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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 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 standalone 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...

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