Doctoral candidate at National Chengchi University in Taiwan Zou Zhongsu
Editor's note: There have always been many opinions about the origin and development of cuisine in Taiwan. By tracing back to the roots of historical traditions, this article points out that the "Taiwanese cuisine" that is currently flourishing was mainly formed on the basis of the transformation of various mainland cuisines by the "people from other provinces" represented by the soldiers of the village after the restoration of the Taiwan region in 1945. As the gourmand Lu Yaodong said, the "new Taiwanese traditional" food beef noodles that he praised so much are precisely the "hometown flavor" of the mainland that he remembers in Zizi.
Tourists from all over the world, after landing at Taoyuan Airport in different time planes, will eagerly look for Taiwan's local delicacies to alleviate the fatigue and hunger during the journey. At this time, beef noodle restaurants may be one of the choices for diners. Taiwanese beef noodles have long been famous and have become a "business card" for Taiwanese food.
However, because of the traditional agricultural society, the consumption of beef and related dishes by Taiwanese people is very recent, and folk slang also says: "Do not eat cattle dogs, merit is obvious; eat cattle dogs, hell is inevitable." "This kind of food, which seems to have little relevance to Taiwan, has now become a representative of Taiwan's indigenous food." This can't help but make people wonder, what is "Taiwanese food"? And how did the real "Taiwanese food" come about?
The Cultural History of "Taiwanese Cuisine" provides a more systematic answer to these questions. The author, Chen Yuzhen, is a professor in the Department of TaiwanEse Literature at National Taiwan Normal University, and because of his love of food, he has taken food culture as his research direction and published many monographs on this topic. This book is the author's doctoral dissertation at the University of Leiden university in the Netherlands in 2010, which was rewritten by the author himself and published by Lianjing Publishing Company in June 2020.
1. Colonial tour and high-end cuisine
Beginning with the Treaty of Maguan in 1895, the island of Taiwan became a Japanese colony. On April 16, 1923, Hirohito, then Crown Prince of Japan, who later ascended the throne, embarked on a tour of the colony known as "Higashigu Kaikai" from the port of Keelung, which marked not only a symbol of colonial conquest, but also the birth of a cooking model known as "Taiwanese cuisine".
Since the Meiji Restoration, French cuisine has been popular among Japan's upper class, and formal state banquets have been dominated by Western-style dinners. The same is true of the crown prince's diet after he came to Taiwan. But the crown prince occasionally needs to change his taste. At noon on April 24, the crown prince enjoyed a banquet named "Taiwanese Cuisine". This table is prepared by Taipei's famous local restaurants Jiang Shan Lou and Dong Hui Fang, which includes precious ingredients such as bird's nest, turkey, shark fin, sea cucumber, white fungus and so on. The eight chefs in charge of cooking also quarantined a week before the feast began, and bathed and fasted.
The banquet is divided into the first half and the lower half, and after the first half of the six main courses, the seventh dim sum fried spring cake is called "impromptu cuisine", marking that the banquet has been halfway through, equivalent to the intermission of the banquet. After the eighth course comes up, the second half of the table begins. For the arrangement of dishes, the chef will pay special attention to the dry and wet, that is, a dish without soup will often be accompanied by soup to make the guests have a balanced taste and not dry mouth. It is not until the final dim sum eight treasure rice and almond tea are served, that the feast has come to an end, which is also known as the "finished meal". The crown prince praised this dish, and since then, "Taiwanese cuisine to Taiwan to eat Jiangshan Lou" has become a necessary itinerary for members of the Japanese imperial family to come to Taiwan.
However, the cuisine represented by bird's nest, shark fin soup, sea cucumber, etc. is a high-end dish common to Chinese cuisine, so why is it named "Taiwanese cuisine"? This is related to the perception of different cuisines in Japanese society. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Japanese did not have a clear concept of "Chinese cuisine", and they did not have a clear understanding of what "Taiwanese cuisine" was, so it was natural to call the food they ate in Taiwan "Taiwanese cuisine". The food eaten in Taiwan is named "cuisine", which means that these foods are all banquet dishes, mainly for Japanese people with good economic conditions, as well as local gentry.
