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.

China is the home of culinary tourism. Centuries before Lonely Planet published its first travel guide, Chinese writers made a habit of recording and sharing their notes on the best places to eat on the road. Now a virtual suburb of Shanghai, Suzhou was once a cultural, commercial, and culinary center in its own right. Historian Joanna Waley-Cohen tells that Emperor Qianlong (1711-1799) developed an affinity for Suzhou’s food and hired the city’s top chef for his personal kitchen. One district, Tiger Hill, may well have been the world’s earliest foodie destination. It boasted outstanding restaurants and teahouses, where travelers feasted on shark’s fin, braised pork, wok-cooked shrimp, and a wide variety of pastries. The following recipe comes from the foodie enclave and dates to the seventeenth century. But the name points to a deeper history, reaching back to China’s wheat-growing region in the medieval northwest. All the same, the pastry would have fit in with Suzhou’s food offerings. Suzhou natives have long been masters at making Northern styled wheat products like chewy noodles and hearty pastries. For more about Suzhou cuisine, check out Jin Feng’s Tasting Paradise on Earth (2019). Sweet, rich, and elegant, the pastry is a cross between a croissant and scallion pancake. You need only three ingredients: flour, water, and sugar. The recipe, though, is mildly labor intensive to prepare. You must laminate and fold the dough seven times, and then cook it on a griddle. Hence, the thousand, flaky layers. A Thousand-Layered Oil Rolled Pastry from the Jin Palace Flour, 1 ¼ cup Sugar, 1 ¼ teaspoon (more, if you like it sweet) Toasted sesame oil, 2 ⅔ tablespoons, plus more for brushing Salt, a pinch (optional) Boiling water, ½ cup plus 2 tablespoons 1. Mix flour and sugar with salt if using. 2. Incorporate boiling water. 3. Knead in sesame oil and let the dough sit covered for 20 minutes (this will relax the gluten). 4. Roll out the dough on a dusted surface, and brush with sesame oil. Go easy, because you will repeat the process six more times. 5. Roll the dough like a cigar, then roll the cigar into a spiral (see picture). 6. Flatten the spiral into a disc with rolling pin. Repeat the process six times. 7. Add vegetable oil to a hot pan, and fry the pastry like a pancake, until golden. Flip and repeat.