing a taste for its own unique flavors, employing its antiseptic characteristics for food preservation, recognizing health and medicinal impacts of capsaicin, and integrating the chile into cultural symbols. While Sichuan pepper is popular and widely available in China today, it is not as prevalent in most regional cuisines as it was before the arrival of chiles. Important exceptions are Sichuan and Yunnan, where the native flavoring is still used regularly, however, most often in combination with the introduced chile, thus also demonstrating culinary shifts since the arrival of chiles. Popular dishes like mapo doufu and gongbao jiding include both. The overall decline in Sichuan pepper use occurred in a direct relationship with the increase in chile pepper use, from the 18th into the 19th centuries. This shift is reflected in increasing numbers and types of Chinese sources discussing chiles, such as local histories, culinary texts, and medical handbooks. Indeed, Sichuan culinary scholar Lan Yong, building on the expansive collection of recipes from ancient times into the early twentieth century compiled by Liu Daqi, demonstrates this shift quite concretely: Recipes in the collection that include Sichuan pepper as an ingredient Ming (1368-1644) Qing (1644-1911) 29.7% 18.9% This marked decline in the use of Sichuan pepper is paralleled by greater and greater integration of chiles into Chinese culinary practices: In a mid-18th century local history, the authors exclaimed that chiles were: “as indispensable in daily cuisine as onion and garlic.” A mid-19th century gazetteer underscored the chile’s essential role as a domestic crop, emphasizing that: “It is the most important vegetable in the garden. It is used as a daily flavoring, not unlike salt.” In his 1848 work on plants, Wu Qijun observed that chilies are “Grown in Jiangxi, Hunan, Guizhou and Sichuan as a vegetable,” not just as a flavoring. medical uses of chiles: + stimulate appetite and digestion + warming the body + treatment for diarrhea + treatment for hemorrhoids + treatment and prophylactic for malaria + treatment for food poisoning + expelling damp, particularly in Hunan, Sichuan and Guizhou Unlike Sichuan pepper, the Chinese have made chiles into cultural symbols. Chiles have become important in some gender tropes, including masculine fighting spirit and feminine independence and passion. In terms of fighting spirit, Mao is often quoted as saying that there would not have been a revolution without chiles. Similarly, Hunanese, as avid consumers of chiles, are often viewed as strong military leaders. The term “la meizi” or “spicy girls,” describes women who eat many chiles and are independent, assertive and passionate. In a further example, strings of real and artificial chiles are now a common Chinese New Year’s decoration. Hanging these strings evokes the phrase “honghong huohuo” literally “red, red, fire, fire,” referring to the color and spiciness of chiles. The symbolic meaning of the strings of chiles can be translated as a wish or prayer for an “exuberant and affluent life.” The impact of chiles on Chinese culture also directly influenced the language. The definitions for la or “spicy” in contemporary dictionaries now include the chile as the first example to explain this flavor. The thoroughness of Chinese integration of the chile sprang from the plant’s versatility. It provides flavor, spice, medicine, nutrition, and stimulation and induces passion. Chinese from different regions, classes, and genders could all find something compelling and edgy in the chile. For more on the history of chiles in China see my The Chile Pepper in China What’s in a Name? There is a parallel in Chinese and English for borrowing names for spicy or pungent plants. In English, “pepper” comes from the Latin piper, which in turn comes from the Sanskrit pippali. The Sanskrit name originally referred to long pepper, a relative of black pepper, but in Europe, it referred primarily to black pepper (Piperaceae family, Piper nigrum). The name pepper was borrowed to refer to the chile once it arrived in Europe from the Americas. Much later, the label of pepper was applied to the native Chinese spice, Sichuan pepper. In China, a similar pattern emerged, but it centered on the name of an indigenous spice. The original name for Sichuan pepper in Chinese is the single character jiao 椒. When black pepper was introduced to China from South Asia around the second century, the Chinese borrowed this character from their native pungent plant to name this new import, hujiao 胡椒or “pepper from Hu.” Hu was an ancient term referring to a broad region of Western and Southern Asia, including India. When chiles arrived in China in the late 16th century, the Chinese again borrowed the character jiao for many of the early names for chiles, including fanjiao 番椒or “foreign pepper” and lajiao 辣椒 or “spicy pepper.” The parallel in naming these plants from three distinct families reflects cultural recognition of similar flavors, physiological effects and convergent uses.

