The Culinary “Language” Barrier
The mental distance between the English language and any member of the Han Chinese language groups is almost inconceivable. This barrier in itself accounts for much of the mutual bafflement and aversion that marked the relations of Chinese and Americans in this country for generations after the first gold seekers from Toisan climbed aboard ships bound for Gold Mountain. We cannot compare the process of bridge building across the linguistic divide to anything in prior Western history. It was many times more difficult to be bilingual in Toisanese (or any other version of Cantonese) and English than, say, German and English, Spanish and English, or Polish and English. For both parties, the difficulty of reading and writing was exceeded only by the difficulty of speaking.
Westerners who realized that written Chinese, with its thousands of ideogrammatic characters, could not be mastered through simple study like any European language seldom tried to rationally understand what was different about it. More often they were content with condescending shrugs at its hopeless mysteries. Educated people and ignoramuses both giggled over the spoken Cantonese sublanguages—especially Toisanese—as monkey jabber.
The Wade-Giles system of romanizing words as pronounced in Mandarin was not regularized until after 1890, and even then had trouble reaching more than a handful of scholars and librarians. Today’s pinyin system for approximating the pronunciation of spoken Mandarin and indicating its four “sung” tones was a long way in the future. The more complex Cantonese, with still more tones and other unique features, was hopeless; even today all systems for converting any of the numerous spoken versions into Western vowels and consonants are breath taking in their confusion and inadequacy. Cantonese dialects and regional subdialects with their many sung tones were confounding enough to Westerners. Alphabetical writing and “toneless” speech were equally mystifying ideas to men from the Pearl River Delta.
I submit that these blocks to purely verbal communication were matched (and exacerbated) by equally serious mutual misapprehensions about the business of cooking and eating.
Anyone trying to understand the history of history of Chinese food in this country should start by recognizing that any cuisine forms a system of skills and practices that can be figuratively described as a “syntax” and “vocabulary,” analogous to spoken or written language. Many students of anthropology and semiotics have discussed cooking systems—not cooking terminology as such but the act of deploying implements and techniques in prelearned patterns in order to accomplish particular ends—as “languages.” I have nothing to add to that highly theory-laden conversation. But it cannot be too strongly stated that the gaps between Cantonese and American culinary “idioms” were just as frustrating as those between actual linguistic idioms—a fact glimpsed in the twentieth century by a few cookbook authors who wrote of cooking “in Chinese.”1
For Chinese and Westerners to make sense out of each other’s gastronomic mindsets is far from easy even now, in an age of painstakingly detailed cookbooks and rapidly exchanged information. Two and a half centuries ago, it must have been like attempted messages between extraterrestrials from different galaxies.
Against all odds, one party had succeeded in the effort by the mid-eighteenth century. At that point, Chinese cooks in the vicinity of Guangzhou had mastered enough English culinary skills to present more than acceptable meals to representatives of the British East India Company who were trading at Guangzhou under the restrictive Canton system.
Neither the English nor any other Westerners tried to reciprocate until long after the colonial era. During the second half of the nineteenth century at least some English and Americans, ignoring the reflexive shudders and jeers of many others, learned to enjoy Chinese food. But they did not go so far as to try re-creating it in their own kitchens through either deliberate analysis of the crucial principles or hands-on practice in pursuit of the right reflexes.
It is surely impossible to trace the stages through which Pearl River Delta cooks felt their way into applied skills in English cookery. But Westerners were generally agreed that the southeastern Chinese flair for mimicry and improvisation at any useful task whatever bordered on wizardry. Visiting Englishmen had not had the concept of xiang banfa explained to them, but they knew it when they saw it in action.
