The original author | Rachel Laudin
Excerpts | Xu Yuedong
Food and Civilization, by Rachel Laudan, translated by Yang Ning, March 2021 edition of Houlang 丨 Democracy and Construction Press
At one end of the social hierarchy, French haute cuisine swept the globe and was a favorite not only of monarchs (including the newly established royal families of Greece, Belgium and Hawaii), but also of aristocrats and wealthy people everywhere, at least if they wanted to show off their status as the world's elite. At the court and in the clubs, only invited guests or members can eat this delicacy. But in restaurants, hotels, railway dining cars and steamship restaurants, it costs a lot of money to eat.
Eating French food usually means being civilized. In 1828, France's leading historian, François Guizot, who was about to pay homage to the Minister of the Interior, declared in a series of full-fledged public lectures at the Sorbonne University: "France has always been the center, the focal point of European civilization." Guizot's History of European Civilization (published in 1828 and translated into English by William Hazlitt in 1846) became a cultural heritage of the French and was recited by generations of French school-age children. At the end of the 19th century, the star of France's outstanding geographer, Paul Vidal de Labrache, once said that France was "at the crossroads of civilizations".
The country is known for its gastronomy and civilization, and its most famous gastronomic writer, Maurice Sayan, is often known by his pen name "What a Can'tski", who once said that French haute cuisine "is an education about etiquette, a system of cooking", while Germany and the United States are as "barbaric" as their diets. Royalty and aristocracy around the world believe that they have more in common with the ruling classes of other nations than the middle and working classes of their own people. Together, these different ruling classes of nations form a cosmopolitan high caste that binds them together is their culture (which includes the French diet) and a shared vision that human history is evolving toward some form of civilization, and many agree that France's achievements represent the direction in which that civilization is headed.
Wine, an invented tradition
After the Japanese were forced to open their doors to the West in 1854, in order to achieve their goals, they also decided to adopt Western civilization, including Western-style food, and their slogan at that time was "civilization and civilization". Just as the genealogy of the aristocracy can be traced back to the distant past, promoters insist that the cultural heritage of the French diet can also be traced back through the Middle Ages to the Greek and Roman periods (the pan-European Catholic diet that was killed halfway is negligible), and the French diet is the pinnacle of this heritage.
For example, wine is France's second largest export commodity after textiles, and advances in science and technology in the late 19th century revolutionized the production of wine, but when people market wine, they attribute the mellow beauty of wine to the place where the grapes were grown (i.e., terroir conditions) and centuries of aristocratic traditions. Of the major Bordeaux wines of 1850, only Margaux could add the word "château" before its name. Subsequently, French vineyard owners began to add some Gothic towers to the original farmsteads, calling them wineries, and with the help of the newly emerged color lithography, the pictures of the wineries were printed on the labels of the bottles. By 1900, all leading Bordeaux wine producers began to use the word "château", for which one historian commented: "In terms of inventing traditions, the process that certain wines went through during this period can be called excellent examples." ”
But in terms of sales strategy, this method of marketing wines produced with the latest technology into ancient hand-brewed red wines was so successful that cheesemakers soon followed suit. By the late 20th century, this practice was widespread throughout the food manufacturing industry.
Scientists and technicians are regarded as the main promoters of the progress and civilization of france, and they are also praised for their outstanding contributors to gastronomy. Louis Pasteur, a wine-loving microbiologist and chemist, discovered that slowly heating wine to 50 degrees Celsius prevents wine from souring, thus solving the problem that plagues the entire winemaking industry. Scientists at the French Academy of Sciences and the University of Montpellier led the war against the grape phylloxera, rescuing French vineyards from this devastating aphid.
Louis Pasteur
At the end of the 19th century, Marcellan Bertello, one of France's top chemists, also contributed to food science, proving that all chemical phenomena, including sugar production and oil pressing, are based on material forces, rather than on some mysterious and irreproducible energy of life. Parisian chef and pastry chef Nicolas Appel invented the airtight food preservation method, which allowed French cuisine to be served anywhere. In the words of the oft-quoted early 19th-century French gourmand Bria-Savoran, cooking "is the most important of all arts (art here refers to skill, craftsmanship, trade)... It provides the most important service for civilized life".
How did French cuisine become a state banquet in the 19th century?