Jin Feng (Grinell College), author of Tasting Paradise on Earth: Jiangnan Foodways What did the emperor of China eat in the 18th century? A contemporary restaurant in Suzhou, China has reproduced the forgotten imperial banquet. By spotlighting the splendor and opulence of gentry living in the city’s storied past, this establishment feeds not only the body, but also cultural nostalgia in a rapidly changing China. No ordinary eatery, the Wumen Renjia (Suzhou Family) restaurant has reconstructed the official banquet that the Suzhou Office of Fabric and Clothes had purportedly prepared for the visiting Qing emperor, Qianlong (1711-1799), during his tours of the south. Officially charged with collecting fabric and making clothes for the Qing court, the Suzhou Office frequently turned into temporary living quarters for the emperor and his entourage, summoning skilled chefs working for local aristocratic families to prepare imperial meals. In 1765, the names of several Suzhou chefs appeared on the official record of the emperor’s daily meals during his travels. Some were later taken into the Forbidden City in Beijing, serving as royal chefs and leaving behind records of “Suzhou-style” dishes once loved by the royal family. Sha Peizhi, the manager of Suzhou Family, has led the effort to recreate the Suzhou Office banquet of the past, with the help of a specialist from the Forbidden City Museum in Beijing. Sha and her colleagues not only searched through the Forbidden City archives, but also consulted contemporary Suzhou chefs and the descendants of Qing-dynasty aristocratic families. One such descendant is I.M. Pei, the late architect, whose family once owned the Lion Grove Garden. After more than a decade of trial and error, Sha and her team came up with more than forty dishes now acknowledged as the “Intangible Cultural Heritages of Jiangsu Province” and won accolades from the government. Many of the recreated dishes not only boast imperial associations but also abound in history and literary significance. Take “Eight Treasures Duck,” which has won the place of honor thanks to Qianlong’s renowned obsession with dishes made from all parts of the duck. Or consider “Jin Shentan Pressed Tofu,” a culinary creation that commemorates the ill-fated Qing scholar and Suzhou native, Jin Shentan (1608-1661). As a show of bravado before his execution, Jin purportedly told his sons that five-spice pressed tofu combined with peanuts could replicate the flavor of smoked ham. Perhaps most revealing is the restaurant’s version of Squirrel-Shaped Mandarin Fish, a signature local dish. Sha corrects what she believes to be misconceptions about this dish perpetuated by her rivals and by locals alike. There is no evidence, she maintains, that Qianlong ever consumed it at the Pine and Crane Tower (Song He Lou) Restaurant, a rival eatery. The dish, in fact, has more ancient origins: It arose when the assassin Zhuan Zhu hid a dagger inside a cooked fish to kill King Liao of Wu in 515 BCE. Sha’s team claims that they have therefore altered the standard recipe of the fish to better represent what they consider “authentic” Suzhou cuisine. The fish now cooks with apricot jam instead of the more common but “inauthentic” tomato paste. Since tomato was not imported to China until the 16th or 17th century, she reasons, it’s best to use apricot jam instead. The Chinese cooked with fruits as early as the 11th century BCE. “Fishy” origin story aside, Sha also claims that their chefs have integrated modern scientific knowledge into their offerings even while emphasizing the restaurant’s time-honored royal ties. For instance, “Cherry Pork,” another signature local dish and a supposed favorite of the Dowager Empress Cixi (1835-1908), uses red fermented rice for coloring. Sha recounts that in 1985, two American scientists, Joseph Goldstein and Michael Brown, won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering that monocline-k can regulate cholesterol metabolism. Goldstein and Brown only speculated about possible drug therapies based on this discovery that could lower “bad cholesterol” clotting arteries and leading to a heart attack or a stroke. But Suzhou Family has lost no time advertising the “scientific basis” for not only their Cherry Pork, but also their Red Fermented Rice Wine. The dish, they claim, is good for reducing fat and cholesterol content. It also supposedly prevents cardio-vascular diseases, cerebral apoplexy, myocardial infarction, and high blood pressure, too. Besides offering “authentic” and “scientifically proven” local dishes, Suzhou Family also uses suitable packaging to represent the restaurant as the true heir to Chinese cultural traditions. Sha has had a set of eating utensils custom made for their renovated imperial banquet. These include white and blue porcelain plates produced in Jingdezhen, the famous “Porcelain Capital” of China, silver spoons, and chopsticks with sliver tips, traditionally used for testing poison in food in the imperial palace. They also try to recreate the lifestyle once enjoyed by Suzhou aristocracy, who owned private gardens and kept family chefs. These efforts have paid off with people in China and beyond. The restaurant attracts foreign celebrities to the restaurant like I. M. Pei, and the owners received invitations to reconstruct historical banquets in Japan.