This issue brings together close readings of diverse culinary texts from around the world and spanning 800 years. We are pleased to begin with the winner of the 2023 Global Food History Prize for an Emerging Food Historian. Andrea Gutiérrez’s essay, “Meat on and off the Royal Menu: The Medieval Delight of the Mind and the Erasure of Meat from Indian Recipe Collections,” examines a twelfth-century Sanskrit royal encyclopedia. By listing the diverse animals he consumed – barbecued bandicoot was a favorite – the king demonstrated his power over all that moved within his realm. The king’s appetite was more than a strict assertion of dominion but a statement of taste, for he took great pleasure in describing the spice mixtures appropriate for each dish. His carnivorous delight proved increasingly awkward for priestly castes who used vegetarian purity as a claim for political authority. Gutiérrez traces the ways that editors, transcribers, and translators purged meat dishes from the text over the centuries. “Veggie washing,” as she describes it, bowdlerized culinary history in the pursuit of Hindu nationalist ideology. A timely reminder, given India’s contemporary gastropolitics, the essay exemplifies the value of historical research on food.
Another rich historical manuscript, in Arabic from the fourteenth century, provides the basis for Veronica Menaldi’s essay, “Magic of Olive Oil: Sex and Fluid Identities in the Premodern Mediterranean.” Ibn al-Durayhim al-Mawsilī’s Book of Animal Uses (Kitāb Manāfiʻ al-Ḥayawān) describes the ways that olive oil, when combined with the products from particular animals, could enhance or diminish sexual desire. Menaldi shows that olive oil was not the source of magical properties but rather a binding medium for ingredients such as duck eggs or wolf testicles. Like Gutiérrez, she follows the history of the manuscript, which was likely composed in Damascus, transported to Morocco, and confiscated from pirates by Spanish authorities in the seventeenth century. The diverse sources of the manuscript, together with its subsequent travels, provide valuable insights into the fluidity and enchantment of Mediterranean cultural identities.
Modern menus, like medieval manuscripts, offer valuable sources on culinary practices and cultural identities, as a second pair of essays demonstrates. Diana Garvin’s “The Pioneer’s Feast: Colonial Menus in Italian East Africa” examines the perspectives of both Italian occupiers trying to impose a form of Italian gastrofascism on the colony as well as banquets offered by the Ethiopian Emperor Menelik and Empress Taytu as a form of resistance. Although the Italian menus emphasized European ingredients and preparations such as prosciutto and pasta, the presence of indigenous bananas and coffee, and possibly even dishes such as the chicken stew doro wat, point to culinary mixtures that defied colonial segregation. Garvin’s essay inspired the cover illustration by Global Food History’s artist Roxane van Beek, who expressed the hybridity of colonial cuisine by combining the visual principles of Ethiopian painting with the paper and paint texture of the watercolor images in the article. She depicts the imperial couple in their splendor from the perspective of banquet visitors, whether Ethiopian or Italian, who could perhaps perceive the lively awareness and tactical acuity of Empress Taytu in selecting dishes to awe both subjects and outsiders.
Paul Freedman and Nancy Johnson, in their essay “Menus from the Lotos Club in New York City,” explore the history of fine dining in the United States from 1870 to the present. Drawing from the archive of an elite private club, they examine changing culinary standards from the nineteenth-century devotion to French haute cuisine to the contemporary preference for local and seasonal dishes. The banquets, called “State Dinners,” honored politicians and artists, and the tendency to name dishes after the honorees, such as the “Bisque à la Sherlock Holmes” served to Arthur Conan Doyle in 1893, made it difficult at times to determine the nature of the dishes. The dinners were lavish at first, ranging from five to ten courses, with abundant meats, seafood, and desserts. In the 1920s, with Prohibition and the decline of French restaurants in New York City, club menus became simpler, but nevertheless preserved dishes such as terrapin, which had been displaced by the revival of Anglo and American steaks and chops. Not until the post-World War II era did club chefs, like their counterparts in Paris, begin to move away from the traditional haute cuisine, a trend that has continued to the present. Freedman and Johnson’s longue durée survey of the Lotos Club provides valuable insights on elite dining culture in the United States.
This issue concludes with a pair of essays discussing Chinese food cultures. Yanqiu Zheng’s “Chinese Tofu in Cold War Taiwan: Gendered Cosmopolitanism and Contested Chineseness” examines a 1971 volume compiled by renowned Taiwanese author Lin Haiyin and her two daughters. By addressing a seemingly mundane subject, Lin and her family constructed a cosmopolitan understanding of Chinese identity that sought to assure Taiwan a place during the Cold War. The text comprised recipes, memoirs, and even some essays with political content that evaded censorship through culinary nationalism. Contributors ranged from intellectuals and culinary personalities, including the beloved author Fu Pei-mei, to younger Taiwanese with no connections to the mainland, at times from Hakka and Hokkien ethnic backgrounds. Geographically, it reached beyond Chinese territory to include Japan, South Korea, and the United States. Although the majority of authors were male, a number of women contributed to the volume. Like the pan-Mediterranean identities discussed by Menaldi, Chinese Tofu created a capacious sense of Chinese identity that encompassed ethnic diversity, diasporic relations, and Cold War allies.
Finally, Veronica Mak Sau-Wa’s “‘The Stinkier the Better!’ – A Case Study on the Reinvention of River Snail Noodles and the Transformation of Taste in China” offers an ethnographic reading of a dish as a rich cultural text. A broth made of river snails and fermented bamboo, which gave it the strong smell, originated among the Zhuang people, a Tai-language speaking group indigenous to the autonomous region of Guangxi, whose preference for spicy sour dishes also extended to Tai speakers in Thailand and Vietnam. Zhuang street vendors in the city of Liuzhou invented the tradition of adding rice noodles in the post-Mao era. By the early 2000s, the local government promoted the dish as a form of culinary tourism, and a decade later packaged versions were sold nationally. Social media also contributed to culinary fashion in contemporary China. It was no longer sufficient simply to taste an exotic dish, many felt the need to post videos on popular platforms such as Weibo and Youtube. Wearing a shower cap to avoid contamination by the noodles’ smell enhanced the spectacle. This case demonstrates how government officials, food processors, street vendors, and culinary influencers constructed an infrastructure of heritage tourism around a novelty dish.