As the famous chef Karem of the first half of the 19th century put it, French cuisine is "the protector of European diplomacy." In 1837, when Lord Oakland, the British Governor-General in India, met with the Afghan rulers in Simla at the foot of the Himalayas in an attempt to win his support in a struggle for interests with Russia, the most central member of Lord's entourage was the French chef Crowe. In 1862, the Mexicans defeated the French army in a battle, and the celebration feast was eaten with French food. When King Rama V of Thailand hosted a state banquet to entertain Western envoys and advisors, it was also French cuisine, partly out of courtesy and partly because the order in which the French feast was served was most suitable for diplomatic occasions.
In 1889, the Emperor of Japan invited 800 guests to a banquet at his new European-style imperial palace in Tokyo, which still served a French meal. According to mary Fraser, the british ambassador's wife, the scene was "like a formal dinner party in Rome, Paris or Vienna". A wide variety of tableware – glassware, porcelain, silverware and linen – is well organized. According to another guest, unable to converse, her companions had to make their bread into villains and ponies to amuse her.
For Mary Fraser, it is self-evident that French cuisine is served at a state banquet, even for a country like Japan, which has its own high-end diet and has never been exposed to French cuisine before. The only rare exception is probably the Forbidden City in Beijing. Although the Qianlong Emperor may have tasted Western food prepared by the Jesuits as early as 1753, the imperial dining room still made Chinese delicacies.
The nouveau riche learned the old-fashioned aristocratic way of life. In Paris, wealth poured into Paris as Napoleon levied taxes throughout his vast but short-lived Continental Empire. Vested interests dine in expensive restaurants, where mirrors are adorned on the walls, crystal chandeliers hang above the rooms, small tables are laid with fine linen tablecloths and fine tableware, and diners order from menus with prices written on them. This French restaurant subsequently appeared in other cities.
In Moscow in the 1860s, Lucien Olivier, a Chef of Russian-Belgian origin, served French Burgundy wine, champagne sturgeon, lamb's loin, salad and Bunbu ice cream at his Hermitage restaurant. The restaurants frequented by the wealthy have the Golden House and the Prenders Hotel in Mexico City, the Union Hotel in Melbourne, eight Delmonico restaurants in New York, and the Ritz Hotel in London, whose founder, Auguste Escofier, modernized the intricate style of celebrity chef Karem, making him one of the most influential chefs in France in the late 19th century.
In Japan, as the family textile business collapsed in recession, a young man named Shiro Itani was sent to the West to learn how to cook, and in 1910 opened a French restaurant in Kyoto. He spread a plush blanket on a tatami mat, set up a table and chairs, and bought the silverware of "Mapin & Webb" with the money he had luckily won from gambling in Monte Carlo. In London and many other cities, clubs that evolved from cafes employ French chefs to ensure that their members can dine with their peers, rather than going to restaurants where anyone can eat for money. Since then, clubs serving French cuisine have soon appeared in large cities everywhere (Table 7.1).
Table 7.1 Examples of the global spread of high-grade French cuisine
How did French cuisine become a thriving industry?
The professional kitchen for high-end French meals is full of cast iron and wrought iron equipment: a closed cast iron stove, a metal pot, a steel knife (Fig. 7.6). Workers work according to the assembly line. Chef Escofier changed the old practice of one group of people in charge of a dish, assigning each group of people to a specific position, making sauces, cooking meats, and finally combining them into a complete dish. In this team, the chef is the leader, who gives instructions to the sous chef, who in turn gives orders to the apprentice or junior chef. Junior chefs have a heavy and tedious job, such as sifting ingredients after mixing or squeezing juice with gauze, but they are one level higher than dishwashers and cleaners.
Mixing white flour, butter, sugar, broth or broth concentrate, eggs and wine in different ways can be combined to make a variety of sauces and desserts in the French haute cuisine. At this time, the sauce is no longer an integral part of a dish, but is made separately, seasoned with different seasonings, and eaten with meat or fish. Thus, a series of fixed-name "mother sauces" appeared. Spanish sauce made with dark brown sautéed batter, broth and seasonings is the basis of all brown sauces. Bessame sauce and white sauce made with light oil noodle sauce with milk or veal and fish broth are used to make a lighter sauce. If eggs are beaten in, they become the sauce for making soufflé, and with gelatin, they can be used as a sauce to make a meat jelly and cover it on a cold dish. Vegetable stews now become a stew, and oil-braised pork cubes refer to tender fried meat pieces made of a white sauce.
