ESL eng essay

Hong Kong University Press

Chapter Title: Eating out East: Representing Chinese Food in Victorian Travel Literature and Journalism Chapter Author(s): Ross G. Forman

Book Title: A Century of Travels in China Book Subtitle: Critical Essays on Travel Writing from the 1840s to the 1940s Book Editor(s): Douglas Kerr, Julia Kuehn Published by: Hong Kong University Press. (2007) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2jc0sb.11

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5 Eating out East:

Representing Chinese Food in

Victorian Travel Literature and Journalism

Ross G. Forman

Writing in her 1899 travelogue The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, inveterate globetrotter Isabella L. Bird proclaimed to her readers, “Our ideas as to Chinese food are, on the whole, considerably astray.”1 Echoing the sentiments of the periodical Temple Bar — which, in 1891, had declared, “It seems, however, impossible to disabuse people of the idea that dogs, rats, and snails frequently appear on the bill of fare” in Chinese establishments — Bird addressed head-on prevalent misconceptions about the exotic nature of the Chinese diet.2 These misconceptions were often advanced through travel writers’ and journalists’ experience primarily with aristocratic banquet foods and their lack of familiarity with everyday and regional fare. By contrast, Bird provided her readers with a much more visceral account of the manners and customs of the “Celestials” by describing her adventures in eating in such diverse settings as mandarin’s palaces, rural inns, wayside restaurants, and markets. “It is true,” she notes, “that the rich spend much in pampering their appetites, that the foolish extravagance of providing meats, fruits and vegetables, out of season at ‘dinner parties’ prevails among them as among us, and that such delicacies as canine cutlets and hams, cat fricassees, bird’s-nest soup — a luxury so costly that it makes its appearance on foreign tables — stewed holothuria, and fricassee of snails, worms, or snakes are to be seen at ceremonious feasts” (300). But, she continues, not only is the Chinese food she saw and sampled during her visit largely wholesome and healthy in nature, it is also incredibly diverse, even amongst the poorer households: “The variety of food eaten by all classes in China is amazing. It would require four or five pages to put down what I have myself seen in the eating-houses and food shops on this journey” (298). With its fin-de-siècle publication date, Bird’s book appeared towards the end of a long period of fascination on the part of the British public with Chinese food. For decades, the exotic and sensuous fare of the Flowery Land had been elaborated for

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64 Ross G. Forman

readers back home and from a distance by a multitude of writers and travelers who had tested the cuisine on their behalf — usually in China, but sometimes in North America, among the expatriate Chinese communities of New York and the West Coast. These Britons recorded their experiences primarily in the periodical press, but also in stand- alone travelogues, where a scene of ritual disgust à table was almost de rigueur — as it also was for the expatriate British community resident in China, whose antipathy towards local food Jay Denby immortalized in his hilarious Letters of a Shanghai Griffin to His Father and Other Exaggerations (1910).3

Like her Victorian predecessors, Bird’s descriptions of Celestial foodways use them as an exemplar of a more general fascination with the radically different world of China that the travelogue, as narrative form, necessarily seeks to elaborate for its audience at home. She relies on her audience’s unfamiliarity with the culinary ground she covers to make her descriptions exciting, even titillating. Yet her more accurate and more laudatory discussion of these foodways and her inclusion of edibles for eaters across the class spectrum — ranging from the preserved eggs she observes being made in a village in Sichuan to the bean curd of the more prosperous regions she visits, to the “itinerant piemen” of the towns who hawk “vegetable patties” at markets and “places where men congregate” (298) — bucks the trend for much of the Victorian era of overemphasizing Chinese cuisine as strange and antithetical to the British diet. Instead of stressing the difference between the British and Chinese diet and eating habits, as was commonly the case (especially in the work of male travel writers and journalists), Bird focuses on variety, ingenuity, healthfulness, and even the triumph over adversity as the hallmarks of Chinese cuisine. (“Cleanly cooking and wholesome and excellent meals,” she avers, “are often produced in dark and unsavoury surroundings, and those foreigners who travel much in the interior learn to find Chinese food palatable” [300].)4 Whether wittingly or unwittingly, this vision of Chinese food turns its producers into reflections of model Britons. The Chinese, through their cooking, excel at the Darwinian traits of adaptation to local conditions, and they embrace the principle of diversity as the means of safeguarding the survival of the social whole. Moreover, and contrary to readerly expectations, Bird’s travels demonstrate that proper standards of hygiene prevail against the odds, and nutritional benefit accrues even if the foodstuffs themselves lie beyond the pale of the British palate and thus would normally be assumed to be unhealthy — which in part explains the emphasis in many travel narratives on the consumption of rats, dogs, snakes, insects, and other “low” animals that “civilized” eaters would have excluded from their purview. By embodying a dialectic of fascination with the exotic and a simultaneous rejection of it, Bird’s book encapsulates some of the contradictions that govern the narration of Chinese eating habits and dishes during this period. Regularly appearing in the columns of the nation’s press from the 1840s onward — a starting point linked to the conclusion of the First Opium War and to British expansion in India and in Asia more generally following the 1857 Mutiny — descriptions of Chinese dinners and diners became a staple of travel narratives, miscellanies, magazines, and fiction produced by British

