Chinese cuisine that devoured the world
BrITIsh cuisine may have its fair share of strange foods — faggots, jellied eels and haggis, to name a few — but when it comes to stomach-churning dishes, the Chinese are in a league of their own.
Those of a squeamish disposition will need to steel themselves before embarking on The Emperor’s Feast, with its gruesome list of ingredients that includes tigers, dolphins, monkeys, pangolins and dogs, as well as a historical cast of blood-thirsty tyrants, lecherous emperors and scheming concubines.
Much of what we know about early Chinese food comes from the Book Of rites, compiled some 2,500 years ago and packed with details about royal banquets, seating arrangements and table etiquette. It contains a list of exhortations, such as: ‘Do not keep picking the teeth . . . do not crunch the bones with the teeth.’ Food hygiene was also strictly enforced: one unfortunate royal servant was sentenced to death for dishing up undercooked bear paw.
By the 7th century AD, when China started trading with Central Asian states, meals became increasingly elaborate, with centrepieces like the Musical Troupe, a 70-piece orchestra made of pastries.
Most extravagant were those of Empress Wu, during the Tang dynasty. An ambitious maid, Wu joined the emperor’s harem, then, as he lay on his deathbed, she seduced his son and married him.
In 690 she declared herself the ruling empress, controlling China with an iron fist. Wu had a harem of 120 handsome youths, who egged her on in her love for outlandish food. Their ghastly culinary ‘experiments’ included a donkey fed nothing but barbecue sauce and then roasted alive.
By the 13th century, European travellers began to arrive in China. The most famous early explorer was the Venetian Marco Polo, who became a great favourite with the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan.
Kublai attended many court banquets, which must have been deafening affairs — his musicians would play a fanfare every time he took a swig of his drink. Grandson of the fearsome warrior Genghis Khan, he was so fat that he could barely lift himself off the dais where he sat lording it over everyone else.
During the Mongol era, from 1271 to 1368, Chinese food became a fusion of different cultures, with traditional Chinese dishes mixing with the exotic ingredients brought back along the silk road —
the trade route from China to the West. Chinese food did not begin to spread abroad until the 19th century, when men left China to try to earn their fortunes as labourers in the silver mines of Peru, the vineyards of California or the sugar plantations of Cuba. Some gambled everything on striking gold in the American West. They brought their own cooking style with them and, in Chinatowns across the world, the locals got their first opportunity to sample Chinese food.
Many of these restaurants served very basic food, most often a random stew which became known as ‘chop suey’ and was hugely popular, although ‘no Chinese would eat it’, according to a disapproving Chinese journalist who visited America at the turn of the century.
Fortune cookies are also a foreign invention; originating in Japan, they were seized on by entrepreneurial restaurant owners as a gimmick for their non-Chinese customers. Today, there are Chinese restaurants and takeaways in just about every corner of the globe.
In the U.S. there are more Chinese restaurants than branches of McDonald’s, Burger King and Pizza Hut combined.
The speed of change in China in the past few decades has been dizzying. Now there are Western fast-food franchises all over the country — although there is little sign that the sale of wild animals in the notorious ‘wet markets’ has stopped, even though it was made illegal last year.
The Emperor’s Feast is a terrific read and historian Jonathan Clements writes with erudition and humour about this vast, perplexing country.
Its contradictions are neatly summed up in the Chinese name for a Big Mac: if you’re ordering this in Mandarin, you need to ask for ‘The Immense Tyrant Without Compare’.