English cream sauce is a cream sauce made of milk, sugar and egg yolk, which can be used to make dessert sauces or french puff fillings, and can also be mixed with whipped salty cream and egg whites to make Bavarian cream. Slight differences in technology can create different textures: oil and flour can be made into a salty tart, a puff skin or a mille-feuille skin, and a salty sauce with a sauce made with a stir-fried batter as the base, or a dessert with an English cream sauce. In this way, the chefs use these basic sauce combinations to transform into a dazzling variety of dishes.
Fig. 7.6 Modern professional kitchens are not only spacious but also well managed, such as the galley of the steamship La Valpindi shown in the picture. Launched in 1925, this British ocean-going cruise ship has a sink on the left side of its kitchen, a stove in the middle, and a baking pan on the right. Such a kitchen is responsible for preparing meals for the ship's more than 300 first class passengers and 288 second class passengers. Chefs usually work on board ships at this port and leave the ship at the next port, which has played a great role in promoting the spread of Western food, and even some Japanese routes have begun to serve Western food (Churchman's Cigarette Cards, 1930. Courtesy New York Public Library https://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/id?1803781）。
People's favorite meats include beef, lamb, veal, game, and expensive chicken, pork is less popular and is mostly used to make meat sauce. Commonly eaten fish include halibut, flounder and pomfret. Sometimes meat and fish are paired with beautifully sliced vegetables and eaten in the right sauce, such as carrots, onions, potatoes, peas and asparagus, just a simple cooking. The most popular fruits include pears, cherries, peaches, strawberries and raspberries.
French chefs, who have always been passionate about progress, science and technology, have embraced processed foods such as white flour, sugar and canned food with the same enthusiasm as ever. Celebrity chef Escofier has used commercially processed broths and broths, sponsored beautiful ham, anchovies and mushroom extracts (not free of course), and raved about unseasonal fruits and vegetables such as canned carrots, green beans, peaches and cherries. Alexis Sawyer, the most admired French celebrity chef of the Victorian period in Britain, like many others, has also created his own essence brand.
In fact, without canned food, it would be very difficult to replicate the French diet around the world. Canned cream from France or Denmark makes it possible to make French sauces and desserts even where there is no dairy manufacturing industry. In the pantry of many wealthy families, canned caviar, liver sauce and salmon have become commonplace. Canned asparagus can be found in Tokyo, Madras and Saigon (a soup made from crab and canned asparagus that is still a famous dish in Vietnam). In 1907, when Sir Nawab Sadik Mohammed Khan Abbasi V became ruler of the northern Indian state of Bahawalpur, his meals consisted of soup, liver sauce, beshamie sauce with salmon, roasted wild fowl, caramel pudding, salted toast, and coffee. In addition to wild fowl, beshamie sauce and toast, the Goan chef in charge of cooking makes other dishes, basically just by opening the can.
The introduction of French cuisine and the teaching of French cuisine soon developed into a thriving industry, with Paris in an unshakable center, ensuring that the French diet did not diverge into sub-genres. Recipe books have sprung up exponentially. Karem published The Royal Pastry Chef of Paris in 1815, The Chef of Paris in 1828, and the French Culinary Arts with Ahermont Prümech in 1833. This was followed by Urban Dubois and Emile Bernard's Classic Cooking in 1856, and Jul guffe's 1867 Complete Book of Diet. At the beginning of the 20th century, three more authoritative tomes appeared in turn: the Compendium of Cooking (1900 and 1929) co-authored by Montagne and Salle, the Culinary Guide of Escofier in 1903, and the 1938 Gastronomic Compendium of LaRousse co-authored by Montagne and Alfred Gottschark.
There are also recipe books that tell people how to make French dishes in a foreign country. In Britain, there are a number of such writings every few years, the more important of which are Bauvier's The Art of French Cuisine (1825), Sawyer's Modern Housewives (1852), and Escofier's Complete Guide to Modern Cooking (translated from the French version in 1903). In Russia there is A. Petit's Gastronomic Russia (published in Paris in 1860); in Hungary there is Joseph Dobosz's Recipe for Hungarian French Cuisine (published in unknown date, presumably in the early 20th century); in The United States there is Charles Langhof's thousand-page Hedonian (1894). Army Colonel A. A. Thompson, nicknamed "Wyvern". R. Kenny Herbert's 1885 book Cooking Notes: A Modified Material Theory for Uprooted British Indians presents a "civilized French cooking system."