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Eating out East 65

writers in China, as well as those who wrote about the Celestial Empire from bases in Albion. Such descriptions formed a crucial part of the way in which the British public conceptualized China as foreign and inaccessible, while also offering cultural explanations of manners and customs aimed at making the inscrutable scrutable through common bonds of etiquette, eating, and after-dinner entertainment. At the same time, discussions of Chinese food paralleled the interest in the cultivation and preparation of that article of Chineseness which Britons ingested on a regular basis — tea. Over the course of the nineteenth century, tea was gradually transmuted from the strange into the familiar, from the foreign into the domestic — as new methods of preparation saw black tea eclipse the consumption of green tea and as new colonial plantations in South Asia shifted production away from China and into the imperial fold (thus removing the economic danger of tea consumption implicit in Britain’s dependence on China for this commodity at the same time as opium exports redressed the overall trade “imbalance” between the two countries). Yet Chinese food continued to enthral and repulse with its alterity, exotic obsessions, and unfamiliar modes of preparation and consumption. Even the implements used to convey this “chow” from table to tongue were a source of wonder to many observers who visited China: chopsticks constituted objects that unified the sublime and the ridiculous and inhabited the basic contradiction of an ancient culture that staunchly resisted incorporation into Western systems of behaviour and Western patterns of material culture. Thus Chinese food — raising, as did interpretations of all other foreign cuisines, questions about the boundary of the national, the natural, and the adaptable — became emblematic of Britain’s relationship to China: it was alternately used to contain Cathay through a process of exoticization and to bolster Her Majesty’s imperial designs by making that exoticization central to Britain’s own efforts to incorporate Cathay within its vision of global supremacy. The travel writer’s dual subjectivity as ingestor and raconteur both confirmed cultural boundaries and traduced them, turning culinary descriptions into a process of reaffirming cultural integrity while simultaneously promoting patterns of identification across cultural lines. The heavy reliance on analogies in these descriptions — comparing thousand-year-old eggs to ripe cheese, for instance, or regularly relating the elaborate table etiquette and the variety of courses served to French traditions — highlights the search for recognizable terms of reference in Chinese menus that would make both the food and the customs surrounding it comprehensible to readers who had never experienced it. At the same time, these writers put into operation a counter-process for familiarizing Chinese cuisine by making European food itself strange; for, when viewed in a critical light, Western delicacies were themselves as exotic and potentially unpalatable as snakes, birds’ nests, and the like. A January 1887 article on bird’s nests in The Cornhill Magazine, for example, quotes Charles Darwin’s derisory comment that “[t]he Chinese make soup of dried saliva” but contextualizes it as follows: “This sounds horrid enough, to be sure; but when we ourselves give up colouring jellies with defunct cochineal insects, it will be time for us to cast the first stone at the Oriental cuisine.”5

