A Loving Tribute to Chinese Food, From a Hundred Years Ago

This past week, I was reading old guidebooks to life in China from the early 1900s, and in one of them, a 1914 book by Peking University professor Isaac Taylor Headland, I found a fantastic chapter on appreciating Chinese food. Obviously a kindred soul, writing on a topic close to my heart, I felt the need to share these hundred-year-old words that still ring so true to me. I've picked out the best parts (including the picture above) and reproduce them below. —saintcavish

"When foreigners speak of Chinese food, they bunch it all in together, as though it were the same all over the country. It is decidedly not the same. 

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"When we who have been in China come home, folks talk to us as though we had nothing but rice to live on, and as though the Chinese existed on this one kind of food alone, and as though it was very poor living.  

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"In a city like Peking one can always buy beef, mutton — the best mutton I have ever eaten — pork, fish, and chicken, and in the winter time the Mongol market furnishes all kinds of game. 

"When the cold months come, great camel trains of Mongol men and women bring loads of frozen game, deer, wild boar, pheasants, partridges, Mongol chicken, rabbits, and everything that grows on the mountains and the plains. 

"Among the best of all this game is the wild boar, the pheasant, and the bustard — the former fed on only the cleanest food, and the latter equal if not superior to our best American turkey. 

"They have a red haw, about the size of a crabapple — an inch in dia- meter — which makes a sauce for bustard equal if not superior to our cranberries. These Mongols also bring large quantities of butter, sealed up in the stomachs of sheep, as we put up our bologna sausage, though foreigners, so far as I have known, have not been very good customers, perhaps because of the greasy and unbathed appearance of the merchants. 

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"The Chinese themselves use but little, if indeed they use any, butter, and they say of us that we carry about with us a butter odour. 

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"There are three kinds of food common to us that the Chinese, when they first come in contact with the foreigner, do not like. These are butter, coffee, and cheese. 

"I have had guests who would force themselves to eat these things when I knew that the very odour of them was offensive. I remember one evening I invited Professor Lu — a very large, corpulent professor — of the Peking University to dine with us. It was the first time he had dined in a foreign home. 

"My table boy had been with us for years, and I had never known him to be guilty of a smile while waiting at the table. During the dinner, when he passed the butter to Professor Lu, he was about to take half that was on the dish. The boy gulped, and suggested in a half-under- tone that we never used so much. Professor Lu, perhaps to justify his mistake, or perhaps to approve himself to his hostess, explained, also in a half-undertone: "I am very fond of butter." 

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"I have had Chinese friends say to me, "I can drink your coffee, and eat your butter, but I draw the line at your cheese." 

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"Many foreigners go to China and never learn to like their food. All I have to say is that, from the deepest depths of my heart, I pity them. They do not know what they are missing in life. 

"Let me confess here that you have to learn to eat Chinese food. I did not like it the first time — nor the first few times I tried it. But it is an undertaking that richly rewards the one who learns to do it well. 

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"They have a way of baking — or cooking — large pieces of fat pork, covered with rice flour, which makes it one of the most delicious mouthfuls I have ever tasted. 

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"It would be impossible in a short chapter like this to try to indulge in any eulogy of sharks' fins, birds' nest soup, chicken soup, egg soup, or the delicious lotus seed broth that one gets at certain seasons of the year. 

"Those who do not know what birds' nest soup is will be interested to learn that there is a bird in the south that expectorates a kind of a gelatinous substance of which it builds its nest on the sides of inaccessible cliffs, where they are very difficult to secure. It is this that makes it so expensive. 

"Some of my friends to whom I have given this explanation, have expressed their sentiments by a peculiar curl of the lip and a twitching of the nose, and said they would not eat it if it were saliva. And then I called their attention to the fact that the bee —  but you may look up the composition of honey yourself — this chapter is about Chinese foods. 

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"My favourite Chinese food? Oh, I just take any kind and am grateful and happy."

    — Isaac Taylor Headland, 1914