[1] They have even signed an agreement with the municipal government of Vancouver in Canada to serve food at a Suzhou-style garden there and to promote traditional “garden-style living.” [2] The restaurant’s business model comprises mixing heritage and invention, art and science in one easily recognizable and consumable package. It also invokes China’s imperial past, adding mystique and flare to target both domestic and global markets. The resulting imperial banquet represents more an invention of traditions than a recovery of historical data. This case thus questions the meaning of authentic Chinese food. For some within China “authentic Suzhou cuisine” signals sophistication and higher social status. For others, however, it ignites hometown pride. And for still others, this cuisine buttresses their sense of uniqueness and individuality. In fact, a successful “local cuisine” restaurant like Suzhou Family Restaurant does not just exactly reproduce the food of traditional society. It must also be flexible enough to accommodate the needs of diverse parties without sacrificing the familiar elements of the Suzhou culinary tradition that make it “identifiable.” Architectural style, interior decoration, utensils, signature dishes, and local lore work together to evoke the symbolic universe of traditional foodways and living. [1] “Suzhou meishijia chenggong fuzhi wutao ‘cefeng cai,’ jilu Liuqiu zhuquan.” [2] “Suzhou meiyao mingcha jiang piaoxiang Wengehua Yi Yuan, ‘Wumen Renjia’ yu Jiaguo qianyue.”

Mung bean starch jelly is a popular food in China, especially during summertime. When the smooth, bouncy, and cool jelly slides down the throat, the body feels healed from the heat and dust of the bustling world. It feels like a piece of heaven in your mouth. Premodern Chinese food and dietetics writers valued mung bean starch jelly for its clear and bouncy texture and its cooling and cleansing effects on the body. This conviction partially comes from the cooling and detoxifying property of mung beans in traditional Chinese medicine. The medicinal value of mung beans was recorded in Chinese medical and dietetics classics as early as the eighth century and became common knowledge in the sixteenth century. Mung bean starch, which was extracted from the whole mung beans through long and complicated processing, was believed to have similar health effect on the body. Hence the recipe below: "Green bean powder, a.k.a., mung bean starch, add ginger to make it into a thick soup. Crush the green beads and sprinkle the silver threads; Its heat clears metal and stone, and its purity cleanses the lung and the digestive organs." The recipe is from Benxinzhai shushipu compiled by Chen Dasou (dates unknown) in the Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279). It is very simple: add ginger and cook the mung bean starch into a thick soup (jelly). Chen Dasou does not indicate whether the jelly is seasoned with anything other than ginger. If not, its taste would be rather plain. In the sixteenth-century miscellaneous writing Zhuyu shanfang zabu by Song Xu and Song Gongwang (father and son), however, a recipe is recorded on making mung bean starch into a dessert. "Mung bean starch cake: first heat water to a boil, add processed honey, add mung bean starch, add ginger powder, and stir until the mixture is even and smooth. Rub the inside of a container with dairy cream, pour the mixture into the container, remove it from the container [when it cools down and solidifies], cut it into pieces, and pour dairy cream on top before serving." The basic cooking method is the same in these two recipes: heat the mung bean starch in water until thickened and let it cool down. Indeed, mung bean starch jelly is easy and quick to make, which may have contributed to its continued popularity in Chinese cuisines. Its well-liked jelly texture is due to the starch gelatinization process taking place when starch is heated with water (check out this site for more: http://sciencemeetsfood.org/starch-gelatinization/). It is easy to make mung bean starch jelly in your kitchen. Mung bean starch is available in many Asian grocery stores in America. To achieve the ideal texture of the jelly, the proportion of starch and water should be approximately 1:6 in volume. Heat 5 servings of water in a pot. Mix another 1 serving of cold water with 1 serving of mung bean starch and pour it into the pot. Keep heating and stirring the liquid as it thickens and its color turns lighter. When it becomes a smooth jelly of consistent semitransparent texture, pour it into a container to cool. After two hours at room temperature, the jelly is ready to be cut into any shape and thickness. It is usually served with chili oil or roasted sesame paste, more often flavored salty than sweet. But feel free to season it any way you like. The jelly structure is pretty stable and can even take some stir frying. Many kinds of starch are used as main ingredient in Chinese cuisines. Pea starch is used to make similar starch jelly dish. Wheat starch noodle is a famous street food in northwestern China; in northern China, pan fried sweet potato starch jelly is a popular street food. Mung bean starch jelly can also be dehydrated and made into thin glass noodles, a popular ingredient for soup, salad, hotpot, and stir-fried dishes in China. Regardless of the final shape or cooking method, mung bean starch jelly’s clear and elastic texture and its smooth and gliding mouthfeel makes it a popular food for the Chinese palate. Do you know of any starch dishes or interesting culinary uses of starch? Please share them with us in the comments.

