Clements Jonathan. The Emperor's Feast: A History of China in Twelve Meals

Hodder and Stoughton, 2021. — 320 p.The journey of Chinese food over 5,000 years of history - and the story it tells us about the land and its people. This is a book about constant cultural exchange. New ingredients and technologies arise, often from parts deemed foreign, only to become thoroughly assimilated into the Chinese kitchen within a few generations, evolving into new dishes and dining habits, and the meals enjoyed by emperors and rebels, peasants and prisoners. There is a recurring clash of the meat and dairy from the Central Asian steppes, the grains and fruits from the northern plains and the rich biodiversity of the south, mixing and contending through the centuries to create the forms of Chinese food we know today. This is also a story of continual transformation, or as Chairman Mao might have called it, of permanent revolution. ‘A dish may be Chinese,’ writes Chao Buwei in her influential recipe book, ‘because it is made of Chinese things or because it is cooked in Chinese.’3 Her phrasing may seem odd, but it speaks to many of the dilemmas facing the historian – that China itself is a moveable feast, its borders ebbing and flowing, its sense of its own culture forming and re-forming over centuries. The Chinese have often tried to impose some sort of classification on their food, although it is surprisingly recent. For much of history, regional differences in Chinese cookery were limited to a blanket two-way distinction between a wheat-eating North and a rice-eating South, a concept locked in during the sixth century ad, when a China that had been divided for hundreds of years along those lines was finally reunited. The concept that there were four kinds of Chinese food arose during the Qing dynasty (1644–1912), and might broadly be described as a similarly simplistic division into North, South, East and West: Lü, Yue, Su and Chuan, which rides roughshod over any pre-existing differences, with a disregard common to imperial decrees.