Food Culture in Colonial Asia

Food Culture in Colonial Asia PDF Author: Cecilia Leong-Salobir
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1136726543
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
Presenting a social history of colonial food practices in India, Malaysia and Singapore, this book discusses the contribution that Asian domestic servants made towards the development of this cuisine between 1858 and 1963. Domestic cookbooks, household management manuals, memoirs, diaries and travelogues are used to investigate the culinary practices in the colonial household, as well as in clubs, hill stations, hotels and restaurants. Challenging accepted ideas about colonial cuisine, the book argues that a distinctive cuisine emerged as a result of negotiation and collaboration between the expatriate British and local people, and included dishes such as curries, mulligatawny, kedgeree, country captain and pish pash. The cuisine evolved over time, with the indigenous servants preparing both local and European foods. The book highlights both the role and representation of domestic servants in the colonies. It is an important contribution for students and scholars of food history and colonial history, as well as Asian Studies.

Food Culture in Southeast Asia

Food Culture in Southeast Asia PDF Author: Penny Van Esterik
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313344205
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 175

Book Description
Southeast Asian cuisines, such as Thai, have become quite popular in the United States even though immigrant numbers are low. The food is appealing because it is tasty, attractive, and generally healthful, with plentiful vegetables, fish, noodles, and rice. Food Culture in Southeast Asia is a richly informative overview of the food and foodways of the mainland countries including Burma, Thailand, Lao, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Malaysia, and the island countries of Singapore, Brunei, East Timor, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Students and other readers will learn how diverse peoples from diverse geographies feed themselves and the value they place on eating as a material, social, and symbolic act. Chapter 1, Historical Overview, surveys the archaeological and historical evidence concerning mainland Southeast Asia, with emphasis on the Indianized kingdoms of the mainland and the influence of the spice trade on subsequent European colonization. Chapter 2, Major Foods and Ingredients, particularly illuminates the rice culture as the central source of calories and a dominant cultural symbol of feminine nurture plus fish and fermented fish products, local fresh vegetables and herbs, and meat in variable amounts. The Cooking chapter discusses the division of labor in the kitchen, kitchens and their equipment, and the steps in acquiring, processing and preparing food. The Typical Meals chapter approaches typical meals by describing some common meal elements, meal format, and the timing of meals. Typical meals are presented as variations on a common theme, with particular attention to contrasts such as rural-urban and palace-village. Iconic meals and dishes that carry special meaning as markers of ethnic or national identity are also covered. Chapter 6, Eating Out, reviews some of the options for public eating away from home in the region, including the newly developed popularity of Southeast Asian restaurants overseas. The chapter has an urban, middle-class bias, as those are the people who are eating out on a regular basis. The Special Occasions chapter examines ritual events such as feeding the spirits of rice and the ancestors, Buddhist and Muslim rituals involving food, rites of passage, and universal celebrations around the coming of the New Year. The final chapter on diet and health looks at some of the ideologies underlying the relation between food and disease, particularly the humoral system, and then considers the nutritional challenges related to recent changes in local food systems, including food safety.

Curried Cultures

Curried Cultures PDF Author: Krishnendu Ray
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520952243
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Book Description
Although South Asian cookery and gastronomy has transformed contemporary urban foodscape all over the world, social scientists have paid scant attention to this phenomenon. Curried Cultures–a wide-ranging collection of essays–explores the relationship between globalization and South Asia through food, covering the cuisine of the colonial period to the contemporary era, investigating its material and symbolic meanings. Curried Cultures challenges disciplinary boundaries in considering South Asian gastronomy by assuming a proximity to dishes and diets that is often missing when food is a lens to investigate other topics. The book’s established scholarly contributors examine food to comment on a range of cultural activities as they argue that the practice of cooking and eating matter as an important way of knowing the world and acting on it.

