Stories about Chinese Food Culture

<<Miscellany of Sichuan Cuisine>> Sanlian Bookstore /Che Spoke/2004-01/$15.60

Taiwanese columnist Fenna Chou, who has a reputation for writing about literature, history, and food, has written Taste Legends--The Past Lives of Celebrities and Cuisine (Sanlian Bookstore), is cleverly tagged with celebrities in addition to food: Bai Xianyong's love affair with Guilin rice noodles, Zhu Ziqing's relationship with Yangzhou snacks, Zhang Eileen's reasons for loving Western cuisine, the gastronomic love affair of famous Jiangnan writers ...... Sichuan's oldest newspaper man, Che Spoke, known as the "Bodhisattva of Food and Drink". Che spoke in his "Sichuan cuisine" (Sanlian Bookstore), specially equipped with "cultural people and Sichuan cuisine" series, including Zhang Xueliang, Zhang Daqian, Li Jili people, Shen Drunk and other people's dietary tales, read interesting. In The Story of Food (Zhu Zhenfan, Yuelu Shusha), a dish of Kung Pao Chicken leads to the story of Ding Yingzhen's elimination of the evil eunuch An Dehai, and a bowl of salted meat congee leads to the history of Lu Xiufu's escorting the young emperor to escape from the Southern Song Dynasty! In addition to the interest of the dishes, the characters, stories, and then the historical background are linked together to make the food more flavorful. The two books "Eat in China's Southern Diet Palimpsest" and "Eat in China's Northern Diet Palimpsest" (Hundred Flowers Literature and Art Publishing House) simply go straight to the point, dividing the region by provinces, and specializing in numerous dietary anecdotes that not only tell stories, but also testify to the origins of and even the originators of a number of famous foods, which fully demonstrates the far-reaching origins of China's dietary culture. In these books, the content about food is only the carrier, the real intention of the author is to express the deeper cultural connotation through food, so it is very popular with readers with higher cultural literacy.

The cultural scholar Xu Chengbei is quite knowledgeable about food, and his "Miscellaneous Eats of Beijing" (People's Literature Publishing House) is filled with a preference for Beijing's flavor culture, and reflects the vicissitudes of Beijing through food. Old gourmets: Recollections of Nearly Fifty Years of Drinking and Offering (Sanlian Bookstore) is a recent influential book on food culture, and the author, Zhao Heng, claims to be a glutton who calls himself an "old gourmand", and writes about a wide range of food and drink, which allows us to see the richness of the author's life experience.

The book, The Belly is Big: An Essay on Chinese Food Culture and The Story of Eating in China (Hundred Flowers Literature and Art Publishing House), are two excellent works on food culture from Taiwan. Left Barbecue Right Simmering Soup" (by Gu Qingsheng, Writers Publishing House) and so on are very personalized food culture books.