Later, as Western steam-powered machinery reached Far Eastern colonies in the late nineteenth century, entrepreneurially minded Chinese “sojourners” might learn to copy it well enough to dominate some regional industry within a few decades. (This would happen with the rice-milling business in Thailand.2) At a humbler socioeconomic level but in just the same spirit, southern Guangdong locals—always men, since there was almost no communication permitted between foreigners and Chinese women—had picked up British and other European culinary skills after only a few generations of contact with Westerners. This nimble address presaged a mastery suggested in the following three instances:
• In an account of Far Eastern voyages in the years 1747 and 1748, the colonial administrator Charles Frederick Noble noted the highly satisfactory cooking arrangements for his visiting party at the British “factories” in Guangzhou:
Our porter business was all performed by Chinese cowlies, whom we hired for a small matter, and most of whom spoke a little English; which we found very convenient. We had likewise several Chinese cooks to assist our own, who, as they had been long employed by the English ships, and could speak the English language pretty well, dressed our victuals after the English manner, as well and as expeditiously as our own cooks.3
• More than a century later, the London Times correspondent George Wingrove Cooke was able to make a far more glowing report about what Chinese cooks were capable of when not led astray by awful English teaching:
Every Chinaman has a natural aptitude for cookery. I know one little, lean, thread-paper anatomy at Hongkong, whose only teaching has been half a dozen lessons administered to him from a French cookery-book, and who will send you up a consommé aux oeufs pochés, a filet de boeuf aux champignons, a salmi of teal, a salad, waferlike fried potatoes, and a sweet omelette in a style certainly not inferior to Vefour; for the salmi I’d back him against the world, and for the salad against any Englishman who ever inverted that best of Italian proverbs, “Molto d’olio, poco d’aceto.”4
• At the Hotel Gladstone in Portland, Oregon, during the late 1890s, an ambitious and very food-savvy proprietress named Elizabeth Brennan decided to upgrade the kitchen by replacing the French staff with a trio of Chinese cooks. One of them, Jue Let, would eventually become her own family cook after her marriage to John Beard. More than half a century later, her son James (born in 1903) vividly recalled the excellence of Let’s yeast rolls, chicken pie, pot-au-feu, and Welsh rabbit, and the assurance with which he taught the English-born Elizabeth to make English-style pound cake, seed cake, and “ladyfingers as light as ghosts’ footsteps.” Sometimes Let would treat the Beards to his own Chinese cooking, but “Mother never mastered the dishes.”5 Nor did James Beard throughout his career ever venture to present serious recipes for Chinese fare.
This one-way street is worth thinking about. It would be the rule in all Chinese–Western culinary encounters until well into the twentieth century. I doubt that the inequality of the exchange can be entirely chalked up to American (or English) ignorance and xenophobia, glaring though they were until the aftermath of World War II. There was something about Chinese cuisine that even so practiced, clever, and willing a cook as Elizabeth Beard couldn’t or wouldn’t get the hang of, despite all Jue Let’s expertise—while not just a few but many Chinese became supremely skilled at reproducing the nuances of English, American, and French cookery.
To understand the reasons behind this long and oddly asymmetrical impasse of understanding, we should discard the smirky, patronizing attitudes toward WASP predecessors that Caucasian followers of today’s food fashions often strut as badges of their own sophistication. Better to start by putting ourselves in the position of people who were no brighter or stupider than we are but understandably enough had never tasted any kind of Chinese cooking. Even today a few non-Chinese Americans can remember blank bewilderment or instinctive dislike on first encounters with the food of some long-ago “Dragon Pavilion” or “Golden Sampan.” I am one.
I have long forgotten most details of the meal in Philadelphia’s tiny Chinatown that I was taken to as a child, probably during the early 1950s. But the sense of an alien quality, something disturbingly different about the food, is as sharp as ever in my memory. I have never involuntarily flinched in the same way from Indian, Japanese, or any other “foreign” cuisine. It took me a quarter of a century to get over that first instinctive unease, in a sudden “Eureka!” moment at a 1970s New York dim sum parlor.