There are six main ways of cooking Taiwanese cuisine in this period: soup, hook, stir-fry, fry, steam, boil, and the selection of ingredients is also quite advanced, so the restaurants that cook Taiwanese cuisine are mainly high-end restaurants and restaurants. In addition to the "Jiangshan Lou" and "Donghuifang" that hosted the Crown Prince's banquet, there were also the later "Chunfeng Proud Building" and "Penglai Pavilion". These four restaurants are called "Jiangdong Chumphon", and the influence of "Penglai Pavilion" on post-war Taiwanese cuisine is so deep that many post-war Taiwanese restaurants are telling their origins with "Penglai Pavilion".
In the Taiwanese cuisine cooked by Taiwanese restaurants in this period, not only high-end ingredients were used, but also local fruits and preserves, such as bananas, longan, sugar cane, etc., were added to the banquet, highlighting the local characteristics. Penglai Pavilion, which was founded relatively late, also employed some chefs from Chinese mainland to enrich the variety of dishes. Therefore, the Taiwanese cuisine of this period presents the image of high-class, exquisite, with specific dining norms and etiquette, belonging to the culture of the upper class. To some extent, it also satisfies the imagination of the Japanese colonists for colonies. However, these were not often eaten by ordinary people at that time, and they were very different from the "Taiwanese cuisine" represented by "congee side dishes, fast stir-fry, and night market snacks" later.
Second, the ancient taste of the common people
In the era of underdeveloped transportation conditions and refrigeration equipment, for ordinary people, home-cooked food is deeply affected by the natural environment, that is, "relying on the mountains to eat the mountains, relying on the sea to eat the sea". For ordinary people in Taiwan, sweet potatoes and rice are the most important main staple foods. However, in addition to being a food crop, rice is also an important cash crop. Therefore, although Taiwan produces "Penglai rice" with excellent taste, the daily staple food of ordinary people is still mostly sweet potatoes, and the proportion of rice consumption will reflect the economic situation of a family.
In terms of side foods, most of them are home-grown vegetables and pickled foods. Pickled foods are good for preservation, but also save money and cooking time. Farmers often make their own vegetables into pickles, and fishermen make a variety of fish, shrimp and shellfish into salmon sauce. In the southern region, local fruits such as green papaya, mango, pineapple, etc. are also pickled or eaten in sauces. As for meat, pigs are the mainstay, followed by chicken and duck, and less lamb. However, because in the Japanese occupation era, the slaughter of pigs, cattle, and sheep required taxation, so that the consumption of meat was mostly seen in the New Year's Festival and wedding banquets, and the daily consumption of meat was mainly air-dried meat, cured meat, sausages, as well as brine meat rice and dried meat rice. Aquatic products are mainly imported, fresh aquatic products are not eaten much, and most of them are dried processed products.
It is precisely because of this pattern of ingredient composition that the taste of ordinary people's cooking is mainly salty. At the same time, in order to save cooking fuel and oil, the cooking method is also mostly boiled and fried, and frying is relatively rare. Fried foods are mostly found in banquet dishes, and their rarity makes them suitable for hospitality and gifts, and they are also given a high social meaning.
In addition, dim sum and street food are also important in the daily life of ordinary people. The dim sum of urban people or rich families is mostly enjoyed by receiving guests and leisure, while farmers mainly replenish their physical strength when they are busy farming. This kind of dim sum has a large starch content and requires a certain production process, so it can not only be satisfied, but also gifted to everyone during the New Year's Festival. While enjoying local dim sum, people can also buy Japanese sweets such as Senbei and Mochi. In places with dense population and larger flow of people, there will be a large number of food stalls, such as the Yongle Market in Taipei's Dadaocheng, which is the concentration of food stalls. There are also night markets every night, such as the famous Shilin Night Market in Taipei, which appeared in the Japanese occupation era. Foods that often appear in night markets, such as noodles, noodle tea, oil kway, etc., have also become representatives of Taiwan's food today.