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66 Ross G. Forman

A Diet of Delicacies

Historically, fascination with the specific topic of Chinese food, at least in the popular press, quickly followed the signing of the Treaty of Nanking (Nanjing), which began the gradual process of opening up China “oyster-like” to Western commerce and influence. Interest clearly followed from the overall attention paid to things Chinese by the British media during and after the First Opium War in the early 1840s, but also from reports sent back by the increasing numbers of traders and civil servants sent to the region, as well as from the establishment of Britain’s official toehold in China, the colony of Hong Kong. The 1840s and early 1850s saw a series of articles about the collection of bird’s nests and their use in soup in periodicals such as Hogg’s Instructor and The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.6 These reports, which were based either on journalists’ and naturalists’ own experiences in China or culled from contemporary travel literature, concerned themselves not with culinary details, but with economic issues that reflected Britain’s concerns about its trade imbalance with China. They focused explicitly on the high cost of the nests and their “monopoly price” and saw them as a spectacular example of China’s resistance to “traffic with foreigners” and its disregard for market rules: “There is perhaps no production upon which human industry is exerted, of which the cost of production bears so small a proportion to the market price,” concluded the Penny Magazine in 1841 in reiterating a quotation from John Crawfurd’s 1820 travelogue History of the Indian Archipelago.7 That the bird’s nests were a foodstuff was almost incidental; interest here was more purely scientific and especially economic. The concerns about the way in which the scarcity of the bird’s nest as commodity dictated its value both fed theorizations of the Chinese as the one race of shopkeepers and traders in Asia that most closely resembled Britain’s own imagined self and pinpointed the non-European monopoly as the appropriate site for Britain’s entry into new markets and new structures of informal imperialism. The highly organized regional trading networks needed to acquire and transport bird’s nests and sea cucumbers from their collection points outside China, in areas that culturally and often politically and economically were — or had been — tributary states, to their consumption points within the Celestial Empire, suggested a rival form of maritime imperialism. It was also a rival form that had successfully resisted incorporation into European trading pathways.8

More directly culinary — although no less directly related to the growth of Britain’s impetus to imperially incorporate parts of China — was Times correspondent George Wingrove Cooke’s description of “A Chinese Dinner” during his sojourn there from 1857 to 1858. Sent to China to cover the Second Opium War, Cooke recorded the experiences of his travels in a series of letters published in the Times. The letters were reprinted as a book in 1861 under the title China and Lower Bengal. Being “The Times” Correspondence from China in the Years 1857–58. Although ostensibly an account of the war, Cooke’s book was structured like a traditional travelogue; it begins with a chapter on “The Journey Out” and culminates (if not concludes) with a chapter entitled “Adieu to China.”9 His letter on Chinese food constitutes the chapter “A Chinese Dinner” in this book.