Chinese food is known for its diversity. But in the last two decades, a new trend is emerging: an increasing number of people have turned to eating spicy Chinese food. In particular, Sichuanese cuisine has become their favorite. And the phenomenon is seen in both China and abroad. Does globalization dull our palatable senses? A glimpse of the history of Sichuanese cuisine, which is relatively short, seems to give us a “yes,” fortunately or unfortunately. Jacques Gernet (1921-2018), the famed sinologist, once wrote that Sichuanese restaurants in the Song period (960-1279) had used “pimento” to spice up the dishes they served. But this has proven to be a glaring mistake, for chili pepper (capsicum annuum), or pimento, the ingredient for making spicy food, did not reach China until the sixteenth century. Moreover, in the first hundred years after its appearance, the plant was more appreciated for its bright color than its use in cooking among the Chinese. Of course, the Sichuanese were long known for their preference for “hot-and-fragrant dishes,” as recorded by a fourth-century local historian. But what they then used were Sichuan pepper, which is native to the region, ginger and cornel. Despite its name, the Sichuan pepper creates numbness in the mouth; but unlike chili pepper and black pepper—the latter was introduced to China from approximately the third century—it does not produce a hot or pungent flavor in food. That is, had the dishes served in Sichuanese restaurants in Song China been spicy, it was most likely due to the use of black pepper, which was/is called “胡椒hujiao” in Chinese—the prefix “胡hu” suggests its “foreignness,” in comparison with “花椒huajiao,” or the Sichuan pepper. When chili pepper arrived in China, it came to be called “辣椒lajiao,” literally meaning “hot pepper.” One probably could say that Sichuanese cuisine is so pungent because it often uses all three peppers, making its dishes either extremely satisfying for those who prefer hot food, or “lethal” for those who have not built up the tolerance. But the fact is: It was only from the early twentieth century that Sichuanese cuisine became associated with spiciness. In 2019 two books were published in China. Lan Yong, a historical geographer at Southwest University in Sichuan, authored History of the Sichuanese Cuisine and Cao Yu, a US-trained anthropologist at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangdong, wrote History of Spicy Foods in China. Lan points out that Sichuanese food acquired its reputation for spiciness only a century old —as late as the early twentieth century, according to Lan’s sampling, barely half of the dishes served in the restaurants in Sichuan were piquant. This is unsurprising, for Sichuan was not the first province the chili pepper reached on its route to China. Cao Yu believes that the pepper first became an ingredient in cooking in Guizhou—the locals there used it as a substitute for salt to make food more palatable; whereas Brian Dott, author of The Chili Pepper in China, finds that the American plant first reached Zhejiang before spreading to the rest of the country. How did, then, Sichuanese cuisine become equated with spicy foods? How did hot Sichuanese dishes, such as Kung-Pao chicken, twice-cooked pork, and Pock-Marked Mother Chen’s bean curd, gain such immense popularity in recent decades? The answers to them seem to lie in the two massive migration trends in modern Chinese history. The first occurred in the Qing period (1644-1911), when Sichuan received a good number of immigrants from China’s coastal regions where chili pepper had already been used in food preparation. The second appeared from the 1980s, when Sichuan, one of the most populated provinces in China, exported its people, mostly as laborers, to the rest of the country, helping to propagate these spicy dishes. The above-mentioned famous Sichuanese dishes, in addition to fish-fragrant pork slivers, man-and-wife meat slices, and Chongqing hotpot, have not only been featured in the menus of Sichuanese restaurants, they have also been called 江湖菜Jianghu cai (lit. rivers & lakes dishes) and served in other restaurants. The term Jianghu cai can indeed mean “migratory/itinerant dishes,” attesting to their close connection with the migration and the country’s urbanization, a subsequent phenomenon. Why do people turn to spicy food? In particular, why do the migrants and