Today I can make a good retrospective guess at the main reasons for my original distaste. They are instructive because in a negative way they exactly mirror some true and important qualities of Chinese cuisine, or the quasi-Cantonese version of it that would have been on display at my Philadelphia encounter. They also are likely to have been just the things that many Gold Rush Californians promptly and instinctively rejected on first exposure to what they liked to call “Celestial” cooking.
I would have made a mess of putting my initial objections into words. So would (and did) those disapproving Gold Rushers. For rookies like them and me, the whole experience was one huge, contorted mystery that defied disentangling in lucid terms. Popular assumptions about food are always cruder and less thought-out than the lessons laid down by cookbook writers. Their very instinctiveness is just what makes them difficult to articulate to anyone else.
Now, people previously acquainted with one cuisine who suddenly encounter another will of course miss certain accustomed features and wonder at other things that are unfamiliar. But with Chinese cuisine, what is unfamiliar is not only a great mass of details but the underlying “language” mentioned before—a system with a far more complex “grammar” than any Western counterpart. In fact, this culinary idiom is as stunningly remote from other systems of cookery as the Chinese written language is from all other writing systems, and as heterogeneous as the constellation of different Han Chinese spoken languages. (Written Chinese is a sui generis mixture of ideographs and phonetic elements; instead of one spoken Han language, China possesses a plethora of separate Han languages, sublanguages, and dialects probably outnumbering all the languages of Europe.) Uninitiated Western cooks trying to get to first base in Chinese culinary “syntax” and “vocabulary” have a far more bewildering task than Chinese cooks trying to master some English, French, American, or other Western dishes. Uninitiated Western eaters face the same impasses from another angle.
The main culinary touchstones that Gold Rush eaters would have missed in southern Cantonese-style cooking in California, and that I would miss in a later, watered-down version of the same cuisine in Philadelphia, were
• Identifiable principal ingredients retaining original sizes and shapes;
• Recognizable textures or consistencies in the components of dishes;
• Recognizable original flavors or seasonings; and
• Cooking techniques designed with any of the above criteria in mind.
To my best ex post facto conjecture, the features marking the foreign “language” of the cooking were
• An inexplicable, off-putting smell, most likely produced by some unfamiliar and unwelcome fat;
• Nameless bits of this or that, cut up smaller or thinner than food “should” have been;
• Brazen juxtapositions of ingredients—animal and vegetable—in what appeared to be ill-assorted jumbles; and
• A peculiarly dense, complicated intertwining of several unfamiliar flavors at once, especially ones produced by strange kinds of fermentation.
Of course, millions of non-Chinese diners have come, with repeated exposure, to love all the qualities that some of us once hated. We have learned to respond to bits of a new “language,” with or without actively grasping what makes it tick, and we tend to smile at the ignorance of people who haven’t acquired our sophistication. But it makes sense to use such reactions as windows into major differences between two kinds of kitchen idiom instead of dismissing them as senseless.
Discrepant Approaches and Attitudes
On the Western side, the main cooking methods recognized by ordinary English and American home cooks and eaters at around 1850 were boiling, baking, roasting, frying, and broiling. To these, as set forth in 1817 by the English authority Dr. William Kitchiner in an influential manual titled The Cook’s Oracle, some people would have added stewing as a variant of boiling. Baking was a relative newcomer to family cooking, dependent on the presence of home ovens, and at this time certainly was not synonymous with roasting. The latter was mostly done on spits in front of an open fire, whose management was well understood by some cooks and botched by others. Frying, in popular understanding as well as in Kitchiner’s usage, meant “boiling in fat.”6
Food meant to undergo any of these processes was usually left whole or (depending on size) divided into rather large pieces. Poultry might be cooked whole or cut into joints. Meats were usually prepared as joints or sliced into steaks or cutlets; only for especially elegant presentations were vegetables cut into anything finer than a few chunks. (Indeed, kitchen knives with straight edges suitable for efficient chopping and dicing were rare in American home kitchens until late in the nineteenth century.) All but very large fish were usually cooked whole.