Culinary Culture in Colonial India

Culinary Culture in Colonial India PDF Author: Utsa Ray
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110704281X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

Book Description
"Discusses the cuisine to understand the construction of colonial middle-class in Bengal"--

Re-orienting Cuisine

Re-orienting Cuisine PDF Author: Kwang Ok Kim
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1782385630
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Book Description
Foods are changed not only by those who produce and supply them, but also by those who consume them. Analyzing food without considering changes over time and across space is less meaningful than analyzing it in a global context where tastes, lifestyles, and imaginations cross boundaries and blend with each other, challenging the idea of authenticity. A dish that originated in Beijing and is recreated in New York is not necessarily the same, because although authenticity is often claimed, the form, ingredients, or taste may have changed. The contributors of this volume have expanded the discussion of food to include its social and cultural meanings and functions, thereby using it as a way to explain a culture and its changes.

Urban Food Culture

Urban Food Culture PDF Author: Cecilia Leong-Salobir
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137516917
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
This book explores the food history of twentieth-century Sydney, Shanghai and Singapore within an Asian Pacific network of flux and flows. It engages with a range of historical perspectives on each city’s food and culinary histories, including colonial culinary legacies, restaurants, cafes, street food, market gardens, supermarkets and cookbooks, examining the exchange of goods and services and how the migration of people to the urban centres informed the social histories of the cities’ foodways in the contexts of culinary nationalism, ethnic identities and globalization. Considering the recent food history of the three cities and its complex narrative of empire, trade networks and migration patterns, this book discusses key aspects of each city’s cuisine in the twentieth century, examining the interwoven threads of colonialism and globalization. ​

Routledge Handbook of Food in Asia

Routledge Handbook of Food in Asia PDF Author: Cecilia Leong-Salobir
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317209370
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 467

Book Description
Throwing new light on how colonisation and globalization have affected the food practices of different communities in Asia, the Routledge Handbook of Food in Asia explores the changes and variations in the region’s dishes, meals and ways of eating. By demonstrating the different methodologies and theoretical approaches employed by scholars, the contributions discuss everyday food practices in Asian cultures and provide a fascinating coverage of less common phenomenon, such as the practice of wood eating and the evolution of pufferfish eating in Japan. In doing so, the handbook not only covers a wide geographical area, including Japan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Singapore, India, China, South Korea and Malaysia, but also examines the Asian diasporic communities in Canada, the United States and Australia through five key themes: Food, Identity and Diasporic Communities Food Rites and Rituals Food and the Media Food and Health Food and State Matters. Interdisciplinary in nature, this handbook is a useful reference guide for students and scholars of anthropology, sociology and world history, in addition to food history, cultural studies and Asian studies in general.

Taste of Control

Taste of Control PDF Author: René Alexander D. Orquiza
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978806418
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
Taste of Control tells what happened when American colonizers began to influence what Filipinos ate, how they cooked, and how they perceived their national cuisine. Drawing from a rich variety of sources including letters, advertisements, textbooks, menus, and cookbooks, it reveals how food culture served as a battleground over Filipino identity.

Asian Food

Asian Food PDF Author: Katarzyna J. Cwiertka
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136120262
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Book Description
By documenting, analysing and interpreting the transformations in the local diets of Asian peoples within the last hundred years, this volume pinpoints the consequences of the tension between homogenisation and cultural heterogenisation, which is so characteristic for today's global interaction.

Cuisine and Empire

Cuisine and Empire PDF Author: Rachel Laudan
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520286316
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 488

Book Description
Rachel Laudan tells the remarkable story of the rise and fall of the world’s great cuisines—from the mastery of grain cooking some twenty thousand years ago, to the present—in this superbly researched book. Probing beneath the apparent confusion of dozens of cuisines to reveal the underlying simplicity of the culinary family tree, she shows how periodic seismic shifts in “culinary philosophy”—beliefs about health, the economy, politics, society and the gods—prompted the construction of new cuisines, a handful of which, chosen as the cuisines of empires, came to dominate the globe. Cuisine and Empire shows how merchants, missionaries, and the military took cuisines over mountains, oceans, deserts, and across political frontiers. Laudan’s innovative narrative treats cuisine, like language, clothing, or architecture, as something constructed by humans. By emphasizing how cooking turns farm products into food and by taking the globe rather than the nation as the stage, she challenges the agrarian, romantic, and nationalistic myths that underlie the contemporary food movement.