urbanites find them attractive? Scientists have offered a variety of explanations for the outcomes, or “benefits,” of eating peppery food, ranging from stimulation of appetite and activation of TRPV1 to enhancement of energy metabolism, production of thermogenesis and formation of a negative energy balance (i.e. weight loss). But many have also observed that physiological factors notwithstanding, there are psychological, cultural and sociological reasons as well. Surveys have found that prior exposure to spicy food actually plays a major role in nurturing the dietary preference. And for those without previous experience, friendship, peer-pressure, and comradery tend to be the main factors for taking the plunge. That is, while the burning and numbing sensations associated with eating fiery Sichuanese foods, or any peppery foods for that matter, can be addictive and thrilling, many people first acquire a liking for the stuff because of social occasions with friends or colleagues. And such social occasions often take place in urban settings. Urbanity is important in that as people work later into the evening, it is more likely for them to crave mid-night snacks with friends in food stands, pubs, and restaurants for relaxation. Spicy (Chinese) foods are more attractive because, on those occasions, you eat not to fill up your stomach but to alleviate work-related stress, a common experience shared by today’s youth in many corners of the world. Whatever the causes, eating spicy food has indeed become a global trend, led by the young generation. (The changing culinary preference in Japan is a case in point: studies have found that while the Japanese in general shy away from spicy food, its young generation has built up more tolerance in recent years.) As Chinese foods are expanding their global presence, it seems Sichuanese cuisine has been growing in its attraction at a fast pace and outshining other culinary schools in and from China.

Many people think that Chinese American food was invented in the form of chop suey during the California Gold Rush. In fact, the Chinese were in the Americas -- and cooking food -- for hundreds of years before 1849. But what this original Chinese American food looked like is even more mysterious than the original chop suey. Experts debate the genealogy of chop suey. Was it thrown together by a Chinese cook for miners demanding a late-night dinner in San Francisco or carryover from everyday meals in the migrants’ home province of Guangdong (Canton)? Was it a bastardized and assimilated departure from authentic Chinese or a creative adaptation by chefs who had started out in gourmet restaurants before being driven by nativists into segregated Chinatowns? Whatever the case, we can see parallels between the Chinese experience in the United States and diasporic communities throughout the Americas. Unlike the nineteenth-century farmers who left their homes in Taishin to seek their fortunes on California’s “Gold Mountain,” the first Chinese migrants to the Americas already formed a diasporic merchant community in the sixteenth-century Philippines. In 1564, Miguel López de Legazpi sailed west from Acapulco to conquer the Philippines for the Spanish Crown. Regular trans-Pacific trade commenced soon thereafter with the annual sailing of the Manila Galleon, which carried Mexican silver on the outward voyage, and returned with Asian spices and Chinese silks and porcelain. The Chinese merchants who handled this trade formed a distinct community in Manila called the Parián. By the eighteenth century, this name had also become attached to an exclusive market on the central plaza of Mexico City, where wealthy aristocrats purchased Asian trade goods. In addition to such luxuries, Manila’s Chinese merchants, cooks, and bakers also supplied Spanish colonists with food. Many Chinese embarked on the Manila Galleon along with people of diverse Asian origins. The Pacific voyage was infamous for its high mortality rates, and Spanish captains were always on the lookout for Filipino and Chinese recruits to fill the depleted ranks of sailors. Moreover, Japanese samurai, unemployed by the Pax Tokugawa, signed on to defend the Galleons from pirates. Finally, Spanish merchants transported slaves from throughout Asia back to the Americas and even to Spain. According to legend, a Christian Chinese named Catarina de San Juan came to Mexico in 