Cooks with sufficient means and interest might have a large selection of aromatics and other seasonings at their disposal. But there was no universal idea that any were really mandatory except salt, pepper, and a few “sweet” spices for cakes and pastries. If my own family’s habits as late as the mid-twentieth century are any guide, many middle-class cooks ignored nearly all herbs as needless folderol.
In most kitchens, the core elements of the diet were understood to be two. Bread or sometimes potatoes most essentially represented the starch-based side of things, which was well enough liked but didn’t command the prestige of the protein-based side—meaning poultry or meat, especially beef, preferably cooked by any method but boiling. (The much cheaper pork had less cachet than most other meats.) People also ate either a handful (for the poor) or a sizable range (for the better-off) of fruits and vegetables. But there was little mistaking the fact that roast or broiled meat was king on the scale of popular American dietary priorities. (Anti-Chinese rabble-rousers would later intimate that it was the birthright of American manhood.)
The Chinese approach was incompatible with the practices or attitudes described above. It started with the unspoken, instinctive premise that in everyday meals prepared by the major everyday methods, any one ingredient should be cooked for the shortest possible time needed for it to reach a certain optimum flavor and texture over briefly applied high heat. Given that nearly all cooking involves more than one ingredient, working by this principle requires superefficient prior organization incomprehensible to untutored outsiders.
Chinese cognoscenti and theorists recognized many subtly differentiated cooking methods (not all conforming to the shortest-possible-time rule) under a host of individual names. But for the plain, everyday cooking of the southern Guangdong natives who came to California, the three crucial ones were
• Stir-frying (Mandarin, chao; Cantonese, chau, often anglicized by Americans as “chow”): Stirring and tossing particular combinations of ingredients in an appropriately sized, bowl-shaped shallow pan (Mandarin, huo; Cantonese, wok) with a little very hot fat over very high heat, at blitzkrieg speed. It is the single most important Chinese cooking method, considered by many to have reached its highest form in southern Guangdong.
• Steaming (Mandarin, zheng; Cantonese, jing): Here the food to be prepared is set on perforated trays or slatted bamboo platforms (sometimes bowls or plates perched on racks) over boiling water in a covered vessel, to cook in the rising steam. Steaming occasionally involves fairly time-consuming items (e.g., a whole chicken or duck) but is most often applied to quicker-cooking foods like dumplings and whole fish. This method is admired for preserving an intrinsic purity and immediacy (Mandarin, xian; Cantonese, sin) of fresh natural flavors; it is particularly important in southern Guangdong.
• A form of controlled boiling or combination of boiling and steaming used, with a final resting-and-absorption period, for rice.
Of these, stir-frying and Chinese-style steaming were perfectly unknown in Western kitchens, and the care taken with rice-cooking baffled any non-Chinese who hadn’t grown up in rice country. The most “untranslatable” aspects of all three methods were the minutiae of advance organization and the signs marking the critical moment of doneness—and, beyond these, the very idea of what a meal is.
A Civilized Meal
As George Wingrove Cooke astutely remarked, a Chinaman “sees an especial connection between cookery and civilization.”7 For most Chinese but especially for people from south Guangdong, the linking principle was rice.
A resourceful Pearl River deltan preparing a humble, hasty meal in Gold Rush–era California would have started by collecting exactly the necessary amount of fuel and painstakingly rinsing the necessary amount of rice in clean water before putting it on to cook over lively heat. The usual stove was a small brazier fired with wood or charcoal; a bucket would do for those who didn’t have a proper Chinese ceramic brazier. Meanwhile, he (at the time, the number of Chinese females in California was infinitesimal) would also prepare at least one other necessity with unbelievable speed. Before foreign observers could grasp what was going on, he would have grabbed a large, outlandishly proportioned blade and almost instantaneously reduced a handful of other preassembled ingredients to various kinds of small chunks, slices, dices, or shreds, each cut to a certain size or thickness depending on its particular cooking properties.