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Eating out East 67

Cooke’s discussion of the meal he enjoyed in Ningpo (Ningbo) is important for four reasons: First, it sets a model of the “Chinese dinner” as banquet meal that later in the century would become the standard formula for depicting Chinese eating habits. Second, it demonstrates that as early as 1857, it was difficult for Europeans to sample “authentic” Chinese cuisine in Chinese homes. Cooke explains that knowing the tastes of their visitors, Chinese hosts inevitably hire their guests’ own cooks, although whether this pattern results from Western intolerance towards foreign foodstuffs or Chinese perceptions of hospitality remains murky: “It is impossible now to get a real Chinese dinner at a Chinese private house. Your host thinks it an absolute necessity of politeness to serve his guest according to his country’s fashion. I had looked forward to a dinner to be given by the Shantung guild of merchants to the English at Ningpo in the new temple; but, alas! the Shantung merchants hire the cooks of their English guests” (238). Third, Cooke’s description indicates a more highly developed and aristocratic restaurant culture among the Chinese than back in Britain, where, in 1857, the range of possibilities for dining out lagged far behind France. By contrast, as John Dudgeon, a medical missionary who arrived in China in 1860, would later point out, “Restaurants are to be found everywhere in China.” 10 Whereas the custom of inviting guests over for dinner prevailed in Britain at this time, in China, the situation was quite different. As Dudgeon explains, “In the large cities these [dining halls] exist on a large scale, and are the rendezvous of the higher classes where friends are invited to dinner. The Chinese family relations prevent as a rule social gatherings at their own homes. It is considered highly becoming to invite to one of these dining halls” (317). Therefore, in order to sample “true” Chinese food in Ningbo, Cooke sets up a dinner at a restaurant run by a mandarin who is a graduate of the imperial examination system; rather than a bourgeois establishment, this restaurant clearly caters to the elite. Named “The Gallery of the Imperial Academician,” it also “holds repute of having, out of Pekin, the best cuisine in China” (239). The later institutionalization of the restaurant as the key site for experiencing “the Chinese dinner” also understands Chinese cuisine as an urban phenomenon; in so doing, it naturalizes any foreign items or preparation methods that might dominate the menu. Chinese culinary exotica therefore become aligned with an urban tradition of importation and amalgamation that in many ways differs little from the Victorian predilection for turtle, imported from America just as birds’ nests are from Southeast Asia, and the penchant for seafood restaurants, where oysters and other slimy foods that might be seen as antithetical to a notional/national diet of meat are consumed. These slimy foods were analogues to banquet foods such as sea slugs and birds’ nests that made many observers comment on the Chinese fondness for the gelatinous. Fourth and finally, Cooke’s “A Chinese Dinner” differs markedly from many other examples of the genre as it would later develop in its sympathy towards the foods on offer and willingness to experiment. Cooke’s sentiments are more in keeping with those of eighteenth-century British imperialists, who adopted local cuisines as their regular diet, rather than late Victorian suspicion and often revulsion towards the foreign foodstuff.11 Cooke, in fact, shows an acute awareness of cultural relativity in eating habits, arguing for open-mindedness towards difference in diet and a healthy sense of

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68 Ross G. Forman

adaptability to change. Pronouncing a dish of sea slugs “succulent and pleasant food, not at all unlike in flavour to the green fat of the turtle,” he goes on to conclude: “If a man cannot eat anything of a kind whereof he has not seen his father and grandfather eat before, we must leave him to his oysters, periwinkles, and his crawfish, and not expect him to swallow the much more comely sea slug. But surely a Briton who has eaten himself into a poisonous plethora upon mussels has no right to hold up his hands and eyes at a Chinaman enjoying his honest well-cooked stew of bêches de mer” (240–1). Although depictions of Chinese food never went out of fashion, forming a staple element of most travel narratives about the region, they blossomed again in the 1880s and 1890s. The opening up of Japan following the Meiji restoration, the growth of the International Settlement in Shanghai, and the expansion of steamship routes that both linked the China Coast internationally to Britain and Australia and rendered China’s rivers up to foreign commerce all played their part. In periodicals in particular, competition for readership meant that periodic bursts of articles about Chinese food appeared at this time, as rival publications jousted to best one another in their portrayal of eating out East. Fiction also had its impact: The Leisure Hour’s serialization of Jules Verne’s Troubles of a Chinaman in 1880 sparked a spate of articles entitled “the Chinese dinner” or “the Chinese menu,” following from the elaborate description of a banquet given by the novel’s protagonist King-Fo.12

The mid-1880s also saw China’s first official participation in an international exhibition in Britain in 1883 (the International Fisheries Exhibition) and the opening of a Chinese buffet and teahouse at the International Health Exhibition a year later. These public displays about the Celestial Empire kept the issue of Chinese food in the public eye; they also extended the experience of banquets that had traditionally been typed as a male preserve to the women who flocked to South Kensington to sample the Chinese table d’hôte, which gave impressive French titles such as “Chaudfroid de cailles à l’Essence” and “Crépinette de Vollaile à la Cantonaise au Varech Violet” to its dishes. (Just what these dishes were is difficult to establish, but the former was a preparation of quail in aspic, while the latter was some sort of chicken sausage with seaweed “Cantonese” style.) The exhibitions themselves constituted a kind of reverse travel experience, bringing the world of China to Britain. With spatial layouts and pavilions that, as many scholars have noted, aimed to telescope the experience of globetrotting, and with specially printed guidebooks to direct the visitor’s path through the exhibits, international exhibitions not only provided a substitute for overseas travel, but were also a means of inciting it. Moreover, in many ways these exhibitions offered visitors a direct means to try Chinese food (however adulterated) that, for cultural reasons, the ordinary tourist to Hong Kong or the treaty ports might not actually have the opportunity to experience. Indeed, the few guidebooks to China that date from the late Victorian period offer scant information on local food and how or where to sample it. (Presumably, tourists were supposed to eat in the hotels and, except when traveling in rural areas, might never sample native fare.)

