Lifestyle
Feast your eyes on Taiwan's distinct food (and understand a history of colonization)
Ivy Chen (left) and Clarissa Wei browse Shuixian Gong Market in Tainan, Taiwan, in January.
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Ivy Chen (left) and Clarissa Wei browse Shuixian Gong Market in Tainan, Taiwan, in January.
An Rong Xu for NPR
TAINAN, Taiwan — On a Friday morning in the southern city of Tainan, Shuixian Gong Market overflows with displays of shiny orange and silver fish, stacks of glistening pork ribs and crates of dragon fruit and guavas. Vendors wash out their stands with hoses, and Taiwanese cooks ask for parcels of raw drumsticks or breasts. People on motorized scooters ride carefully through the market’s corridors, laden with bags of dried goods.
It’s easy to think of Taiwanese food as a subset of Chinese food — after all, the island’s food shares many culinary traditions and techniques with those from mainland China. Yet Clarissa Wei and Ivy Chen would argue that Taiwanese food is distinct. They’re the creators of the cookbook Made in Taiwan.
That title declares something: Even though about 90% of people in Taiwan have Chinese ancestry, they have forged a cuisine that is, in many ways, their own.
A set of traditional Taiwanese cuisine staples: oyster omelet, lu rou fan, oyster soup and fish ball soup.
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A set of traditional Taiwanese cuisine staples: oyster omelet, lu rou fan, oyster soup and fish ball soup.
An Rong Xu for NPR
Fresh seafood is sorted at Shuixian Gong Market.
An Rong Xu for NPR
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Fresh seafood is sorted at Shuixian Gong Market.
An Rong Xu for NPR
“Taiwanese food is quite distinct in that we have our own pantry items that are made in and unique to Taiwan,” Wei says. “So the way that soy sauce and rice wine and rice vinegar are made in Taiwan are not made similarly elsewhere in the world.”
Another key difference: Taiwanese food is sweet. In Tainan, which used to be a sugar-cane-producing hub, it’s even more pronounced.
Chen also points out that Taiwanese food doesn’t tend to rely on a lot of spices. “When our ancestors moved here, they found we have so many fresh ingredients in this small island, so it’s very easy to get food very fresh, so we don’t over-season it,” she says.
These differences are all products of Taiwan’s unique history.
“Taiwanese food is, I would say, a combination of all of our waves of colonization and governance,” Wei says.
Dried goods on sale at Shuixian Gong Market.
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Dried goods on sale at Shuixian Gong Market.
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Vendors at Shuixian Gong Market.
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Vendors at Shuixian Gong Market.
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Take sugar. In the 1600s, the Dutch came to southern Taiwan, where they established a couple of forts and the sugar cane industry, bringing Chinese farmers to help raise the crops. During Japanese occupation from the late 1800s through World War II, Taiwan was Japan’s main source of sugar production.
“At one point, two-thirds of all Taiwanese families were in the sugar cane industry,” Wei says. “So it was a huge part of our culture.”
Sugar is so important in Taiwan that it shows up even in its savory dishes, like Taiwanese sausages or braised pork over rice. It’s also a key ingredient in some of the island’s religious offerings, like ang ku kueh, or “red turtle kueh,” which are bright-pink sticky rice sweets stuffed with fillings like red bean and black sesame and shaped to resemble a turtle’s shell.
And just like sugar, the types of rice help tell the story of colonization on the island.
A bowl of traditional wa gui, a savory steamed rice cake.
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A bowl of traditional wa gui, a savory steamed rice cake.
An Rong Xu for NPR
Tapiocas on sale at Shuixian Gong Market.
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Tapiocas on sale at Shuixian Gong Market.
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“The type of rice that Taiwanese people eat on a daily basis has changed really depending on who has governed Taiwan, which I find is a really fascinating reflection of Taiwanese colonial history,” Wei says. “Taiwan is the only subtropical country in the world where short-grain rice are the grain of choice.”
Wei explains that early Chinese settlers who came to Taiwan hundreds of years ago brought over long-grain rice, which was commonly grown in mainland China. When Japanese colonizers came, she says, they craved the short-grain rice they were accustomed to eating. The problem: Short-grain rice doesn’t grow very well in Taiwan’s subtropical climate.