While the cooked rice rested, all the cut-up components would go—in a prescribed order—into hot oil or lard in a pan. This would most likely have been a cast iron wok made in Foshan, where artisans had perfected the casting of remarkably light iron vessels and where many residents of the poorer Guangdong counties seasonally sought factory work.8 Almost as soon as the last ingredients were added, the result would be ready to dish up with the rice, needing only the last-minute addition of a few flavorings such as soy sauce. Aside from the wok, the only equipment used in the whole stir-frying performance would have been the strange-looking knife, a cutting surface, and a stirring tool, perhaps nothing but a pair of chopsticks.
As any self-respecting person knew, this was a proper meal because it united cooked rice with some other component designed to share its journey from bowl to belly or, in a common phrase, to “make the rice go down” (Cantonese, hah faan; Mandarin, xia fan). The rice and the auxiliary element went together like dog and tail, with the understanding that the second could never wag the first. A pot of rice shared among eaters qualified as a meal in its own right even if attended by nothing more than a smidgen of stir-fried vegetable. The assumption was carried to America by all Cantonese immigrants and was drummed into their children and grandchildren until it became instinct. Mary Tsui Ping Yee, who grew up during the 1930s and 1940s as the daughter of Guangdong-born laundry owners in the town of Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, recalled that her mother was “disconsolate” when “supplies of rice ran out for several weeks” during World War II: “As she set down platters of potatoes, bread, or noodles, she sighed, ‘Moh fan haek (No rice to eat).’ What she meant was, ‘This is really not a meal; without rice, it’s only a snack!’”9
The improvised meal described above was a classic Cantonese union of faan and sung, the helper that made it go down. (Northern Chinese cooks observed the same principle, but for them the fan or grain-based element had originally been millet, and later wheat-based noodles and breads; they used the broader word “cai” for meat or vegetable dishes that appeared at a meal along with fan.) The treatment of ingredients for the stir-fried sung had an inevitable logic that Western cooks had a hard time grasping. The great principle was to cut things up in such a way, and add them in such an order, that tougher and tenderer foods should all reach a desired consistency at the same instant in a feat of lightning-fast choreography. Major vegetables had to be added in proper sequence, in pieces designed for just so many minutes’ cooking and no more. Similarly, any meat or poultry in the dish had to hit the hot fat in slices or other narrow shapes ready to cook through in a very few minutes. The usual aromatics—scallions or other alliums and fresh ginger—might be dissected into tiny bits or hairlike threads that would receive less than a minute’s exposure to the heat. The speed with which all these things were accomplished was unimaginable by any standard of Western kitchen operations.
Trying to put such food in one’s mouth was equally disconcerting to many Gold Rushers, as it had been to most if not all English people and Americans doing business in China. It is hard to convey to twenty-first-century Western eaters how strange their forebears found the sight of food cut up in small bits before cooking, rather than reaching the table as recognizable steaks, chops, roasts, fowls, and familiar vegetables. Even English or American stews usually involved meat cut into chops or fairly hearty slices. Lacking any adequate descriptive terms for typical Chinese dishes, observers clumsily wrote of “fricassees,” “ragouts,” “curries,” or “hashes”—all words meant to suggest nameless smidgens of mystery meats and vegetables in some kind of strong-flavored sauce. (In genteel culinary parlance, “hash” up to this time had been a dish of cooked meats cut into slices and delicately rewarmed in a savory sauce. In California mining circles, the word was starting to mean any last-ditch anthology of leftovers, the better kind usually being yesterday’s meat and potatoes hacked up together and fried.10)
That anybody found southern Cantonese flavors strong will also puzzle many today. Recalling my own first reaction to Chinese food, I surmise that soy sauce and a cluster of other fermented products were the reason. True, many English and American cooks of the era were brewing condiments (vaguely modeled on ideas that Western voyagers had picked up in the Far East) that they called “soy.” But these had nothing to do with Chinese sauces fermented with the mold species Aspergillus oryzae and A. soyae, which partly digest the carbohydrates of soybeans before a secondary fermentation in a strong brine with another set of microorganisms.11 At the time, Chinese soy sauce was commonly produced in small batches by local makers or even home preservers. Like other brews rooted in peasant economies, it did not get reduced to any sort of commercial standardization until close to the turn of the twentieth century. The fact that four or more generations of middlebrow Caucasian Americans have now grown up taking factory-made Chinese or Japanese soy sauce for granted does not tell us how people who had never tasted soy sauces in Chinese dishes would have reacted to their unfamiliar fermented notes at around 1850.