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Eating out East 69

The “Exquisite Absurdity” of English Dining

The late nineteenth century also saw the appearance of the more occasional sub-genre of descriptions of European-food dinners given by Chinese hosts. These descriptions emerge in travel narratives only towards the end of the century in part because it was an historical juncture in which the motives for imperial expansion itself increasingly came under question (especially given the history of the opium trade in China) and in which the hierarchical systems for classifying cultures, of which cookery experts such as Mrs. Isabella Beeton — who famously averred in her Book of Household Management (1861) that “dining is civilization” — had taken advantage, were increasingly open to criticism. Generally of a comic nature, these descriptions point to the way in which issues of diet identify problems of cultural understanding by shedding new and often unsavoury light on the heavy consumption of tinned meat and other imported goods by Britons in China. They often show, in a self-mocking way, how erroneous Chinese impressions of British food are, but in a manner that underscores how the Chinese could in fact legitimately see Europeans as “barbaric.” In narrative method, they rely on the adoption of a Chinese subjectivity to contextualize the way in which custom dictates the constitution of acceptable behaviour. In so doing, they show how custom is both contingent on culture and not necessarily hierarchical between cultures. Humour diffuses the narrative upheaval of the reversal of the presumed relationship between author and audience occasioned by the narration from a Chinese perspective; humour is, in fact, the force that mediates between that Chinese perspective of the European dinner and the audience’s own through the intervention of the British narrator. Trader and traveler Archibald John Little’s description of one such European meal he was served in Sichuan by a Cantonese merchant, for instance, hinges on the plain boiled fowl and the large and bloody leg of mutton served in contradistinction to the more refined fare of the Chinese dinner party. “In lieu of the chicken being neatly cut up, and stewed in a delicate sauce, all ready for serving to the mouth with the elegant chop-sticks, a rough, plain-boiled fowl was set on the table, with no carving-knife to dissect it with,” he notes, putting himself in the place of the Chinese guests at this dinner, who are unable to stomach the lot.13 Although the problem of the meal in Little’s mind stems from the inept serving of the fowl and joint — namely, the lack of appropriate carving utensils and of accompaniments such as bread and potatoes which would make it palatable — the ironic tone of the passage works to reveal how the Chinese viewed British food: as unadorned, undercooked, and shockingly rude in its serving method. Little’s conclusion is a reappraisal of the Chinese food of his travels: “After experience of this meal I began to think myself less a victim than I did before, in being generally restricted in my travels to a Chinese cuisine pure and simple” (306). In truth, it is the Chinese guests, not Little, who are the victims at the merchant’s dinner — a fact he implicitly recognizes by “mak[ing] up for my fellow-guests’ indifference by setting to as best I could” (305–6). Nevertheless, this ideology of victimhood was a standard trope for British impressions of Chinese food, converting food from pleasure into torture and through this process heightening the titillation of the descriptive powers.

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70 Ross G. Forman

An even more compelling example of the ironic use of food descriptions to underscore cultural relativity, also through Chinese eyes and lips, comes from Arthur H. Smith. Smith was an American missionary based in P’angchiachuang (Panjiazhuang), Shandong, whose Chinese Characteristics (1890) was published after he had been living in China for eighteen years.14 Based on a set of papers printed in the North China Daily News, Chinese Characteristics was, according to Lydia H. Liu, the most popular book about China until Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth (1931).15 Here, Smith relays some Chinese impressions of Western food to great parodic effect:

A Chinese official who had been honoured with an invitation to a dinner at the British Consulate, narrated afterwards, how the English “Great Man” stood up at the head of the table, and with a gigantic sword cut into the huge mass of beef, that was placed before him. Ranks of servants stood all about, and, like the visitor, watched the proceeding, and all of them were too used to it, to appreciate the exquisite absurdity of the performance. Is there any good reason why a host should pass a practical examination in the presence of his guests, as to his knowledge of comparative anatomy? Is it a sublime duty of the civilization of the nineteenth century to wait, while a man does at an inconvenient time what his servants could have done better at a convenient time? . . . (24–5)

Again, humour forms the means through which to convey cultural reappraisal through the eyes of the other, thereby diffusing the unpleasantness or even unacceptability of being made ridiculous by the Chinese. Dining, as Smith acknowledges here, is about performance, and this performance has been misrecognized because what for one culture is an act of hospitality (cutting the roast beef) is for another a symbol of swashbuckling ineptitude. The ceremony of carving is therefore turned into an “exquisite absurdity,” but the crucial point is that the servants serve as spectators to this farce: the act of carving displaces the appropriate roles for host, guest, and servant and offers a supreme example of household mismanagement. Smith goes on to prove this point by retreating from Chinese subjectivity back into a Western one with a direct appeal to his audience, but this, too, ultimately shows the mock superiority of the Chinese. He invites readers to think of guests of honour being asked to carve a goose at an English table “with the result of depositing it in the lap of the lady sitting next, who of course smiles, and says it is of no consequence” (25). British politeness courts absurdity by denying that a soiled dress is, in fact, of consequence. “Nothing of this sort ever takes place in China, and for this reason alone, we are prepared to maintain that in eating, in cooking, in carving, the Chinese are more civilized than we,” Smith concludes. Smith’s description of the Chinese official’s impressions of the English dinner thus prompts readers to query, more broadly, what the duties of civilization at the end of the nineteenth century might be, and asks whether Britons are actually in a position to dictate or mandate such duties. When the Chinese themselves were giving the dinner, as in Little’s case, the host’s decision to serve Europeans with familiar food certainly owed something to pragmatics and to cultural notions of hospitality. Dudgeon, in the essay he prepared for the 1884 International Health Exhibition entitled “Diet, Dress, and Dwellings of the Chinese

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Eating out East 71

in Relation to Health,” compliments Chinese ingenuity in recalling a banquet meal he attended: “it may be interesting to remark, as exhibiting the culinary skill of the Chinese, and the many pleasant forms in which milk can be presented, that I was once invited to a large dinner of ceremony by some of the highest officials in Peking, and knowing the foreigner’s predilection for, and constant use of, milk, the sumptuous dinner was composed almost entirely of articles of milk composition, and neither cheese, butter, lau [a soft curd], nor nai p’i (milk skin) formed a part” (276). Yet if Britons’ resistance to Chinese food can be interpreted, on some level, as an antipathy to “going native,” at the same time the Chinese propensity not to serve their own food functioned as a distancing mechanism, as a way of avoiding too much proximity and common ground for exchange.

How Much Depends on Dinner?

This is not to say that descriptions of Chinese fare, especially in the context of these banquet dinners, were necessarily negative. Although the Chinese music that might accompany the banquet was universally condemned as “deafening noise,” the dishes themselves were often reported as delectable. An 1880 account of “Chinese Cookery” in The Pall Mall Gazette presented the report of a correspondent of the Journal des Débats, who had attended a banquet in China given by a French official in the employ of the Celestial government. “Many of these dishes are known to us in Europe, and appear to be more eccentric than in reality they are,” it noted. Bird’s nest soup might be taken for vermicelli in chicken soup, sharks’ fins are reminiscent of skate, and “everyone” who has tasted thousand-year-old eggs “says that they are excellent.”16 In Wanderings in China (1886), Constance F. Gordon Cumming discoursed on the “excellent, but somewhat lengthy dinner, in twenty-five courses” that she experienced in the home of one Mr. Ahok.17 Cumming found that “everything was exquisitely refined, and of such unquestionable cleanliness, that the curiosity of tasting new dishes might be indulged without alloy” (220). “I may safely say,” she added, “that I tasted everything uncommon, and indeed I thought all the special dishes very good” (220–1). Even when they did not like the food, they recognized the care and expense involved in the preparation and elaborate plating involved, and the custom of giving diners hot towels for their hands was much admired. Above all, the ingenuity and refinement involved in conceiving of and concocting complex dishes like birds’ nest and sharks’ fin soups marked the Celestial’s sophisticated and civilized notion of taste. Darwin had argued in The Descent of Man “how similar the nerves of taste must be in monkeys and man” (12); commentators on Chinese food proposed the same model for the diverse “races of men,” especially those who were members of such an ancient and distinguished civilization. Darwin had proposed that differences in moral disposition between the “highest men of the highest races and the lowest savages are connected by the finest gradations. Therefore it is possible that they might pass and be developed into each other” (35). Similarly, Chinese food might be