“They spent 10 years trying to cultivate short-grain rice on Yangmingshan, which is a mountain hill-ish area in Taipei,” Wei says. “After 10 years, they finally succeeded, and that has become our rice of choice.”
Order a rice dish from any restaurant in Taiwan, and your bowl will be filled with bright, sticky, short-grain rice. “And that was really through the efforts of the Japanese,” says Wei.
A selection of pastries on sale at the market.
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A selection of pastries on sale at the market.
An Rong Xu for NPR
Fresh wheel cakes being made at Shuixian Gong Market.
An Rong Xu for NPR
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Fresh wheel cakes being made at Shuixian Gong Market.
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Foods like kueh are made using time- and labor-intensive crops, like sugar and sticky rice, so that makes them special and a worthy offering to one’s gods and ancestors. Chen says food culture in Taiwan is inextricable from religion.
“During the worship time [which could be] two or three hours, people are hungry, so they are hanging out in the neighborhood and looking for food. And that’s [why] the many small vendors [began] gathering in the neighborhood and start doing their business,” she said.
In fact, in Taiwan, temples and food markets often appear side by side. Shuixian Gong Market is also home to Shuixian Temple — a structure that is hundreds of years old. The temple is dedicated to water gods, with intricately carved stone pillars, red-painted wooden beams and gold dragons flanking its entrance. Paintings above the temple’s entrance depict scenes of maritime life, paying homage to the ocean that surrounds the island.
Just a few yards away from the temple stands a fish ball vendor. Trays of ice in front of her display neat rows of balls made from varieties of seafood: shrimp, flounder and milkfish.
Fish balls vendors serve up the goods at Shuixian Gong Market.
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Fish balls vendors serve up the goods at Shuixian Gong Market.
An Rong Xu for NPR
Just some of the fresh fish on display at the market.
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Just some of the fresh fish on display at the market.
An Rong Xu for NPR
“The milkfish is a very important aquaculture in the Tainan area,” Chen explains. The bony white fish also has a connection to the Dutch colonization of the island.
“The milkfish [has] been here for centuries,” Wei says. “When the Dutch came in, they started the aquaculture industry where they were breeding the fish, and this has become a staple of the Taiwanese diet ever since.”
Seafood makes up a huge portion of the Taiwanese diet — from fish balls in soups, to a dried flounder used by many Taiwanese cooks to make stock, to Pacific oysters, which are found in a variety of dishes.
Chinese migrants started farming these oysters along the island’s west coast hundreds of years ago. They’re smaller than the oysters seen in North America, and most of the time, they are not eaten raw. Most farmers lack the infrastructure to closely monitor the water quality, so they show up in cooked dishes, like o-a-tsian, oyster omelets.
These eggs are thickened with sweet potato starch and studded with oysters before being slathered in a sweet and tangy sauce made from pickled vegetables. Wei says the ingredients in this dish can show a lot about the island.
An oyster omelet.
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An oyster omelet.
An Rong Xu for NPR
Clarissa Wei and Ivy Chen share wa gui, a savory steamed rice cake.
An Rong Xu for NPR
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Clarissa Wei and Ivy Chen share wa gui, a savory steamed rice cake.
An Rong Xu for NPR
“It describes what Taiwanese food was 200, 300 years ago. It’s very simple. The bulk of it really is sweet potato starch, because sweet potatoes thrive [here in Taiwan] — it’s kind of like a weed,” she says. “And this isn’t a dish you associate with Chinese food at all. It’s something that’s very, very Taiwanese and unique to Taiwan.”
What distinguishes Chinese food from the unique flavors in Taiwanese food is a bit of a nebulous thing. Chen is a cooking instructor and has taught students from all over the world. She says they’d often ask her, “What is Taiwanese food? What is Chinese food? What’s the difference?” Figuring out the difference was a process for her.
“I can tell [the difference],” Chen says. “But I never think that people will ask me that way, that I need to give a definition about Chinese food and Taiwanese food.”
