Mexican kitchen in Mineral de la Luz, Guanajuato, Mexico ca. 1905. John Horgan

Photographs of old kitchens are not that common so I was delighted to come across this one.  In the early twentieth century, Mineral de la Luz was a boom mining town with a number of well-to-do houses.  This I suspect was one because the door is open to the dining room where someone (a servant, probably) is pouring what could be horchata into the glasses on the table, already covered with a sparkling clean tablecloth.

In the kitchen, one servant is standing on a wooden box fanning the fire in the bench stove. You can still buy these fans in the market.  The spiky things at the back of the stove are more fans. Copper vessels are resting in the holes in the top.  The other woman is peeling onions.  There is a small table in the room but judging by the pile of soup plates, this was for serving  rather than work.  A metal grill, a couple of enamel spoons (one slotted, one for soup) and another couple of copper cazuelas (pots) hang from the wall.

What can’t be seen is the storage area or the tall jar containing water.

I like to compare this to a photograph of the kitchen in the childhood home of Xiong Xiling (1869-1937), now a museum, in Fenghuang, Hunan. Xiong was a moderately important politician in the early days of the Chinese Republic.

Nineteenth-century Chinese Kitchen. Donald Wagner.

In many ways it is so similar.  The kind of stove, with pots (this time covered woks) set in a bench it the same. So are the few utensils handing from the wall, the use of wood, pottery and basketry,  and the utterly basic essentials. Here we can see the water jar and buckets and a pole, perhaps for carrying the buckets.

And yet both would have turned out elaborate, multi-dish meals for the owners of the house.

I am not suggesting influence here, just parallel developments.  Both are more typical of kitchens worldwide than the open hearth kitchens that we associate with 18-19th century England and America. Both drive home the contrast between the formal rooms of the house and the dark, simple rooms where servants worked to prepare meals.

Many thanks to Kay Curtis for sending Mineral de la Luz: La obra fotográfica de John Horgan Jr. en Mexico (Guanajuato:Ediciones de la Rana, 2010) a collection now owned by the well-known Guanajuato artist, Jesús Gallardo.  And thanks too to Donald Wagner for sending and discussing the photographs he took (he’d already kindly discussed woks and wok menders with me). He’s the person if you want to know about the history of Chinese metallurgy.  As he pointed out, the brickwork looks suspiciously new in the Chinese kitchen so who knows how much reconstruction of the kitchen may have altered.

That’s not the point of this post though.  It’s about this particular paragraph.

Tourism is certainly not about discovering new food. A 2006 survey of Chinese coach travellers found that 46% had eaten “European” food only once, and 10% not at all, during holidays on the continent. Clients at Ansel Travel are typically offered foreign food once in each country: seafood in Paris, ham knuckle in Germany, pasta in Italy and so on.  After that, “it’s Chinese all the way.” Many stay in suburban hotels and eat noodles.

This is because excitement and acquisition are prized over pleasant, relaxing experiences.

What the author is assuming here is that eating foreign cuisines is a natural, pleasant, relaxing part of tourism.  And that has certainly been the default assumption in, say, Britain and the United States for the past 70 years.

For most of history, though, and still for much of the world it is not the default assumption. Quite the reverse.  Eating foreign food is unnatural, unpleasant, tense-making and disgusting.  History is replete with Greeks who detested the way Scythians ate, Byzantines who loathed the food of Gaul, Jesuits who hated tofu, Spanish who had no use for corn tortillas, Japanese who thought French haute cuisine horribly oily, English who believed Americans only ate canned food, Americans who knew (know) that there was nothing decent to be had in the British Isles.  And that’s just the beginning.

Now before we decide that we are the first enlightened generations in history and that before us there was nothing but unwarranted prejudice, it’s worth remembering two things.

1. Traditional nutritional advice was that the healthiest food for any individual was the food of the place where they grew up.  The further you moved away, the more dangerous the food.   And it was not just that it might make you sick but that it might change your whole personality.  Northern Europeans were adjusted to butter, meat, etc and to eat a diet rich in olive oil and vegetables, so they were warned, would upset their stomachs and change their temperament to one more ready to anger, for example.  The reverse was true: it was dangerous for those born in the Mediterranean to begin eating a northern diet.   You changed your diet very much at your own risk.