The upstarts, who are not well-known, have not been infiltrated by years in their daily manners and tastes, preferring to read food reviews and etiquette guides. In 1803, Alexandre Grimaud de La Renière began to publish restaurant reviews in his Gastronomic Annals, one volume per year, which lasted until 1812. Just a dozen years later, the aging intellectual Jean-Antelme Bria-Savoran, determined to break the boat, published The Physiology of Taste (1825), in which, according to diplomat Talerand, famous aphorisms were everywhere. In 1887, the Japanese Imperial Family brought in Othmar von Mohr, who had served Kaiser Wilhelm in Berlin, to instruct the courtiers on how to dress and behave at a French dinner, and even to conduct a full dress rehearsal without a single foreigner present.
The global flow of French chefs contributed to the popularity of French cuisine
French food has become popular around the world thanks to the thousands of chefs who are willing to travel. According to statistics, about 10,000 chefs have emigrated from Paris. Peasant teenagers will work as apprentices in some big kitchens, only to survive a few years of apprenticeship, once they are discharged, they can find a well-paid errand overseas, hoping that one day they will be able to save enough money to return to China to open a small restaurant of their own.
In the 1890s, there were more than 5,000 French chefs living in The City of London alone. Many chefs from Switzerland, Belgium, Armenia, Italy, The United Kingdom, Hungary, Russia and Japan have come to Paris as apprentices, looking forward to returning home one day. British foodie and Army Lieutenant Colonel Nathaniel Nunham-Davis once made this judgment: "All the great food missionaries set out from Paris." "But this is not necessarily the case.
Many aspirants to become French chefs have mastered the craft in Switzerland's burgeoning hotel management schools, while others have studied in London, St. Petersburg and Vienna with chefs of French descent or who have studied in France, and Escofier himself claims to have trained thousands of chefs from England. In St. Petersburg and Moscow, some Russian slave owners would send their serfs to French cooks for training and then sell them for a good price. In Leo Tolstoy's war and peace, count Rostov boasted that the serfs who made the hazel grouse in made made in made in Madeira's white wine on the day of his daughter Natasha's naming day were bought for 1,000 rubles.
French chef
In Italy, French chefs trained chefs from Sicily in mansions, who were later known as "monzu", derived from the French word "monsieur". 2,000 students studying under Escofier have moved from the UK to the rest of the world, many of whom are teaching cooking in new places. Some chefs from Moscow and St. Petersburg went to Work in Kiev and Odessa, and also to Istanbul and Paris after the Revolution of 1917.
Some of the chefs trained in Vienna and Budapest came to Athens, such as the Greek Nikolaus Dilemmendes, who returned to his hometown to work in the Austrian embassy, and others went to Mexico City, where the Hungarian Tudors played for The Mexican Emperor Maximilian. The French-Belgian Family of Jean ran the De Verdan estate in Mexico City; the French cooks of the Governor of Calcutta made a fortune by running cooking classes. French-trained Italian chefs came to work in the breve's kitchen, where they trained Goans who were relieved to eat beef and pork because of their conversion to Christianity, who later opened restaurants and patisseries in Mumbai.
Chefs working in the British and French Concessions in China sent their apprentices to Japan to work. In Vietnam, many Vietnamese took the opportunity to work for the French troops or wash dishes in French cafes to observe French chefs and learn some French cooking techniques. Colonel Kenny Herbert, in his Cookbook, notes that while serving as a quartermaster in Madras (now Chennai) in southern India, he used Jul Guffy's Encyclopedia of Diet to teach Ramasami (the common name for Indian chefs) to cook French cuisine.
Through his studies, Ramasami abandoned traditional stone mills, learned to wash away the dust marks on the kitchen walls, learned to use canned vegetables from French or American companies (but never British goods), mastered the use of small pans, fish pots and Warren pots (a kind of hot water steamer), and mastered the different methods of white sauce and brown sauce.
How is French cuisine localized?
Also contributing to the global spread of French cuisine are waiters, butchers and bakers, as well as various shops selling porcelain, knives, restaurant furniture and canned food. Waiters have traveled to many countries, from summer resorts and hot spring resorts to chinese restaurants. French butchers and bakers went to Saigon to run their businesses, and Chinese who had studied Western-style baking opened bakeries in Shanghai, Saigon and Honolulu.
In 1808, bakers from Germany and Italy came to Rio with the Portuguese court. By the end of the 19th century, in large cities such as Paris, London, New York, Kolkata, Mexico City, and Tokyo, people could buy all the European goods needed for a formal dinner from department stores.
Outside of France, especially in Europe, the French diet, like all previous high-end diets, has been integrated with local tastes, and the local diet has been refined and become more like a high-end diet. This process can be found in many recipe books. The author of an important Mexican food dictionary of the 19th century once declared that "French cooking has invaded our kitchens", and he believed that the first step to "Mexicanize the recipe" was an essential step.