There isn’t a black-and-white definition of Taiwanese food. Wei and Chen argue that the food is unique because the flavors in Taiwan’s cooking, as well as its produce and seafood, are the historical record of colonialism and migration on this island.
And to them, that means the island’s cuisine deserves to stand on its own.
Sunday Puzzle
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On-air challenge
I’m going to give you two five-letter words. Add the same two letters at the end of the first one and the start of the second one, in each case to complete a familiar seven-letter word.
Ex. Later Ready –> LATERAL/ALREADY
1. Habit Tempt
2. Laten Press
3. Blank Ching
4. Since Venue
5. Shack Groom
6. Surge Stage
Last week’s challenge
Last week’s challenge came from Rawson Sheinberg. of Plymouth, Mich. Think of a U.S. city with a two-word name. Add a letter to the first word, without rearranging letters, to name a country. Then, without adding a letter, rearrange the letters of the second word to name another country. What places are these?
Answer: Los Angeles –> Laos, Senegal
Winner
Elaine Neel of Derby, Kansas.
This week’s challenge
Next weekend will be the 186th convention of the National Puzzler League, in Bloomington, Ind., which I’ll be attending as always. Two other people who will be there are Henri Picciotto and Joshua Kosman, who created this week’s challenge. Name two words that are opposites. They share a single letter. Remove that shared letter from each word, put a hyphen between the two starting words, and you’ll get a term you sometimes see in food ads. What are the two words?
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it here by Thursday, July 9 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle. Important: include a phone number where we can reach you.
An illustration of the Boston Tea Party, when colonists dumped British East India Company tea into the harbor on Dec. 16, 1773. Some accounts say this marked a pivotal moment when Americans started loving coffee. But one historian says Americans were drinking lots of coffee before then.
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Hulton Archive/Getty Images
A consequential act of defiance secured tea’s place as perhaps the most iconic beverage of America’s colonial era.
The Boston Tea Party became an essential ingredient in the recipe for revolution in the following years.
But tea wasn’t the only hot beverage with a prominent role in America’s fight for independence.
Coffee was an important part of American culture from the start. And coffeehouses were essential, too — serving as hubs for brewing ideas of independence.
As the United States celebrates 250 years, here’s what to know about America’s early history of coffee.
Colonists were drinking coffee long before the United States existed
Europeans brought coffee with them when they came to America.
“The first documented example of a mortar and pestle used to grind coffee beans was on the Mayflower” in 1620, says historian Michelle Craig McDonald, the author of Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States.
“The fact that coffee was present so early is not surprising if you think about it,” McDonald says. “A number of those who were on the Mayflower came to North America from Amsterdam, which was a major coffee trading center in Western Europe by the 17th century.”
The first coffeehouse in the colonies opened in 1676 in Boston, a century before the U.S. declared independence, she says. Some taverns sold coffee even earlier.
The Boston Tea Party probably wasn’t the dramatic turning point toward coffee that some claim
On the night of Dec. 16, 1773, disgruntled colonists boarded three ships moored in Boston Harbor and threw overboard more than 92,000 pounds of tea owned by the British East India Company.
Tensions had been building between the Crown and the colonies over the previous decade, as Britain tried to levy taxes on its colonies to recoup war debts.
The Boston Tea Party protest was targeted at the British government’s passing of the Tea Act in 1773, which granted the East India Company a monopoly over tea sales in the colonies. While the British had removed some unpopular taxes in the preceding years, they left tea taxes in place. Colonial merchants were especially upset that the act allowed the East India Company to undercut their tea business.
To build solidarity for their cause of sovereignty, some patriots called on colonialists to swear off tea in favor of coffee. It’s why many histories point to the Boston Tea Party as a turning point when Americans switched from mostly drinking tea to mostly coffee. The anti-tea sentiment was immortalized in a founding father’s now-famous letter.
In July 1774, John Adams (before he became the second U.S. president) wrote to his wife Abigail, recounting an incident during his travels. After a long day, he asked the proprietor of the house where he was lodging for a cup of tea, provided it was smuggled and free of British taxes.
” ‘No sir, said she, we have renounced all Tea in this Place. I cant make Tea, but I’le make you Coffee.’ Accordingly I have drank Coffee every Afternoon since, and have borne it very well. Tea must be universally renounced. I must be weaned, and the sooner, the better,” Adams wrote.
