The Food of China

This is not a cookbook, nor is it one of those armchair cookbooks that have become so popular of late, but rather a somewhat scholarly journal through the story of food in China from the first known agriculture (millet, in the north, approx. 6500-6000 BCE) to the appearance of rice (in the Yangtze Delta approx. 5000 BCE) through the discoveries and cultivation of other important crops...as well as seafood, animals, and as the Chinese themselves say, anything and everything the Chinese have ever found edible. And not only does it cover the discovery and growth of food production in a manner that is virtually page-turning, but because it also links these stories into the most interesting details of Chinese culture and history, it is much more than just a book about food. Author Anderson has scoured ancient texts to extract references to food (and medicine), meals and agriculture in his research, and thus you learn of the food described by the Japanese monk Ennin who visited China in the 840's, and how tea was an exotic drink from the Indian-Burma border regions that probably was introduced to China by Buddhist monks, to name just two examples. Original and secondary sources are referred to in the text itself making additional reading and research tantalizingly easy. My only problem now is the list of about thirty books I want to read culled from this amazing volume. Anyone with a serious interest in China will enjoy reading this book -- and yes, it does close with some very good chapters that include a fascinating survey of "Dinner at the Ngs". (And if you're looking for a good cookbook, there's no better place to start than the recommended list of titles on page 274 at the end of the book.)

Published in the late 1980s, The Food of China remains one of the key modern works on Chinese food history. This was the first book I read on Chinese food. That was a mistake, if only because the book is so dense with information that the reading experience was quite overwhelming at the time. So if you are a novice like I was, start with something lighter such as Francine Halvorsen's The Food and Cooking of China before taking the deep plunge with this more academic book. But E. N. Anderson remains on of the two or three authoritative references in my bookshelf that I know I will be reaching for many years to come.