French cuisine was not only Mexicanized, but also localized, Austrian, Russified, Hellenistic, Indianized or Siamese. One way to achieve localization is to cut some boneless meat into small pieces, or make it into minced meat pie, because diced meat and minced meat are much more common in many parts of the world, including France, than the popular practice of whole grilling or whole piece steak cooking in Europe. Schnitzel, croquettes and thin steaks, which spread around the globe, are made by cutting or chopping meat into thin slices, mixing it with beshams sauce or mashed potatoes, and then fried in breadcrumbs. In Latin America, this type of food is called "milanesas"; in Persia, it is called "kotlets", which are flavored with saffron and turmeric, rolled up with fresh vegetables, and eaten with pancakes; Indians call this food "cutlis", "kroke" in Indonesia, and "korokke" in Japan. Another way to make a dish is to add a little local spice or ingredient to the food in moderation. In the case of omelets, for example, Indians would add coriander to flavor, or a large handful of chickpea flour, while persians would
Choose to tuck in the dates inside.
To enhance the refinement of the local diet and make them taste more "French", chefs reduce the amount of spices they use when cooking and replace mutton, lard or rapeseed oil with butter. In the best-selling Greek recipe, The Cook's Guide (1910), author Nikolaus Dillermendes (which had sold 100,000 copies by the time of his death in 1958) suggested reducing the amount of spices and oils used to help Greek cuisine get rid of "contamination that caters to the tastes of the Orient and avoid being too greasy and too spiced to be eaten." In Russia, chefs add butter to buckwheat porridge. The safest way to make your food taste French is to add French sauce. Vinaigrette ("vinagrety" in Russian, french sauce in the United States) is the protagonist of French vegetable salads; mayonnaise turns cold meat, cold fish and cooked vegetables into a French dish.
But to say that the most added French flavor is still beechel sauce. Together with Parmesan cheese and mushrooms, besschame sauce turns the Russian "Piroski" (a Russian bread with a stuffed bun) into a "Caucasian-style puff pastry". The bessamer soup made of milk, whipped cream or egg yolks can make the usual Russian vegetable broth and borscht elegant. Drizzled with bessamer sauce, some native vegetables (such as Indian eggplant, moringa and pumpkin) or fish (such as Mexican snapper) immediately become respected. Whether sweet or savory, the puff pastry adds a touch of French style to the table. Also with this function are French desserts such as Mousse and Soufflé. Light and fluffy boxes filled with oysters (most likely from canned) are popular starters from Mexico to Vietnam.
Chefs also combine French cooking techniques with local ingredients to create new dishes. Russian salad (vegetables cooked, chopped, tossed with mayonnaise) and Stroganov beef (beef cut into strips and fried with mushrooms and whipped cream) are French dishes invented by Russian chefs. The egg beshammere sauce mille-festa (musaka), which is considered a typical Greek dish today, and the similar Greek lasagna (noodles, beschame sauce, and minced beef) were actually modified by Tyremendes with the previous meal without the besharme sauce. The Italians of the north invented lasagna (lasagna, meat sauce and bessaux sauce) as a French dish.
The Indian chicken curry (presumably a nut-made white sauced dish, the signature dish of the Mughal diet) has been rebranded by Kenny Herbert to re-emerge as a "stew" or "Indian white sauce meat". The Siamese court chefs' familiarity with the French diet has reached the point of cooking jokes: "Their chicken jelly is covered in a milky gelatinous sauce and looks like the French bessamé sauce and gelatin, but it is actually made of lemongrass to flavor the ground chicken and wrapped in a layer of coconut milk and arteriole (a gel made of seaweed). Back in Europe, Escofier helped Westernize the curry, and his chicken curry was seasoned with bessamé sauce and a little curry powder.
Not only chefs, but also diners sometimes combine local and French haute cuisine. The British nobles ate an English breakfast, drank English afternoon tea, and added a salty dish to the dessert. When Japanese people eat French food, they end with green tea making rice. The Romanian French dinner menu is served with sour soup (borscht) and the last dish is meat rice (risotto). Mexicans, at least when eating at home, must put a bowl of chili peppers on the table to add a hint of spice to their French meals. Sometimes these extra additions become the focus of haute cuisine, even in France. Like Russian caviar, how can it be without it in a moment of celebration?