Despite John Adams claiming a newfound patriotic duty to appreciate coffee, McDonald says colonists had been drinking lots of coffee all along.
She studied advertisements from the 1760s and ’70s to estimate how many shops sold coffee versus tea. Even before the Boston Tea Party, she says, “coffee is definitely more broadly available than tea is.”
A big reason? It was cheaper. “Its price again per pound is significantly less, which tells you about its availability, its accessibility to drinkers.”
Historians say it’s hard to definitively compare tea with coffee consumption, though, as official records from before America gained independence were inconsistent.
And smuggling was rampant, making official records even less reliable.
“There is a vast amount of smuggling,” says Joyce Chaplin, a professor of early American history at Harvard University. “So they’re not paying formal duties on tea that they get from the Dutch. They’re probably not paying formal duties on coffee from the French Caribbean.”
And Chaplin notes that people who loudly proclaimed a new appreciation for coffee over tea weren’t always doing what they said. It could have been political pandering. “I do not drink tea that comes via the East India Company,” she posits someone of the era saying. “But, you know, other sources are fine. Ditto for the coffee.”
Coffeehouses were a hub for revolutionary ideas
A coffeepot with cover, circa 1795. It has an American eagle motif, made in China for the American market. Coffee was part of a growing trend of globalization in the colonial era.
Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images
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Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images
In the colonial era, coffeehouses were hotbeds for seditious thought — where people planned acts of revolution.
“Coffeehouses are kind of famous for being places where people think and plot things,” says Mark Pendergrast, author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World.
A coffeehouse called the Green Dragon served as one of the locations for planning the Boston Tea Party. Years earlier, the Old London Coffeehouse in Philadelphia was a meeting place for strategizing responses to another British tax, the Stamp Act of 1765.
In Britain, coffeehouses were nicknamed “penny universities,” Pendergrast says: “because for a penny you could go and learn a whole lot by sitting around in a coffeehouse and discussing everything.” The same attitude traveled across the Atlantic.
Early American coffeehouses would commonly have city business directories, libraries of newspapers and currency exchange information. People could get maritime insurance there or buy things at auction.
“There’s a reason why coffeehouses become places of colonial protest … in the 1760s, in the 1770s, and it’s because it is the place where traders and merchants tended to gather,” historian McDonald says. “That’s where they heard about the economics of the day.”
Taverns were more likely than coffeehouses to have rooms for rent and stables for travelers’ horses. They were also more likely to have food.
Interestingly enough, coffeehouses could serve alcohol and taverns could serve coffee.
But the vibes at each were different. While women and men could “riotously drink together” in taverns, coffeehouses often didn’t allow women, according to Chaplin of Harvard.
“The sense was the coffeehouse was the place where you had a clear head — to argue about politics, to find out what was going on in the business world, to cut a business deal,” she says. “Whereas taverns were places where, in a sense, you refueled.”
Still, she says, the lines between the two “weren’t completely clear.”
The cost of America’s revolutionary drink
Coffee (and tea for that matter) was part of a growing globalization of trade around this time.
Much of the coffee in the colonies was grown in the Caribbean, while tea came from China.
Supply was up and coffee was easier than ever to drink. “Trade and frankly, imperialism, are making it possible for … colonial products to be produced and transferred to other parts of the world in greater and greater quantities,” says Chaplin.
As a result, by the time of the American Revolution, both coffee and tea were in reach for many common people. “They’re both becoming affordable luxuries,” Chaplin says.
Fancy coffee and tea paraphernalia were also part of this increasingly global market. Middle and upper-class people would have wanted special implements for drinking these beverages and a place to drink it. That meant they needed wood for coffee tables, silver for coffeepots, and porcelain for teapots.
“These two beverages are encouraging people to consume all kinds of new stuff,” says Chaplin. “The mahogany that comes out of the Caribbean, the china coming out of China, silver that is mined principally in South and Central America and processed in a lot of the parts of the world.”