Tainan Garden Night Market
"Zuo ZongTang Chicken" and Taiwan: The Reconstruction of "Taiwanese Cuisine" after the War
At the end of World War II, due to the war, a large number of restaurants dealing in "Taiwanese cuisine" were forced to close. After the restoration of Taiwan in 1945, the restaurants specializing in "Taiwanese cuisine" represented by Penglai Pavilion began to reopen. At the same time, a large number of provincial restaurants also began to open in Taiwan. For example, the "Great Bright Restaurant" and "Great Shanghai Restaurant", which specialize in Shanghai cuisine, opened on October 26, 1945 and June 1, 1946, shortly after the restoration of Taiwan.
With the influx of a large number of mainlanders into Taiwan around 1949, restaurants from other provinces also sprung up, such as "Lao Zhengxing", which specializes in Shanghai cuisine, "Yuebin Lou" and "Lu Mingchun", which specialize in northern cuisine. The operators of these provincial restaurants, some of which are branches in Taiwan by the mainland main store, and the other part are the private cooks of the original rich families, although they followed the rich families to Taiwan, but the original employers could not afford to hire chefs, so that the original private chefs had to open another business to make a living. Among the chefs in this category, the more famous is the Famous Chef Peng Changgui of Hunan Cuisine who created the "Zuo Zong Tang Chicken".
Peng Changgui was born in Changsha, Hunan Province, and when he was a teenager, he studied cooking with Tan Yanmin's family cook Cao Xingchen. Because Tan Tingmin is very particular about food, his home kitchen is known as "Tan Kitchen", and Cao Xingchen also opened a "Jian Paradise" restaurant in Changsha. Since childhood, Peng Changgui has worked in restaurants in Hengyang, Changsha and Chongqing. After coming to Taiwan in 1949, he also engaged in catering work, and later founded the "Peng Yuan" restaurant. The most famous dish of "Peng Yuan" is the "Zuo Zong Tang Chicken" created by Peng Changgui in Taiwan. Although "Zuo Zongtang Chicken" is named after Zuo Zongtang, a famous scholar in Huxiang, there is actually no such dish in Hunan. Restaurants from other provinces, such as Taipei's "Peng Yuan" restaurant, have also become meeting places for local associations from other provinces in Taiwan.
In the villages where people from other provinces live more intensively, there are also provincial dishes called "village cuisine". Because most of the residents of the village are soldiers, their ingredients are mostly rationed food and foreign aid food in the military. Therefore, the residents of the village often use limited resources to cook food in their own familiar hometown methods. Depending on the provincial nationality of the residents of the village, the food characteristics in different villages are not the same. For example, most of the residents in the Air Force villages come from Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Sichuan-Chongqing, so the food in the Air Force villages is mostly Sichuan-Yang flavor. At the same time, in order to make full use of flour from the United States, there are also more noodle dishes in the "Village Cuisine". Among the residents of the village, there are also many combinations of "officers from other provinces, Mrs. Taiwan", so the use of ingredients available in Taiwan in the village has become a feature of "village cuisine".
In addition to "Village Cuisine", this way of cooking provincial dishes with local Ingredients from Taiwan is also evident in the recipes of the well-known culinary educator Fu Peimei. Fu Peimei often mentions in her food programs or recipes that if the main ingredients of a dish are not easy to buy, they can be replaced by other common ingredients, and the taste is good. For example, the dish "squirrel yellow croaker" was originally made of large yellow croaker, but at that time, the yellow croaker could not be artificially farmed, and the price of wild yellow croaker was very expensive, so Fu Peimei suggested that its audience could use other slender fish or grass carp instead. Other Taiwanese restaurant owners, in addition to Fu Peimei, also incorporate sichuan cuisine, Cantonese cuisine and other cuisines in the cooking process. It is also this culinary characteristic that makes "not emphasizing authentic and traditional practices" one of the characteristics of Taiwanese cuisine.
However, despite the integration of various cuisines in Taiwan after the war, Taiwanese restaurants still retain some of the characteristics that have been inherited from the colonial era. For example, there are still many dishes in Taiwanese cuisine that are mainly pickled ingredients, as well as dishes with pigs as the main meat. At the same time, Taiwanese chefs emphasize that the characteristics of Taiwanese cuisine are to retain the original taste of the ingredients, relying on fresh plant spices for flavoring, and using less air-dried spices. Oil and chili peppers are also not used much.