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72 Ross G. Forman

exotic or alien, but the very process of trying it and describing it for others meant that British writers perceived this mutability of taste and recognized a kind universality of human appetites. Another traveler, Henry Spencer Ashbee — better known to posterity for his indexes of Victorian erotica — made this point even clearer. In The Metropolis of the Manchus (1882), his account of a visit to Beijing, Ashbee “made up my mind for a Chinese repast, served in Chinese fashion.”18 Although Ashbee reports that he did not actually enjoy his meal at a “thoroughly native rest-house” in the city, he places the blame neither on the restaurant nor on the food itself, but on the limits of his own cultural sensitivity: “It was not the first time that I had tasted pure Chinese cuisine, so that the food was not altogether foreign to me, nor were the viands in their way badly cooked, but the taste of almost everything one eats is more or less acquired, and a matter of education; as my tongue was unschooled in the language, so my palate had not yet been taught to appreciate the cooking” (32). Ashbee’s analogy between the mastery of a particular language and the mastery of a particular aesthetics of eating is also a statement about the scene of narration. By focusing on the dual uses of the tongue — to speak and to taste — he again encapsulates the dialectic between experiencing food and recounting that experience; he not only recalls the embodied nature of the travel experience, but also calls attention to the travel writer’s role as the translator of that experience for a reading public back home. Moreover, he draws an important distinction between the abstract appreciation of another culture through its difference (its food, its language, etc.) — an intellectual concern not necessarily grounded in personal pleasure or displeasure — and the ability of the traveler to concretely enjoy that difference — an experiential concern directly rooted in personal sensation. Most important to Ashbee’s formulation, however, is the idea that education and schooling are the key factors for intercultural understanding. What transmutes displeasure into pleasure, distaste into taste, is knowledge and exposure. This understanding that palates, like people, can be educated out of culturally limited worldviews helps clarify why commentators — particularly those from the 1880s onward who sampled Chinese food in a metropolitan British setting like the 1884 Exhibition’s restaurant — saw such delicacies as sharks’ fin soups as open to incorporation into the British diet. One writer, for instance, proclaimed during the Exhibition that he was sure that the birds’ nest soup that he had sampled would soon be added to the repertoire of prominent London establishments. The idea that British palates could accommodate themselves to the best of Chinese cuisine also helps explain why the frame of reference used to describe Chinese banquet foods was so persistently that of French haute cuisine: for Britain, both models of taste and the aesthetic of the educable palate were of French origin, owing a debt to Jean-Anthèlme Brillat-Savarin, Auguste Escoffier and particularly to Alexis Soyer and other French chefs working in Britain, who promoted refined cooking and made fine dining fashionable. The enormous variety of soups, roasts, and palate cleansers that made up the menu of the banquets “to which foreign residents or travellers are sometimes invited by the Chinese” also formed a close parallel to Britain’s valued French model of sophisticated cookery.19

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Eating out East 73

Ultimately, all these varied and uneven descriptions of Chinese food boiled down to a question of taste, in the aesthetic sense of the word. Whether it was seen as haute cuisine or as the epitome of all that was vile and loathsome about foreign behaviour, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century travelers’ and journalists’ descriptions of Chinese cookery placed a heavy burden on it: to make China into an essence or a stock that could be intellectually sampled and appraised by those seeking to fold the Celestial into European systems of knowledge.

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