At that point soy sauces could be strongly individual in character, and knowledgeable Chinese cooks in wealthy urban households or prominent restaurant kitchens probably had at least as much access to a range of different types as their counterparts today. Modern Guangdong cooks often combine several different kinds of soy sauce (lighter or darker; thinner or more viscous; possibly enriched with mushrooms or sweetenings) to finish their cooking sauces, along with various other fermented pastes of beans or wheat. They may also use small amounts of preserved vegetables (of which there is a large and decidedly pungent repertoire well described in Shiu-ying Hu’s Food Plants of China12) or fermented bean curd (which is made in several mild- or vile-smelling versions). They may add some unfermented oyster sauce—more delicate but puzzling to unhabituated Western palates. It is a foregone conclusion that non-Chinese Gold Rushers had never encountered any of these flavorings. Even a few of the possible additions to cooking sauces, together with the suspicious absence of identifiable objects in most dishes, must have dismayed some Californian diners and helped reinforce a far from romantic sense of mystery.
Western accounts of Chinese eating places frequently mention yet one more drawback: a nasty smell that most people attributed to some kind of oil or perhaps lard. Sinophobic observers had a field day with this unpleasantness. Even thoughtful, sympathetic American and English accounts mention an off-putting odor too often for historians to dismiss the whole thing as ignorant Western prejudice. Certainly soy sauce and other fermentations must have made background contributions to a general Chinese restaurant pong. But I see no reason to doubt the noses of commentators who thought some cooking fat was to blame.
Cooke, who greatly admired Chinese cuisine, found the street-food scene decidedly smelly. What he describes are not faan/sung or fan/cai meals but quick bites served up amid “a frying of fish and flesh and fowl, and a bubbling of oil in many pans,” with an accompanying odor that was “decidedly the weak point of Chinese common cookery. Whether that oil be castor oil, as many say . . . or tea oil, or oil expressed from the cotton seed, or which other of the twenty different vegetable oils in use in China, is of little importance. It is so foul and rancid that the stench it produces is intolerable, and the cookshops add most potently to the fearful scents of a Chinese town or village.”13
I am not sure that this puzzle will ever be satisfactorily solved. We should first realize that mid-nineteenth-century American and European cooks were familiar with only a small number of cooking fats, mostly animal fats such as butter, beef suet, or lard. (The last was equally popular in China.) The idea of using oil as a cooking medium rather than a salad dressing ingredient was far from universal. The only kind fully accepted in salads was the posh and expensive olive oil. The few other available vegetable oils were widely distrusted as cheap olive oil substitutes. Rapeseed oil had a reputation for harshness. Thomas Jefferson had hoped to introduce sesame oil as an alternative to olive oil, but with scant success. Chinese cooks were fond of it in a form pressed from the toasted seeds, which was prized as a flavoring or condiment to be added to dishes at the last minute but became harsh-smelling over high heat.
