Free Chop Suey : A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States by Andrew Coe Page A

life. . . . Its long use is indicated in the number of terms employed to describe it.”
     
    Williams based the information in
The Middle Kingdom
on Chinese sources, his own observations, and most of all, the first dozen years of the
Chinese Repository
. He essentially sought to condense that publication into a more palatable form for readers who were not experts on China. We see this in the book’s discussion of Chinese food, in which he mostly follows the outline of his
Repository
article “Diet of the Chinese,” covering rice and other grains, vegetables, fruits, oils and fats, beverages, meats, poultry, fish, and the three delicacies birds’ nests, sea cucumbers, and sharks’ fins. He notes with care the Chinese revulsion toward western dairy products like butter and cheese. Predictably, he attacks the idea that cats, dogs, and rats commonly appear in the Chinese diet:
Few articles of food have . . . been so identified with the tastes of a people as kittens and puppies, rats and snails, have with the Chinese. The school geographies in the United States usually contain pictures of a market-man carrying baskets holding these unfortunate victims of a perverse taste (as we think), or else a string of rats and mice hanging by their tails to a stick across his shoulders, which almost necessarily convey the ideathat such things form the usual food of the people. . . . However commonly kittens and puppies may be exposed for sale, the writer never saw rats or mice in the market during a residence of twelve years there. . . . He once asked a native if he or his countrymen ever served up
lau-shang tang
, or rat-soup, on their tables; who replied that he had never seen or eaten it, and added, “Those who do use it should mix cheese with it, that the mess might serve for us both.” 18
     
    Though Williams tones down the harshness of his
Repository
article’s judgments, he still cannot bring himself to enjoy the food of China. The “repose of putrefied garlic on a much-used blanket” is gone. Now, the food is admired as “sufficient in variety, wholesome, and well cooked,” but it remains “unpalatable to a European from the vegetable oil used in their preparation, and the alliaceous plants introduced to savor them.” He treats only minimally the question of how the Chinese prepare their dishes, commenting that they like to cut up their food into small pieces before stewing or frying. In sum, he reported: “the art of cooking has not reached any high degree of perfection among the Chinese, consisting chiefly of stews of various kinds, in which garlic and grease are more abundant than pepper and salt.” 19 One of the world’s great cuisines was reduced to a couple of oily stewpots. Judgments like these would dominate American opinion of Chinese food for many decades.
     
    Unfortunately, when Williams returned to Guangzhou in 1848, he discovered that the community of Western China hands was no longer interested in that country’s history and culture, except as they furthered their own narrow interests. He wrote home: “the class of merchants here now take very much less interest in China than they used to, and the publication is carried on at a loss.” 20 In fact, he soon had to stop publishing the
Chinese Repository
because subscriptionsdropped dramatically. (He spent the next few decades of his life in the U.S. consular service and then retired to teach at Yale University.) He also found that the missionaries who were then arriving in China—those who had answered his call—were a different breed than the earlier generation. The missionary boards back in the United States had grown tired of supporting men like Williams, Parker, and Bridgman, with their printing presses, schools, hospitals, and scholarly work. Now they wanted young, energetic, devout, and single-minded men and women who could concentrate on the task of saving Chinese souls. These turned out to be far more interested in Williams’s examination of