Reading Snippet - Review of Cuisine and Empire by Rachel Laudan

Cuisine and Empire - neat high-level framework on world's culinary history, but full of glitches

I am an amateur cook and likes understanding the stories behind different cultures' and countries' food and culinary practices. One day, I came across this book on a Chinese book Facebook page, and decided to buy the original English edition. It is my first book on global culinary history, although I have read some books on gastronomy and dining practices in Chinese Song dynasty.

It didn't take long for me to finish reading this book, for three reasons - the length of this book was not excessively long, and there had been no junctures when I felt the author has dug too much into the details or dwelled on a topic for too long, but neither did I feel lacking upon conclusion of a section. The writing was designed to flow for a lay person instead of being semi-academic for trained historians or people starting on a culinary history course. Most importantly, the sectioning of chapters and topics within each chapter was highly logical and simply went from one period to another like TV drama episodes, giving me a sense of continuity as I progressed. I didn't feel that there were major gaps.

The basic framework adopted by this book was to put world history into approximate major periods similar to "renaissance", "nationalism" and "post-commuist era". It started with early human civilisation in which culinary was associated with cosmology and divinity through cooking's transformation of food; this then progressed to the "imperial era" sophisticated dynasties appeared and imperial high cuisines emerged together with the associated ceremonies & philosophies and counter-cuisines. It then devoted a number of chapters towards the "global religion era" during which the major religions went global and spread their culinary philosophies together with their religions, and that different geographies adapted the philosophies based on their own territories' capabilities and constraints. The final two chapters were devoted to the rise of modern cuisine especially the Anglo cuisine that went hand-in-hand with industrial revolution (modernity) and then the food debates and movements since 20th century when industrial food processing went in full swing.

As the author admitted at the start, this secondary-school-curriculum style synopsis and super-high-level framework is necessarily simplistic and may contain generalisation which some people will find uncomfortable. Nonetheless, just like a secondary-school curriculum, it helps novices in creating an overall picture that allows them to subsequently get deeper into the details, or simply stop at this level satisfied with the abstract truth. The queries and concerns that came with this approach didn't bother me. However, there are a number of points which prevented me from trusting the book fully or extracting the most from the book.

If you were a European or North American with little knowledge of other cultures and regional history, you wouldn't spot it. But as a Chinese, I realised that the Chinese name translations were non-uniform. There are places that adopted Cantonese translations, other places with the Communist pinyin translations, and yet some places with the Qing dynasty/republic era Latin translation. My guess is the author air-lifted the specific name translations from reference sources and inserted directly when creating the narration. It is simply uncomfortable reading that feels a hint of laziness lurking around, creating suspicion that some other laziness might have led into over-zealous generalisation or un-cross-checked facts or theories.

This is a culinary book, and given the huge differences between the medieval or even imperial cuisines and our current cuisines, it is very difficult to visualise her descriptions of the old food, old culinary styles and ingredients. She talked about "sauces" liberally throughout the book, but are these sauces people integrate into a dish (like sweet and sour sauce), act as an accompaniment (like gravy), provide complementary tastes for those who wish (like ketchups) or act as a stand-alone to be enjoyed (like jam)? Surely, sauces would serve different purposes for different cultures at different ages, yet it was generalised into one. She talked about the use of almonds in creating white sauces, and described chicken korma in Mughal era - it would be good to see actual recipes, photographic illustrations or rich paintings! I read through the descriptions sometimes unable to tell the difference from one to another, or to picture them in my head to my satisfaction. Especially given the proliferation of food programmes on TV and well-illustrated cookbooks, readers do expect illustrations that make them "get it".

Nonetheless it is a well-written book. More importantly, her ability to NOT put Europe and North America (and Roman & Greek history) at the centre of her framework or describe from European/North American pint-of-view should be commended. Too many world history books have simply ignored their non-European/American readership, practically lined historical theories with European examples (or are these theories set along the European contour alone?) or assume primacy of European history with "other world" history as secondary or a result of reactions to European events.

Good book, really worth reading, but could have been improved.