In fact, by Gold Rush times the Chinese had gone much further than Westerners in exploring cooking oils extracted from other plant seeds. Recently they had started making oil from peanuts, introduced from the New World during the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Other sources that had been used for generations or centuries were “tea seeds” (from some Camellia species related to the tea bush), hempseed, the seeds of various plants in the Brassica (cabbage) tribe, castor beans, and, to a small extent, soybeans.14
But the technology of oil manufacture was still too crude to turn any of these into facsimiles of the clean-cooking, flavorless, deodorized vegetable oils that would later be introduced to modern kitchens through factory-scale chemical solvent extraction and degumming. All would thus have been somewhat muddier and stickier than the products we are used to, and marked by characteristic odors and flavors. Peanut oil would have tasted and smelled of peanuts (as good Chinese brands still do). Soybean oil—which in any case would remain difficult and expensive to extract until much later—would have had an emphatic beaniness. Tea oil was reputedly pleasant. Hempseed oil was cheap but considered smelly; castor oil was even worse. Any bad original aromas would have been intensified in heating and cruelly magnified if the oil were reused ad infinitum without filtering—also a good recipe for rancidity. The same is true of lard, though it probably was used more carefully because it was expensive.
Whatever the reason for reports of malodorous cooking fats, we can take it for granted that Chinese cookery, like any other, was practiced by both good and bad cooks to splendid or awful effect. We can also assume that non-Chinese eaters greeted it with different degrees of tolerance or intolerance, across an enormous communications gap.
Only the most seasoned and unflappable Western China hands could have recognized that they were encountering something far more subtle, complex, wide-ranging, and heterogeneous than French (or any other European) cuisine. Transforming the raw into the cooked was not in itself an intellectual exercise. But an enormous terminology of connoisseurship—as well as real hands-on skills—grew up around it over the course of many centuries. The concepts involved resist English translation even today. For at least a glimpse of some, consult the appendices and glossary of the English writer Fuchsia Dunlop’s pioneering 2001 work Sichuan Cookery.15
At the time of the California Gold Rush, Chinese cooks in the imperial kitchens or the employ of nobles or wealthy merchants received long, diligent, professional training. Their craft was a vast body of lore and skills; connoisseurs reporting on it singled out dozens (at least) of nuances meaningless to Westerners. People might, for instance, praise the texture of properly cooked ingredients in terms indicating very specific, tactile kinds of softness, tenderness, slipperiness, gelatinousness, crispness, flakiness, firmness, suppleness, sponginess, resilience, rubbery crunch, and so forth. There were names for both the five broad flavor categories—sweet, sour, salt, bitter, and la (Mandarin) or laat (Cantonese), both meaning pungent or hot—and their effects in different combinations.
There was a body of names for the very shapes into which ingredients should be cut in preparation for cooking, or the different motions of the dou (cleaver-shaped knife; Mandarin, dao) in dealing with them. The everyday cooking methods of stir-frying and steaming might be practiced with particular added refinements like using only light-colored ingredients for a qing (clear, lucid, transparent) effect. Literally dozens of other possible methods existed, including many special kinds of frying, stir-frying, pan-searing, braising, poaching, and stewing as well as ways of combining these. Some methods were chiefly left to cookshops. In Guangdong, the most famous instance has long been a specialized form of siu or (Mandarin) shao—an untranslatable term often mangled in English as “barbecuing.” This method, cha siu (or cha shao), is one of the few procedures involving meats left whole or in sizable pieces and requires a large, vertically oriented roasting oven that allows freer circulation of heat than any Western oven. The food—large slabs of pork or whole chickens and ducks—is painted with honey or another sweet glaze and suspended on hooks over a very hot charcoal fire until it acquires a glossy or crunchy finish. For non-Chinese fans of Chinese food, the example par excellence of oven roasting is Peking duck.
It is instructive to compare late Qing Chinese cuisine with French cuisine of roughly the same era. Each embraced a spectrum of approaches from the most “mandarinized” rarefaction (for a wealthy clientele) to subsistence-level pot-boiling, with a large middle ground of wonderfully skilled, good cooking that managed to be as practical as it was artful. Each was, as the historians Mary Hyman and Philip Hyman have written of French food, a “multifaceted discipline”;16 each was the highly structured, sometimes pretentious product of a civilization given to systematizing and codifying.