2. Travel did make people sick (often it still does) and they had no idea why.  The historian Philip Curtin did a fascinating study of British military records in the nineteenth century and in every overseas posting (except New Zealand and the Pacific Islands) soldiers died at many times the rate of their colleagues in the British Isles.  We might now put that down to malaria, cholera, typhoid, and lots of other nasty diseases.  But given the nutritional advice above, it was natural to assume that food had a lot to do with these problems.

So back to our Chinese tourists.  I suspect two things are going on, neither of them having to do with excitement and acquisition.

First, I suspect they still take traditional nutritional theory very seriously.  I have known many Chinese who say surgeons for broken bones, aspirins for headaches, but traditional nutritional theory to keep the body generally balanced.  Not a crazy way to go at all. And that would mean stick to Chinese food when you travel.

Second, the Chinese are proud of their own culinary tradition and enjoy eating their own very varied dishes.  Not necessarily odd at all.

To conclude.  Our search for culinary novelty, our belief that trying new foods is part of travel, perhaps even a reason to travel, is the oddity, not the default position.  It’s a sea change in attitudes to food that is very recent. In part it has to do with modern nutritional theory, in part to the fact that we now attribute many diseases to germs, in part due to the fact that we usually have access to safe water or soft drinks, and in part to political and social attitudes, though the latter is for another posting.

ca. 540 AD.  Recipe (not direct translation).  Take refined rice glutinous rice starch, add enough water to make a batter, heat a large pot of boiling water, set a copper pan in the water, push the pan to rotate it as you drop in a ladle of batter. The batter spreads to cover the whole pan (centrifugal force).  Take the pan out of the water and peel off the film. It looks like suckling pig skin (cooked pig skin I assume).

Cut up and add to a savory soup or sweet sesame or fruit based soup.

Commentator Huang´s note.

Modern versions are still seen in the cuisine of Fukien. In the Foochow areas there is a much beloved dish called ting-pien hu which is made by spreading a thin layer of rice flour batter along the uypper wall of a large cooking wok. As the film dries it is scraped and allowed to fall into the hot savory soup in the center of the wok.

In southern Fukien thin round rice pancake called po ping are made on a flat bottomed pan.  These are used to wrap chopped meat and vegetables to give spring rolls.  When fried they are just like the ubiquitous egg rolls one sees in Chinese restaurants in America except than the skins are thinner than those made with wheat flour. In

In short, I finally  did what I should have done earlier on, looked up thin pastries in H.T. Huang´s wonderous volume in Joseph Needham´s Science and Civilization in China.  Huang, born and raised in China,worked as a food scientist for years in the US, ending up as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation, before writing this tome on Fermentation and Food Science in China.  Never has a tome been more welcome.

He has a long discussion on ping or roughly Chinese pasta (Katy, I am following his terminology here which is why I use ping not bing.  He uses it to describe the earlier wider meaning of the word, whereas as your links point out in modern times it refers mainly to round breads).

No less that 15 kinds of ping were described in the 6th century Chhi Min Yao Shu, Essential Arts for the People´s Welfare, an astonishing compendium of agricultural practices and food technology.  The one above is the only batter.

Comments, please, please. Just love these hunts.  Thanks Charles, Katy and Robyn for comments here and on Facebook about the Chinese thin pastries, and everyone else on those elsewhere.  I will acknowledge them in future posts.

Here’s something I’ve been wanting to post for some time.  This ad appeared in Honolulu in a weekly, The Polynesian, in June 1840.  If it’s hard to read the words, here they are:

Good people all, walk in and buy

Of Sam & Mow, good cake & pie:

bread hard or soft, for land or sea,

“Celestial” made; come buy of we.

Now if this ad had appeared in 1880, when the Chinese (Celestials as immigrants were called in the nineteenth century) from Canton began arriving in the Hawaiian Islands in force, when bread making and European foods in general were making inroads across East Asia, it would not be so surprising.  But 1840!  That’s really early.

Bakeries are pretty tricky things, after all, demanding a good bit of equipment and skill.  You have to be able to build an oven and (if you are to bake pies and cakes) have to have various molds and forms.  You have to have some kind of leavening.  Hard to believe there were lots of yeasts floating around in these remote islands just waiting to be capture, but perhaps some microbiologist can correct me.  And few of the plants there (unlike say the maguey that produced pulque that could raise bread in Mexico) would have been suitable.  So probably some kind of sour dough starter.  Or perhaps (see below) some kind of chemical raising agent.