There’s a dark side to coffee’s history, too. The plantations that supplied the crop ran on the labor of enslaved people. By 1790, half of the world’s coffee was being grown in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, in what is today Haiti, Pendergrast says, where slaves were routinely mistreated, raped and murdered.
The Declaration of Independence, signed in 1776, is infamous for a contradiction. It proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” but failed to acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of enslaved people living in America at the time.
Coffee carried a similar contradiction. The beverage that fueled conversations that inspired America’s fight for independence — centered on the ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — depended on enslavement.
“Coffee had this paradoxical effect, that it did promote revolutionary thought,” Pendergrast says. “But it was also grown by slaves.”
Just in time for a contentious 250th anniversary of the United States of America, historian David S. Reynolds’ latest book, Two Ships, helps us realize that any country that couldn’t agree on its own origin story is destined for divisive times.
Two Ships is about the complicated, conjoined legacy of the landings of the Mayflower, which carried the Pilgrims to Plymouth, Mass., in 1620, and the White Lion, which arrived in Jamestown a year earlier, bringing the first enslaved Africans to Virginia.
As Reynolds demonstrates, it’s not so much the facts of these two voyages, as it is the meanings ascribed to them, that made them such a powerful metaphor for two conflicting visions of American identity.
To simplify, the Mayflower’s passengers were separatist Puritans, dissenters to the reign of the English king, James I. As the United States developed, the Mayflower was credited with carrying the seeds of a radical democracy to the New World, one in which all men (in theory, at least) were equal before God.
In contrast, the European settlers of Jamestown were Royalists, also known as Cavaliers. Loyal to the monarchy, they believed in a strict hierarchy.
But the meaning of the images of the two ships shifted depended on who was invoking them and when. Not surprisingly, the metaphor was deployed most vigorously during the Civil War. In abolitionist speeches and writings, the White Lion or the “Slave-Ship,” as it was commonly called, was condemned for infecting America with the “plague-spot” of slavery.
Reynolds says that Frederick Douglass resorted to the “two ships” metaphor frequently, while Lincoln avoided it, hoping to preserve a unified ship of state. Meanwhile, Southern descendants of Cavaliers invoked the Mayflower to emphasize the intolerance and “cruel, persecuting” character of the Puritans. In a comment that resonates for our own times, Reynolds says:
It didn’t matter to the South that … by the mid-nineteenth century, the North had become a kaleidoscope of religious denominations, …, few of which resembled the faith of the Plymouth colonists. Distortion is intrinsic to cultural memory, especially when amplified by sectional or political bias. For Southerners, the Mayflower had brought Puritanism, which had yielded fanatical movements like abolitionism, now a dire threat to the Union.
In a brief-but-fascinating digression into the unpredictable power of literary fiction, Reynolds observes that the South’s fondness for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s anti-Puritan novel, The Scarlet Letter, and, even more, for the medieval historical romances of Sir Walter Scott, bolstered its nostalgia for a largely-imagined feudal society.
Reynolds quotes the always-quotable Mark Twain, no fan of Scott’s, as saying that Scott “did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote …”
Two Ships is a dazzling survey of some three centuries of American history through a close reading of a metaphor. By the 1890s, Reynolds says, the interpretive tide had turned again: “Southern and Northern whites, feeling threatened by people of color and by an array of European immigrants, were retreating to a cocoon of racial solidarity that Mayflower celebrations helped reinforce.”
By the later-20th century, the image of the Mayflower was depoliticized and commercialized into Pilgrim hats and Black Friday sales. The powerful metaphor of the two ships receded into the mist.
Seven years ago, however, the 1619 Project piloted the White Lion — “The Slave-Ship” — back into view and anchored it at the center of debates about slavery’s place in the national story. The 1619 Project has been faulted for its historiography, and it does lie outside of the chronological boundaries of Reynolds’ book; still, it seems too momentous a reappearance of the White Lion not to at least acknowledge in this book.
That criticism noted, I think reading Two Ships would be an excellent way to observe this particular Fourth of July. It’s wise for all of us to have a more informed awareness of how Americans have understood, misunderstood and, often, flattened each other into stereotypes. Or, as Ernest Hemingway, one of the Mayflower Pilgrims’ more cynical descendants, might say in response to that sentiment: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
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