But late Qing culinary culture had not only more ancient intellectual roots but a much older restaurant tradition than its late-nineteenth-century French counterpart. Its actual cooking processes were more intricately detailed. It was more weighted with symbology, more bound up with cosmological and medical beliefs. And if anything beyond these factors set apart the Chinese scene from any other, it was people’s sheer adaptability and quick-study savoir faire as cooks, with or without formal training.
George Wingrove Cooke’s testimony about his Hong Kong cook’s prowess in French dishes deserves to be set beside this flat assertion (in 1852) by a cosmopolitan and witty Frenchman from the southwestern department of Tarn-et-Garonne, the Catholic missionary Évariste Régis Huc: “All the inhabitants of the Celestial Empire, without exception, are gifted with a remarkable aptitude for cookery. If you want a cook, it is the easiest thing in the world to supply the want; you have but to take the first Chinese you can catch, and after a few days’ practice he will acquit himself of his duties to admiration.”17
The Welsh Protestant missionary Griffith John recalled Huc’s words a quarter of a century later when wondering whether to appoint one of his converts—Liu Kin-Shan, “a sawyer by trade”—to the post of cook for his small congregation in Hankou: “In England, such a metamorphosis would have been dismissed as ridiculous.” But Liu happily accepted the post as a means “of promoting the physical and spiritual well-being of his fellow-men. In this capacity he has given us the utmost satisfaction.”18 No talent of the Chinese more amazed foreigners than this sheer xiang banfa ability to cope, in kitchens or any other work situation.
Chinese cuisine (unlike French) was never exported to this country in its most mannered refinements or surpassing extravagances. But it certainly began to be exported in very fine versions during the Gold Rush. Disastrous alignments of the political stars would soon throw the Chinese immigrant community into fear and confusion. Otherwise, I believe that late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America beyond California would have become familiar with excellent representations of Chinese food introduced by both trained pros and nimble-witted improvisers.
In fact, under better circumstances Americans might have learned that the area from which most immigrants came before the 1882 Exclusion Act happened to be China’s most celebrated hub of the culinary arts. People everywhere in the kingdom loyally praised their own regional foodways but agreed with surprising consistency that Cantonese cuisine was the most delightful of all. A popular proverb gave the formula for the ideal existence as “being born in Suzhou, dressing in Hangzhou, eating in Guangzhou, and dying in Liuzhou”—thereby profiting from the Middle Kingdom’s loveliest surroundings, most exquisite silks, finest food, and best coffin wood.
Where Cantonese cuisine was considered to excel was in the art that conceals art: an unforced freshness, harmony, and balance; a respect for natural flavors; a magical ability to deliver any dish to the table with every ingredient gracefully and absolutely à point. But at the same time, diners in Guangzhou and the entire province of Guangdong were also known for what northern Chinese considered grotesque appetites. The emperor’s subjects in the far south already had a reputation for disloyalty and lawless pursuits. People in Beijing related with horror, and perfect accuracy, that the perfidious Cantonese actually ate rats, cats, monkeys, snakes (including poisonous ones), and a lively assortment of insects. (Dog was too commonly eaten in most of China to arouse the same kind of disgust.) These were not core elements of everyday menus, but the locals were in no way ashamed of them or their part in the scheme of dietary values. The sharp duality in Chinese outsiders’ views of Cantonese cookery—the most elegant in all China but at the same time given to nasty practices—is not unlike some former English attitudes toward French food.
Given the monumental barriers to understanding between Eastern and Western culinary cultures, other Gold Rushers could not have grasped that the new arrivals from the Pearl River Delta possessed the most highly regarded cooking tradition in all China. But for a brief interval, at least some of the true Cantonese culinary gifts would be successfully transplanted to San Francisco and other places of Chinese settlement.