Origins of Chinese Food Culture, by Asiapac Books, illustrated by Fu Chunjiang. 41.
A completely charming introduction to Chinese food culture, cooking theory, history, and folklore, thoroughly illustrated and told partly in comic book form.
I can’t guarantee the accuracy of the entire thing, but the material that I did recognize didn’t contradict what I already knew (except for the part that said that in America, tofu is sometimes used to make wedding cakes, which is probably true for some couple somewhere on cake wrecks), and the illustrations certainly have that meticulously researched look.
It begins with the discovery of cooking, when unhappy Early Men, often subject to stomach aches, find a burned goat after a forest fire: “Indeed, it smells good and it’s easy to chew, too.” The ensuing whirlwind tour of Chinese foodways touches on Confucius’s ten perfections of Chinese cuisine (like many key terms, these are helpfully shown in hanzi as well as English), banquet etiquette, superstitions and songs about chopsticks, regional cuisine, which foods should not be eaten together, and a great many anecdotes in comic book form about the origin of various foods, including one in which the ubiquitous Zhuge Liang improves his soldiers’ morale via a meat dumpling shaped like an enemy’s head. (There’s another story in which a guy shapes dough into the form of a tyrannical minister and fries it.)
Many of the food origin stories follow this pattern: Political problem; new dish invented; new dish cures ailing person, improves morale, or is used to metaphorically illuminate the political situation; political problem solved!
Yi Yin once carried his cooking utensils and used cooking methods and flavorings to persuade King Cheng Tang to take up leadership of the state and successfully overthrow the corrupt Xia Dynasty.
Comic book Yi Yin, magisterial: “Every food item has unique qualities. You are only the king of a small state. You can’t possibly sample all of the delicacies of this great land. You have to take control of all China, and become the emperor to possess everything.
A tremendously entertaining read in its own right, but also an excellent springboard for further study of Chinese food culture.
Check it out on Amazon: Origins Of Chinese Food Culture
I can’t guarantee the accuracy of the entire thing, but the material that I did recognize didn’t contradict what I already knew (except for the part that said that in America, tofu is sometimes used to make wedding cakes, which is probably true for some couple somewhere on cake wrecks), and the illustrations certainly have that meticulously researched look.
It begins with the discovery of cooking, when unhappy Early Men, often subject to stomach aches, find a burned goat after a forest fire: “Indeed, it smells good and it’s easy to chew, too.” The ensuing whirlwind tour of Chinese foodways touches on Confucius’s ten perfections of Chinese cuisine (like many key terms, these are helpfully shown in hanzi as well as English), banquet etiquette, superstitions and songs about chopsticks, regional cuisine, which foods should not be eaten together, and a great many anecdotes in comic book form about the origin of various foods, including one in which the ubiquitous Zhuge Liang improves his soldiers’ morale via a meat dumpling shaped like an enemy’s head. (There’s another story in which a guy shapes dough into the form of a tyrannical minister and fries it.)
Many of the food origin stories follow this pattern: Political problem; new dish invented; new dish cures ailing person, improves morale, or is used to metaphorically illuminate the political situation; political problem solved!
Yi Yin once carried his cooking utensils and used cooking methods and flavorings to persuade King Cheng Tang to take up leadership of the state and successfully overthrow the corrupt Xia Dynasty.
Comic book Yi Yin, magisterial: “Every food item has unique qualities. You are only the king of a small state. You can’t possibly sample all of the delicacies of this great land. You have to take control of all China, and become the emperor to possess everything.
A tremendously entertaining read in its own right, but also an excellent springboard for further study of Chinese food culture.
Check it out on Amazon: Origins Of Chinese Food Culture