And of course you needed flour.  Don Marin, a Mexican from California (which was of course Mexican then) had tried sowing wheat in the second decade of the nineteenth century, apparently to no avail.

No, in the early nineteenth century flour was shipped round the Cape from the East Coast of the United States. “On opening a barrel stamped ‘Flour’ *said J.S. Green in the Transactions of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society in 1852( a chisel and mallet were always put in requisition to prepare the way for sifting, and these even were so ineffectual oftentimes that a pick axe or crow-bar seemed necessary for the work” of breaking up the solid cake.  Usually it was musty and sometimes sour, and often riddled with bugs and worms.  “In those days the demand for saleratus (a naturally occurring sodium or postassium bicarbonate, also imported) was imperious” to alleviate the indigestibility of the flour.

Into this world of weevil-ridden compacted flour come Sam and Mow from Canton, even advertising themselves as being from Canton, as if that had some connection with bakery.  Is that even possible?  Canton, after all, is in the rice-eating south of China.  If they ate wheat products, it was most likely noodles of various kinds.

Even so, a story begins to form in my head. The British in particular had been trading in Canton, porcelain and then opium, for well over a hundred years.  This indeed was the time of the Opium Wars and the attempt to open China to European influence.

Is it possible that the key to this story lies in the third line, “bread hard or soft, for land or sea?”  Ships sailing into Canton would have been running low on ship’s biscuit it may be assumed.  It would have made sense for entrepreneurial Chinese (who had perhaps sailed on British ships and observed bakeries in other parts of the world) to supply this need by setting up bakeries in Canton.  And perhaps the few British residents there, missionaries and merchants, provided the link to the soft bread, the pies and cakes.

And by 1840, there had been links between Canton and Hawaii for over half a century.  There had been Cantonese sailors with Captain Cook when he arrived in the islands in 1778 and others had come in the intervening years on the merchant ships that commonly had a few Chinese sailors, some of whom stayed. Apart from bakeries, they set up rice farms, sugar mills, stores, restaurants, and sold wine and liquor.

And then there’s one last factor to consider.  The market.  Who in Honolulu is 1840 is going to be buying bread?  The population of the islands is overwhelmingly Hawaiian, perhaps 80,000 or so, sadly down due to disease, but still the majority.  Their food was taro, perhaps just beginning to shift to rice.  There are about four hundred foreigners, thirty or forty of them Chinese.   So say 350 Europeans and Americans (including missionaries who arrived in the 1820s) who were most of the other foreigners. Enough just to support a bakery.  But dicey, I would think.

Ah ha. The ocean again.  In the 1820s whalers from New England started wintering in the Islands.  They would have wanted pies and cakes and soft bread.  And hard bread for going to sea again, for the long haul north back to the Arctic or southward home round the Cape. Now there’s a market for Sam and Mow.

One last question.  What is the green sprig that the Celestial is holding?  Tea?  Any thoughts?

I don’t have conclusive evidence of any of this but that is the story I tell myself.  But what a way for bread to come to Hawaii.

On the culinary front, I found it interesting that nineteenth century observers commented that woks were valued for boiling rice because, being thin, they heated quickly.   Rice not the stir fries that we tend to concentrate on.  Worth mulling over.  Also that the British tried to get into the market but could not make a pot that was thin enough.

Afterword.  An apology to Donald Wagner for originally posting his page. In the nicest possible way he asked me to just put a link so that no permissions were abrogated and his design remained clean.  And thanks again to him for keeping me posted on this work in the first place.

My long-time friend and fine scholar and anthropologist, E.N. Anderson, told this story in The Food of China (1988).

“Wok is a Cantonese word; the Mandarin is kuo. The wok appears to be a rather recent acquisition as Chinese kitchen furniture goes; it has been around for only two thousand years. The first woks I know of are little pottery models on the pottery stove modes in Han Dynasty [that is about 200 BC to 200 AD] tombs. . . . The wok is virtually indispensable for stir-frying, and thus I infer that this cooking technique was a Han invention.”

