About This Issue
From A General History of Taiwan, the Fujianese and Cantonese immigrants are described as settling on the island along with their native culinary practices: “The cuisine of Taiwan is the same as that of Fujian and Guangdong… At feasts, they must roast a piglet, while Cantonese households would kill a cat to serve its head to honored guests.” Today, this would be seen as inhumane, but at the time it was the way for hosts and guests to celebrate together. In The Melancholy of the Tropics, the indigenous people watch Lévi-Strauss consume a worm called “koro,” which lives in decaying tree trunks. This act of observation opens up the possibility of loosening the power structures that distinguish civilization from savagery in the Western world. Eating, beyond fulfilling physiological needs, also serves as a prominent marker of “cultural image” (eidos); like language, each society has its own usages and symbolic meanings.
The trends in Taiwanese food culture—Western-style Japanese cuisine, Taiwanese cuisine, home cooking, culinary techniques, dining practices, and spaces—were less a shocking foreign influence for Lévi-Strauss than what Chiao Tung describes as “hybridization”: a blended flavor, a transnational foodscape, simultaneously exotic and internalized, part of the assimilation process yet distinct in character. During the Meiji Restoration, Western dishes were equated with civilized progress, and familiar cooking techniques infused with Japanese style became highly popular among Taiwanese intellectuals—beef hotpot, curry, coffee, desserts—leaving traces of colonial modernity on the palate.
Although these specific eating habits were strongly influenced by Japan, most foods and consumption practices remained distinct from the Japanese mainland due to local production conditions or religious factors. Within this discernible foodscape, banquet dishes different from Japanese cuisine offered locally unique flavors and exemplified refined local culinary techniques, thus termed “Taiwanese cuisine” (Tseng, 2018). When fresh shiitake mushrooms and dried bonito flakes became the umami of Taiwanese soups, ingredients from traditional China, such as Jinhua ham or dried squid, also became indispensable for demonstrating complex preparation and elevated taste.
Taiwanese restaurant cuisine was noted for its delicate flavors, rare ingredients, and grand presentation, as exemplified in the 1921 advertisement for Jiangshan Lou in the Taiwan Nichinichi Shinpō, claiming that its dishes could forever rival both Japanese and Western cuisine.
Once bustling, the restaurants’ lively atmosphere has mostly quieted; many now face demolition or decay. Yet, as public leisure spaces, they once offered fine food and drink, entertainment with yidan (performing female entertainers), spaces for officials, merchants, and literati to socialize, and venues for associations to gather—witnessing the development of Taiwanese political and social life, as in Taichung’s Juying Lou and Zuoyue Lou. In an era when art education was limited and artistic trends were weak, the yidan even served as models for painters. By the 1930s, however, the image of talented and beautiful yidan gradually gave way to the overtly sexualized impressions of female attendants and café hostesses.
Lavish banquet cuisine can still be recreated, and simple home cooking continues to be passed down, while globally renowned restaurants populate city streets. Yet the era of first tasting the flavors of civilization, full of complex emotions and layered tastes, no longer exists. Looking ahead to the next century, if one reflects on today’s Taiwanese food culture, what landscapes will be observed, and what foodscapes recorded?
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