1621 and became known as the “china poblana” (Chinese woman from the City of Puebla). Nevertheless, the association between “chinos” and Chinese or even Asian immigrants was not always clear in Latin America. The Spanish Crown sought to defend the native communities from rapacious conquistadors by dividing colonial society into two distinct “republics” of Spaniards and Indians. Intermarriage stymied this policy of segregation, and mixed-race “castas” soon formed an urban underclass. At first this category comprised mestizos (born of mixed Spanish and Indian parents), mulattoes (Spaniards and Africans), and zambos (Africans and Indians). Over time, in seeking to divide and rule the lower classes, Spaniards invented new categories with bizarre, animalistic names such as lobo (wolf), cambujo (stallion), and chamizo (half-burned tree). Under this arbitrary taxonymy, “chino” was often used as a generic modifier for servant, as in “chino cambujo.” Because Spaniards considered Asia part of the “Indies,” newly arrived “chinos” were categorized within the “republic of Indians.” This in-between social status allowed them to work as traveling merchants selling Spanish goods to indigenous communities. Thus, for more than two centuries of Spanish colonial rule, ending in the 1820s, tens of thousands of Chinese migrants, many with clear experience in selling and preparing food, arrived in Acapulco and traveled outward from there, but it still remains difficult to discern their culinary impact on Latin America. In examining this legacy, it is perhaps easiest to indicate what the Chinese did not contribute. Although rice is widely eaten in the region and at times nostalgically attributed to the Manila Galleon, Latin American rice is not generally steamed plain in the Chinese fashion but rather cooked in pilafs. Scholars have pointed to slaves from West African rice cultures as the most likely agents of transmission. Likewise, Asian ingredients such as cinnamon, ginger, tamarind, and mango entered the creole cuisines of Latin America, but their preparation in dishes such as mole poblano resembled Middle Eastern more than Chinese cooking. Material culture provides some hints about early Asian culinary influence in the Americas. A spherical oven, used widely from India through Central Asia to China, was probably introduced to Mexico’s Pacific coast regions of Oaxaca and Tehuantepec. Known as a comiscal, it is used to bake crisp, round totopos (like giant tortilla chips) rather than samosas. Early distilling technology along the Pacific coast may be related to Philippine stills, but this evidence is still tentative. Part of the difficulty of finding evidence of Asian food in colonial Latin America is that Chinese cuisine has come to be firmly associated with nineteenth-century migrations. More than 100,000 Chinese indentured servants traveled to work in the plantation societies of both Cuba and Peru, while smaller numbers came to Mexico, often with the goal of crossing the border into the United States. Once they had finished their terms of indenture, many Chinese remained in their new homes and found work as cooks or merchants. But as with Chinese cooks in North America, and probably colonial Latin America as well, they were asked to prepare local foods. Chinese elements did enter the local cuisines, for example, tallarin (noodles), chaufa (fried rice), and lomo saltado (stir-fried beef) were beloved menu items in restaurants, which became known as “chifas” in Peru and “cafes chinos” in Mexico and Cuba. We cannot say for sure that similar dishes had arrived already in the sixteenth-century, but the ghostly presence of Chinese cooks lingers in the cultural fusions of the Americas. Jeffrey M. Pilcher University of Toronto Sources Balbi, Mariella. Los chifas en el Perú: Historia y recetas. Lima: Universidad San Martín de Porres, 1999. de Vos, Paula. “The Science of Spices: Empiricism and Economic Botany in the Early Spanish Empire.” Journal of World History 17, no. (December 2006): 417-24 Pilcher, Jeffrey M. Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Slack, Edward R., Jr. “The Chinos in New Spain: A Corrective Lens for a Distorted Image.” Journal of World History 20, no. 1 (March 2009): 37-43. Vega, Jiménez, Patricia. “El Gallo Pinto: Afro-Caribbean Rice and Beans Conquer the Costa Rican National Cuisine.” Food, Culture & Society 15, no. 2 (2012): 223-40.