IV. "Taiwanese Taste" of Tourists and Gourmets
With the economic take-off of Taiwan since the 1970s, the incomes of ordinary people have increased, so that after meeting basic survival needs, most Taiwanese have begun to have extra time and money to invest in leisure and entertainment activities. Taiwan also began to turn to a consumer society during this period. As a result, tourism has also begun to develop rapidly. In order to attract tourists, tourists have gone deep into the countryside and developed ethnic minority cuisine and Hakka cuisine. At the same time, "Taiwan snacks" have also ushered in a golden period of development.
In related recipes, the dietary characteristics of Taiwan's ethnic minorities are described as "primitive, natural and healthy", and the treatment of ingredients is also original. Its representative dishes include bamboo rice, banana cake, stone slab grilled meat, mountain pork sausage, etc., which is also in line with today's food trend of emphasizing health and nature. As far as Hakka cuisine is concerned, salty, fragrant and fatty are the main flavors, and the ingredients used are mostly dried or pickled foods, and at the same time, the amount is more realistic. Representative dishes of Hakka cuisine include duck blood stir-fried leeks, Hakka stir-fried, pork lung pineapple stir-fried fungus and so on. However, the salty, fatty and fragrant characteristics of traditional Hakka cuisine are contrary to the value of modern Chinese health, which is easy to lose guests. Therefore, while developing Hakka cuisine, tourism operators are also trying to refine and make Hakka cuisine more refined and healthy.
While tourism operators are developing ethnic minority and Hakka cuisines, snacks have become key to attracting tourists. Since Shi Zaiman published the book "Taiwanese Snacks" in 1981, all parts of Taiwan have developed local snacks into one of the representatives of local tourism characteristics. Moreover, with the increasing development of communication means, snacks in various places have also been continuously knowledgeable and folklorized, and have become an important means of attracting tourists locally. To this end, various local food festivals related to local snacks are also held, the most typical of which is the Beef Noodle Festival in Taipei.
Beef noodles, written by the famous glutton, have become a representative of the "new traditional food" in Taiwan. A native of Feng County, Jiangsu Province, Lu Yaodong grew up in Suzhou, came to Taiwan in middle school, and later taught in Hong Kong for many years. His life experience in different places has led to a strong interest in food and is the first professor to offer a course on "History of Chinese Food Culture" at a university in Taiwan. Lu Yaodong, like Tang Lusun, who had a similar experience with himself, is very opposed to the phenomenon of "mixed dishes" in Taiwanese restaurants, and pays attention to the authenticity of cooking ingredients and methods. But later Lu Yaodong felt that "there is no good taste in Hong Kong", and the taste of Suzhou made him "very disappointed" compared with when he was young, and regarded Taiwanese cuisine as his "hometown flavor", even if he left Taipei, he also had an attachment to Taipei's food. And this "hometown flavor" of "Taiwanese cuisine" is very obvious in Lu Yaodong's beef noodles.
Beef noodles are not uncommon in western China, such as Lanzhou, where the representative is local beef noodles. However, "Sichuan-style beef noodles" are unique to Taiwan. After reading the famous gourmet Jiao Tong's "On Beef Noodles", Lu Yaodong successively wrote three articles: "Also on Beef Noodles", "On Beef Noodles Again", and "On Beef Noodles". Lu Yaodong said in the article that he could not find Sichuan-style beef noodles in Sichuan, because sichuan snacks only had "red soup beef" and no "beef noodles". The method of red soup beef is to cook a large piece of beef, then fish out a knife, then make red oil from pixian bean paste, which is essential for Sichuan flavor, bundle it with Qingxi peppercorns and star anise into a spice package, and simmer it slowly in a beef soup pot with green onions and ginger. Lu Yaodong believes that Taiwan's Sichuan-style beef noodles may have originated from the Air Force village in Okayama, Kaohsiung, because most of the Air Force dependents of Okayama are from Sichuan, and Okayama also produces spicy bean paste. At the same time, it is also relatively easy to obtain canned beef and flour from the United States in the village. So the Sichuan compatriots in the village made flour into noodles, and added canned beef, Okayama's local spicy bean paste, and tomatoes to make Sichuan-style beef noodles.
