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6 The Obsessive Gourmet Zhang Dai on Food and Drink1 Duncan Campbell [F]or the people, food is Heaven (㮹ẍ梇䁢⣑)2 A greedy Dongpo, Starving at Solitary Bamboo. 椆㜙✉梻⬌䪡 —Zhang Dai ⻝ⱙ, ‘Inscription for My Own Tomb’ (Zi wei muzhiming 冒䁢⠻⽿所)3 A dandy in white silk breeches will never starve. 䲰壚ᶵ梻㬣 —Du Fu 㜄䓓ġ(712–770), ‘Twenty-two Rhymes Presented to Wei Ji, Assistant Director of the Left in the Department of State Affairs’ (Fengzeng Wei zuocheng zhang ershier yun ⣱岰杳ⶎ᷆ᶰḴ⋩Ḵ枣) Among the rich, frugality is considered to be a virtue, but one that is observed intermittently, as periods of fast alternate with those of feast; at this level a frugal diet is associated more with fasting and voluntary denial than with famine and the ineluctable elements; abstinence was internalized as a way to grace rather than the result of external pressures that heralded starvation. —Jack Goody, Cooking, Cuisine and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology4 Of the various books that the late Ming dynasty historian and essayist Zhang Dai ⻝ⱙġ(1597–1684?)5 either wrote or compiled over the course of the long and prolific second half of his life, many did not safely negotiate that passage from manuscript to imprint that so often spelled the difference between survival and loss of text in China.6 Although, somewhat unusually in this respect, the late 1980s and 1990s saw the first publication of a number of his manuscripts, found preserved in various libraries,7 sadly, given both Zhang Dai’s privileged upbringing and his finely-honed instincts for fine living, one work that now seems lost forever is his book of recipes, entitled the Old Glutton’s Collection (Laotao ji 侩棽 普), which was based on an earlier compilation put together by his grandfather. Fortunately, however, Zhang Dai’s preface (xuġ⸷) to this work, translated below, was included in the major collection of Zhang Dai’s prose writings, his Paradise Collection (Langhuan wenjiġ䎭⫃㔯普), and has thus survived.8 88 Scribes of Gastronomy It is a preface of some considerable interest, quite apart from the insights it provides into Zhang Dai’s own life and preoccupations. In his preface, Zhang Dai provides something of an insider’s digest history of the traditional Chinese discourse on food and cooking, a tradition that, in the opinion of the anthropologist Jack Goody, represents one of the world’s most complex of cuisines and associated culinary discourses. Goody speaks of the culinary differentiation of culture (between private and public, and along regional and hierarchical lines) which, in China, as much as in the classical world, was ‘linked to a particular kind of hierarchy, with distinct “styles of life”, a hierarchy that is in turn based upon a certain type of agricultural system’, and which engendered opposition at both the conceptual and the political levels.9 Goody notes a set of specific characteristics of such cuisines: the link between cuisine and class; contradictions, tensions and conflicts connected with this differentiation; an increased range of ingredients and menus resulting from exchange, tribute and commerce; the specialization of cuisine encouraged by the collection and publication of recipes; an elaboration of the gendered division of culinary labour with high-status tasks often being transferred from women to men; a close and long-standing link between food and sex; and finally, a link between eating and health.10 We can observe many of these characteristics at work in Zhang Dai’s preface. K. C. Chang has argued that ‘perhaps one of the most important qualifications of a Chinese gentleman was his knowledge and skill pertaining to food and drink’.11 In these terms, Zhang Dai seems splendidly qualified. He was a man of many and varied obsessions: rocks and gardens, actors and operas, books, handicrafts, painting and calligraphy, friends and flowers, birds, dreams, tea and medicine and, perhaps above all else, the West Lake of Hangzhou. Eating was one of his abiding preoccupations as well, and his voluminous writings are studded with memories of eating and of food, all of them recalled to mind and recorded at a time when Zhang Dai was suffering, by his own account, from extreme privation: ‘If starvation too is such a common-place affair, / Then how marked a feature of my life it has now become!’ 梻Ṏ⮳ⷠḳ⯌㕤㗗㖍⣯, read the first two lines of a set of two poems entitled ‘Birthday of the Jiawu Year: On this Day, I Starve’ (Jiawu chudu shi ri e 䓚⋰⇅⹎㗗㖍梻) written in 1654, a decade after the fall of Beijing, the northern capital of the Ming.12 He ends this...

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