One great Chinese puzzle remains its cuisine

A truth that ought to be universally acknowledged is that Chinese food, while much loved, is underappreciated. China certainly has one of the world’s most sophisticated cuisines, yet while there’s a Chinese restaurant in almost every town, there’s little dependable information about it in English aimed at the general reader. Jonathan Clements addresses this in The Emperor’s Feast, a galloping journey through thousands of years of Chinese culinary history, from origin myths through numerous dynasties, the Opium Wars and the Cultural Revolution, right up to the present day. At the start he says his work has been ‘a quest to find out what Chinese food actually is’, by shedding light on its development over time and some of its dizzying geographical diversity.

As Clements rightly points out, the term ‘Chinese food’ can obscure a multitude of local cuisines and cooking processes, as well as a history of constant evolution through cultural exchange:

The stews of the Shang priest-kings were a world away from the banquets of the Tang emperors; and the recipes cooked for the Mongol khans by their Central Asian staff were nothing like the dishes that the people of the Ming era made with new ingredients from across the Pacific.

He highlights the challenges and controversies of trying to classify regional culinary traditions, noting that the idea that China had four great regional styles dates only to the last dynasty, while the rival notion of ‘eight great cuisines’, so often cited, emerged in a newspaper article in 1980.

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A fascinating cast of characters, real and mythological, pepper the pages, including the legendary Divine Farmer Shen Nong, the inventor of the plough; Yi Yin, the chef who became a minister in the Shang dynasty and tutored his king on the finer points of gastronomy; the pork-loving Song dynasty poet Su Dongpo; and Chairman Mao.