Chinese Food and Foodways in Southeast Asia and Beyond

by Tan Chee-Beng (Editor)

Chinese cuisine has had a deep impact on culinary traditions in Southeast Asia, where the lack of certain ingredients and access to new ingredients along with the culinary knowledge of local people led Chinese migrants to modify traditional dishes and to invent new foods. This process brought the cuisine of southern China, considered by some writers to be "the finest in the world," into contact with a wide range of local and global cuisines and ingredients. When Chinese from Southeast Asia moved on to other parts of the world, they brought these variants of Chinese food with them, completing a cycle of culinary reproduction, localization and invention, and globalization. The process does not end there, for the new context offers yet another set of ingredients and culinary traditions, and the "embedding and fusing of foods" continues, creating additional hybrid forms. Written by scholars whose deep familiarity with Chinese cuisine is both personal and academic, Chinese Food and Foodways in Southeast Asia and Beyond is a book that anyone who has been fortunate enough to encounter Southeast Asian food will savour, and it provides a window on this world for those who have yet to discover it.

Genres: Food

320 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 2011

Reviews

[Alice Yong]

Fascinating reading for food lovers especially those interested to learn how Chinese food influences made their presence felt in Southeast Asia, then through some hybridisation went on to become a force to be reckoned with in different parts of the world. Full of interesting facts and insights about the Chinese food ways.

[Joshua]

Drawn-out holiday reading... While I found the book's ethnographic coverage of diasporic Chinese cuisine to be stimulating, I felt the chapters (essay contributions) lacked overall coherence. Personally, I felt the chapters oscillated between being very dense (Duruz) and comparatively lacking depth (Tan). But just being about food made up for the deficiencies....