In addition to France, other countries are constantly creating and disseminating new French cuisines. The Russians brought Russian salads to Turkey and have now become a home-cooked dish for wealthy families. They also brought schnitzel to Iran, and Stroganov beef from New York to Kathmandu before the mid-20th century. The Austro-Hungarian Empire spread their French-improved cuisine to Prague, Bucharest and Belgrade. In balkan recipes, creamy vegetable salads, roast beef, sautéed batter, bessamer sauce and cream sauce compete with traditional Ottoman high-end diet recipes such as yogurt, garlic sauce and baklava.
In Athens, Cairo and Alexandria, chefs also began to make vegetable stews, mayonnaise and soufflé. The appeal of the French diet is that it is like a badge that symbolizes the status of the world's elite leader, not necessarily because of how delicious the food itself is. It is praised by Europeans as a creamy and smooth food, but the Japanese find it greasy and unpalatable. Considered a food with a deep charm by Europeans, Indians feel that they lack the rich and varied spicy aroma that the imperial chef of the Indian royal palace is good at. Chinese like to eat with chopsticks and a spoon, turks use a spoon, and Indians use their hands directly. To the Japanese, the sound of metal and porcelain colliding is very rude, and they like to eat quietly, and it is very difficult for them to chat while eating.
So they can cook both domestic and French food, and rich people usually have two kitchens in their homes, each doing their own, without disturbing each other. As early as 1800, Navab Sadat Ali Khan of Lucknow in northern India had two kitchens. A century later, the rulers of the western Indian state of Baroda hired both a French chef and an English butler, while his Indian chef was responsible for making the local Marata diet. In Japan, both the imperial family and wealthy samurai and merchants living in Edo and Osaka offered Western food (so-called "Western food") on formal occasions, which was strictly distinguished from the japanese high-end diet based on white rice, fish, and vegetables (the so-called "Japanese food").
How did French food "eat" the Kingdom of Hawaii?
Although adopting the French diet can highlight the "modernity, progress and civilization" of a country, the cost is also very high. On February 12, 1883, King David Kalākawa of Hawaii held a coronation banquet. On previous visits to the world, Kalākaua had noticed that both U.S. President Chester Arthur and the modern monarchs of Japan, Siam, Italy, and Britain had held French dinners as a diplomatic courtesy. In order to show that his government was not behind, Kalakaua decided that his coronation banquet would also serve French cuisine. By this decision, the king distinguished himself from the traditional Hawaiian chiefs: the chiefs' banquets were limited to men, women were excluded, those who broke the taboo were executed, and the guests sat on the floor with mashed taro in the middle gourd.
David Kalakava
But to eat French food, it won't work without the right cutlery, restaurants, and ornate mansions. So before the coronation, Kalākaua hired architects and craftsmen to build a palace, ordered Gothic Revival oak furniture from the Davenport Company in Boston, custom-made blue-rimmed porcelain with Hawaiian coats of arms in Paris, and imported crystals from Bohemia. His people made a sterling silver table decoration in Germany, and portraits and clocks sent by European monarchs were hung on the walls.
The banquet offers English and French cuisine, led by curry chowder, turtle soup, Windsor soup and Queen's soup. The fish practice is predominantly Hawaiian. Next up are wild duck, pheasant, veal rolls, turkey with truffle sauce, goulash, ham, roast goose and curry. Because Hawaii does not produce wild duck or pheasant, at least these two ingredients need to be imported. Paired with these dishes are potatoes, peas, tomatoes, corn, asparagus, spinach and taro, many of which are certainly canned. Desserts include red wine jelly, sponge cake, strawberries and ice cream. All of these dishes are accompanied by a variety of drinks, including sherry, Rhine, Bordeaux, champagne, port beer, liqueur, tea and coffee.
From spending more than $360,000 to build the palace to adding a variety of equipment and coronations, all of this comes from taxes paid by sugar plantation owners. At that time, Hawaii's total population was only 57,000 people, and the annual export volume was about $5 million. Plantation owners, mostly New Englanders, most believed that "extravagant monarchy was not modern at all", but instead believed that the future belonged to republicanism, including frugal and simple republican eating. They preferred middle-class thriftiness to royal grandeur. In 1893, the royal family was overthrown and Hawaii declared a republic, but in 1898 it was forcibly occupied by the United States. Although a lavish coronation banquet poses far less danger than the fall of monarchy, it is a profound reminder that the issues behind the struggle between monarchy and republican catering are quite serious.
The original author | Rachel Laudin
Excerpts | Xu Yuedong
Proofreading | Zhao Lin
Source: Beijing News