It was Anderson’s best guess when he wrote. But now we are thirty years on and we’ve learned a lot about more about the history of food in China.  Those pottery models are not woks, if by woks we mean an iron cooking vessel. And if the wok is necessary for stir frying, which is not clear, then this technique does not go back to the Han either.

And it turns out that making cast iron woks was a tricky business.  Don Wagner, the expert on the history of Chinese metallurgy, explains this here.  Do follow the link because he also reproduces a wonderful series of nineteenth-century Chinese gouaches of wok making.  In a letter, he commented that he believed a Japanese scholar had dated the wok to the Song (that is mid 10th to mid 13th century).

That still leaves open the question of whether the wok was an independent Chinese invention or whether it was borrowed from elsewhere.   Anderson suspected the latter.

“Since the same sort of pan is universal in India and Southeast Asia, were it is known as a kuali in several languages, I strongly suspect borrowing (probably from India via Central Asia)–kuo must have evolved from some word close to kuali.”

Ammini Ramachandran who hails from Kerala has been interested in Indian-Chinese connections. For her article on this, follow the link, go to articles, and scroll down to “Woks, Fishing Nets, and Ceramic Jars” an article she first published in Flavor and Fortune in 2004. (Do read other parts of her web site too.  It is full of interesting material).

Trade between the two regions was evident in her family kitchen.

“Other remnants of ancient Chinese trade still visible on these shores are Chinese woks and Chinese ceramic jars. In the local language these cooking utensils are still called Cheena chatti and Cheena bharani. These words literally translate to Chinese pot and Chinese ceramic jar. Today they might be manufactured in India or elsewhere, but still, they are known by their old names.

The traditional Cheena chatti is made with iron. It is in the exact shape of a Chinese wok. It is an indispensable cooking utensil in every home in Kerala; used to sauté, stir fry, and deep fry foods. Chinese ceramic jars are used, too, and preferred for storing homemade pickles and milk products such as yogurt and butter milk.”

Here is her photo of the Cheena chatti.

On a recent trip to Turkey, she saw this tava made of bronze in the famous Topakapi kitchens.

Tava, as she points out, is one word for a similar wok-shaped vessel in Indian.  Kadai is another.

Which all goes to show that anyone who knows metallurgy, cooking, and a number of languages has a great research project ahead of them.  And that there is a huge amount to be traced out about the origins, construction of, and use of these metal vessels made or bronze or iron.

It’s there in the NY Times because this is where Obama grew up. Here’s my friend Lori Wong on how Hawaii saw Obama’s victory. “Our re-elected mayor summed up Obama’s election in a foodie fashion by saying we will now have a prez in the White House who understands shaved ice, plate lunch, spam musubi, and poi.” One day we’ll have an account of Obama’s life that gives due attention to the difference that growing up in Hawaii made. It won’t come for a while because now is the moment when the nation is celebrating someone who embraced an American black heritage.

Meantime, I have to say, specially after my recent visit, that I am thrilled to have been in the vanguard of those who celebrated, instead of denigrated, Hawaii’s cuisine.

And just to give you a sense of the exuberance of Hawaii’s cuisine, I asked Lori if I could reproduce a recent letter. It’s all hers except for the commentary in square brackets. She calls it Pigcentricities.  Of course, this is just one particular subset as she says (no Japanese, Korean, Portuguese dishes at this particular feast).

The obligatory goat skin found at Hawaiian-Filipino celebrations, ahi poke [raw cubes of tuna] along with sushi and fruit sat on the pupu table as the 350-700 guests awaited “the kitchen” to open. The groom’s father’s band rocked out “Mustang Sally” as the crowd answered back, “Ride, Sally, Ride”. The kitchen in the garage “opened” and the double line grew as guests piled their paper plates high.

(By the way, for those of you who don’t know Bee’s work, look out for her column in the Telegraph. Here’s a recent column on hospital food).

Food safety is something that is incredibly hard to ensure demanding constant vigilance. We’ll never be able to achieve total safety in food or in any other area of life.  The question we all have to ask is how we balance increasing cost (which vigilance necessarily means) against safety.  So how much are we willing to spend?  How do we as societies deal with the fact that some of us are more averse to risk than others?  All very difficult questions.

I don’t think this happens in other major culinary traditions such as Indian, Chinese, Persian, etc. Or am I wrong? Any thoughts greatly appreciated.