Summary of Paper, Global Chinese Food conference, University of Michigan, Dec. 2019 Silk and Milk: The Medieval Silk Routes and Food in China E. N. Anderson University of California, Riverside www.krazykioti.com geneanderson510@gmail.com Chinese food expanded into Central Asia in a limited way. The commonest Chinese foods expanded with empire, but very few spread much beyond the limits reached in the Tang dynasty, very close to the limits today in the Silk Road area. Broomcorn millet was the first and most long-distance traveler, reaching what is now eastern Kazakhstan by about 2700 BCE. Unlike most Chinese domesticates, this millet endures great drought and heat and matures in as little as two months, making it a valuable resource for the dry Central Asian world. It spread onward into Europe. Rice came much later, during dynastic times, but could not flourish outside of major river valleys, and has been abandoned as a crop, though it flourishes in Iran. Foxtail millet spread to India in the Bronze Age, and much later to Europe, but details on this spread are lacking. Few fruits and vegetables traveled west. Among them were minor crops like Chinese garlic chives and bunching onions. China, in fact, domesticated many trees independently of the west, so that different species are found at the two ends of the Silk Road. This was the case with apples (the common apple was domesticated in Kazakhstan, but China has its own species), pears, cherries, and other fruit. Only peaches went from China to the western world. Apricots are probably native to much of Central Asia. The common domestic mammals all came from the west, though pigs may have been independently domesticated in China as well as west Asia. Ducks and chickens, however, spread from east to west, the chicken moving across Asia quite early. Water buffaloes are an exception to all rules: they were domesticated in India, and apparently spread from there to China—the native Chinese buffalo is apparently a now-extinct separate species. Overall, most flow was the other way: West to east. Specific dishes also traveled in that direction. Dumplings, kababs, tandur-baked bread (Iranian nan, ancestral to Chinese shaobing and other breads), and other dishes moved east. Noodles were probably invented independently in the Mediterranean and in China—they are fairly obvious things to invent—and their extreme popularity in Central Asia thus records dishes spreading in both directions. Causes for the west-to-east predominance begin with ecology. China depends on the east Asian monsoon, which brings warm wet summers and cool dry winters. Central Asia has hot dry summers, or, in the mountains, quite cold but still dry summers. Winters are bitterly cold. Most Chinese food plants do not flourish. Conversely, west and Central Asian food plants do fine in China, at least in the dry northwest. Linguistic expansion evidently mattered, in that speakers of related languages seem to have picked up each others’ foods easily. Indo-Iranic languages spread from the western steppes (focusing probably on Ukraine) to Central Asia and thence to Iran and India about 5000-4000 years ago. Other Indo-European languages were spoken farther west, with Tokharian languages dominating what is now central Xinjiang. Chinese did not reach Central Asia till the Han Dynasty. Turkic and Mongolian languages expanded south into the region from southern Siberia over the last 2000 years. Ecology was reinforced by empire once the Persian and Scythian kingdoms expanded widely in Asia. Persian culture spread rapidly through the Iranic-language areas, east to Tadzhikstan and Afghanistan. Chinese culture expanded even before Han, influencing the Tokharians. Indian culture spread, especially with Buddhism, into the region after the beginning of the Common Era. Religion became a more powerful influence with the rise of Islam, which profoundly influenced foodways by banning pork and alcohol. Pigs had not been important, but wine was enormously so—a major drink—and its loss was sorely felt, as medieval literature records. Many continued to drink fermented mares’ milk or mild raisin wine (which they considered nabidh, i.e. fruit wine too weak in alcoholic content to be covered by the Islamic prohibition). A particularly interesting story concerns dairy products. These are vitally important in Central Asia, which depends heavily on stockraising. They became important in China during the period between Han and Tang, when Turkic and Mongol-related groups dominated much of the north and introduced western foodways. They maintained some importance during Tang and Song, rose again in Yuan with the Mongol conquerors and their Turkic followers, and were decisively rejected in Ming, presumably in part due to nationalism, but also to the rise of the south and southeastern parts of China in political and cultural power. Dairy products continue to be found and used widely, but as local, small-scale traditions except in the Central Asian provinces. Today, characteristic Chinese foods such as soy sauce, fermented bean paste, and fresh ginger tend to be found west to the Uighur and eastern Kazakh cultural areas, but no farther. Dairy products essential to life in Central Asia, from qurt (dried yogurt) to kumys (fermented mares’ milk), stop short (except for isolated local use) once ethnic Mongol and Turkic peoples give way to Han Chinese. Chinese restaurants, so abundant in most of the world, are rare in western Central Asia. Korean food is much commoner, but is a recent introduction: Stalin moved many Koreans from the Russia-Korea border area to Uzbekistan and neighboring areas, to defuse opposition and break their power as an ethnic group. Conversely, west Asian foods transmitted via Central Asia have become major staples throughout China: dumplings (Turkic manty, Mandarin jiaozi and many other names). The Turkic word, borrowed as mantou, now refers to an unfilled dumpling, but Tang accounts and archaeological finds reveal that mantou were once filled. Another borrrowing was raised wheat breads (Farsi nan). Noodle and lamb dishes, various stews, and such dairy foods as are still made in China also show influence. The food of Ningxia and western Gansu seems as much Central Asian as it is “Chinese” of the classic “eighteen provinces.” It preserves a cuisine much like that described in Yuan Dynasty sources. In sum, religious and other cultural influences, and preferences shaped by these, sharpen up distinctions that have roots in regional ecology.