Lu Yaodong's theory of the origin of beef noodles has been widely accepted, and has become the "King", which is the "King", the origin of beef noodles in the Taipei Beef Noodle Festival. However, Lu Yaodong's statement is only one family's statement, and the true origin of beef noodles in Taiwan needs further demonstration and study. But for Taiwanese, every Taiwanese has their own beef noodle story, and beef noodles have become the "hometown flavor" of Taiwanese.
Fifth, "mixed" bubble tea
The postcolonial scholar Anjali Prabhu divides "hybridity" into two types: one refers to the social reality in a particular history, that is, the state in which multiple cultural forces coexist and interact with each other; and the other is a specific concept with political positions. In the development of "Taiwanese cuisine", the original Taiwanese cuisine of the Japanese occupation era and folk snacks named "ancient morning taste" were integrated with provincial restaurants, food stalls, dim sum, etc. in Taiwan before and after 1949, and were continuously carried out through recipes, markets, restaurants, family kitchens and other channels, and the chefs also learned different techniques in restaurants with different cuisines. Eventually, in the development of food culture knowledge and communication means, a "Taiwanese cuisine" in the modern sense was formed, and it was called the "hometown flavor" of Taiwanese. At the same time, this "mixture" also shapes another kind of "authenticity", which in the diet is called "authenticity". In this book, the author systematically depicts the emergence and development of "Taiwanese cuisine", and follows this path.
However, in the process of narrative, the author spends too much ink on "dishes" and ignores the "cans" and "drinks" that occupy an important position in the Taiwanese diet. In the period when refrigeration preservation technology is not developed, fresh fruits are not easy to preserve, and some fresh fruits with short shelf life are expensive if they are sold in areas far from the place of origin. Therefore, canned processed goods have become one of the main ways for ordinary people to obtain these fruits. The memory of the canned food still stays in the impression of many elders and becomes the memory of an era. And the can itself, after cooking, also has a unique taste.
In terms of beverages, the most representative is "bubble tea". Although the Taiwan region produces tea, because it is a traditional agricultural society, the history of Taiwanese people eating dairy products is not long. The way to drink milk to tea also originated in the UK. Milk tea is also not a traditional Taiwanese ice drink. According to Liu Hanjie, the owner of "Chunshuitang", one of the invention shops of bubble tea, when he traveled to Japan in 1983, he saw the waiter pour the coffee extract into a shaker cup, mix it with ice cubes and shake the milk out of the foam, quickly pour it into the cup and drink it, the taste is cool and delicious. So Liu Hanjie bought back the rocking cup, and at the same time borrowed hand-cranked iced coffee and the Song Dynasty tea drinking method with ice and honey, and invented foam black tea.
Then in 1987, Lin Xiuhui, the manager of the Chunshuitang Siwei store at the time, added the powder rounds she had just bought to the foam black tea, because the powder balls added at that time were crystal clear, so the drink was named "bubble tea". Later, the industry added brown sugar to the powder circle to make the powder round black and round, which made the bubble tea have the appearance it has today. In the 1990s, with the introduction of automatic sealing machines into milk tea shops, replacing the traditional cup lid, takeaway bubble tea began to be popular. Statistics show that on average, every Taiwanese person can consume ninety cups of hand-cranked drinks per year, and the average person drinks one cup every four days, of which bubble tea accounts for a considerable proportion. People walking the streets with a cup of milk tea in their hands can be seen everywhere, and even some people fly from Japan specifically to drink a cup of bubble tea. Therefore, "bubble tea" and "beef noodles" have become the "business card" representing the food of Taiwan.
Nowadays, walking the streets of Taiwan, hungry people go into small shops to get a bowl of hot beef noodles, and thirsty people buy a cup of bubble tea to continue their journey. With the development of globalization, beef noodles and bubble tea are not uncommon in Chinese communities around the world, but diners enjoy a special taste, unforgettable and memorable.
Editor-in-Charge: Shanshan Peng
Proofreader: Luan Meng