Chinese Culinary History

Fermentations and Food Science, by H. T. Huang (Huang Hsing-Tsung/Huang Xingzong ) goes to the very heart of what makes Chinese food Chinese by tracing the historical development of the chemical basis of the fermentations used in Chinese food processing. Dr. Huang is uniquely qualified to write such a study. He was Joseph Needham's research assistant during the 1940s. Then, after a career in the food-processing industry in the United States, he served as deputy director of the Needham Research Institute in the early 1990s. He has already made a major contribution to the Science and Civilisation series in his coauthored volume on Chinese botany (Lu and Huang 1986).

The introductory chapters of Fermentations and Food Science cover (a) the Chinese culinary system in the Zhou and Han and (b) the main primary and secondary sources. These are followed by separate chapters on the fermentation and evolution of alcoholic drinks, soybean processing and fermentation, food processing and preservation, tea processing and utilization, and food- and nutritional-deficiency diseases. Throughout, the emphasis is on techniques rather than on traditional explanations of the uniqueness of Chinese food or on ritual and presentation. Huang not only sums up the latest debates based on literary and archaeological evidence but also uses his knowledge of the chemical basis of food processing and classical philology to evaluate the arguments. As with all the volumes in the Needham series, the cut-off date is approximately the mid-nineteenth century.

Chapter (a) on the Chinese food system as it had developed by the end of the Han (pp. 13-115) is written with a degree of thoroughness that immediately makes it the standard analysis in a Western language. It includes both food resources (grains, oilseeds, fruits, and land and aquatic animals) and the ancient culinary system (cooking methods and utensils, seasonings and spices, eating and drinking). The main plant foods are illustrated, either with line drawings or with reproductions of woodblocks or excavated paintings and stone rubbings. There are also many tables, lists, and translations of the original sources, giving Latin and Western equivalents where possible. Huang is not only a food scientist but also a historian, and one with much experience in the problems of botanical nomenclature in the early Chinese literature (for an outline of the terminological problems involved, see Métailié 1999, pp. 275-291).

Many thorny problems are addressed in the footnotes. For example, in one page-length note Huang puts forward a possible new interpretation of the uses of the word suan. In the earliest sources he suggests suan might have meant garlic, and hu, from the Former Han, rocambole. In the second century A.D., the terms xiaosuan and dasuan were introduced for garlic and rocambole, respectively (hu was gradually abandoned). In modern times, as rocambole faded in importance, the use of the words was reversed, and dasuan was used to refer to garlic and xiaosuan to rocambole (p. 39 n. 92). If this interpretation is correct (and Huang leaves the reader to decide), then Zhang Qian did not import garlic, as recorded in the Shiji, but rocambole.

Chapter (c) on the fermentation and evolution of alcoholic drinks (pp. 141 - 291) contains detailed discussions of...