This is a assignment from the cource about East Asia(China, Japan, Korea) history from 13th-17th century. The Key point about this essay is that: “Use recipes as clues to describe the cultural and material exchange process between China and East Asia and even the world, rather than talking about the recipes themselves. The time range of the article needs to be from classical China to (but the details of the Ming Dynasty recipes need to be emphasized) the Qing Dynasty”. If you have any better recipe about East Asia history, just let me know, we can change the original recipe. and here is the original requirment:
Analyzing your favourite recipe in global context.
Choose a favourite recipe (one that is not excessively simple). Write global history of that recipe, describing the route taking by the various foodstuffs in the recipe.
Write the recipe, by producing a biography of the different historical stages of the recipe. To do this assignment well, it will be necessary to describe clearly the temporal and geographic context of each stage.
It would be ideal to create three time or geographic points, minimum. One of those points could even before that particular dish was possible!
For instance (to use one example for me, that consequently I must ban the rest of you from using) – if for instance, I choose as my recipe “stuffed Green peppers,” a food that was much eaten by ethnic-Swabian family in the province of Bessarabia (present-day Moldova) in what was then the Russian empire. I would first list the ingredients and the method I use to cook this meal. Then I might complicate it, perhaps (in the first stage) describing the origin of how key foodstuffs entered Bessarabia (taking perhaps 1800 as my baseline). I should create more than one vantage point, of course – perhaps I decide that, above all, this is an Ottoman empire recipe. If I am able, perhaps I might create an earlier baseline, for at least some aspects of the recipe (perhaps setting 1700 Ottoman empire as my first vantage point), and also a later one (perhaps extending the story to the present-day in Canada).
Some, such as the beef and onions and garlic, might have pretty uninteresting migration histories in the case of Bessarabia (but might be interesting in other respects – stay tuned); others, such as the green peppers, tomatoes, and the black pepper, have very interesting migration histories. With 1800 as my baseline, I might then trace the process whereby these products arrived in my ancestors’ Swabian village in Bessarabia, in as great detail as possible. Rice (usually included) arrived quite a bit earlier but could also be part of the story.
For the beef on the other hand, people have been eating beef in that region since the Paleolithic period, so what is there to say? Well, I guess quite a bit! Beef is, after all, a very expensive source of protein, requiring much land, and cows are also used for transportation and plowing, so slaughtering cattle has significant implications. In the Bessarabian context, it might be worth noting that the region was steppe land, not long before inhabited by Nogai Tatars who were pushed out with the expansion of the Russian empire. My Swabian ancestors were thus benefiting from land that had recently been transformed by ethnic cleansing. One likely result (I haven’t done the research yet) would be lots of land for pasturage – although it is also worth noting that stuffed green peppers uses ground beef ( a relatively cheap source of meat, involving much less beef per person than, say, a steak). In any case, with 1800 Bessarabia as the baseline, a political economy of beef, and an ecology of beef, should become part of my story.
Here, I might also embark upon a cultural discussion – my Swabian ancestors may have been originally from southern Germany, but while living in Bessarabia their culture was changing to accept garlic as core to their diet, and also accepting as a standard dish a typical Ottoman dish (also eaten in Greece, Lebanon, Libya, etc.).
Of course, you don’t have to chose a food that is traditional to your family, but you should chose one that allows you to trace several different stages, in this manner, and also provide a great deal of detailed “thick” description.
Of course, another ecological/economic aspect of a foodstuff could well be the ecological implications and environmental costs of its cultivation or collection – so, a discussion of mutton, for instance, might also include a discussion of the ecological cost (in terms of erosion and deforestation) of the devoting lands to sheep pasture; currently, cattle herding the Amazon involves both the clear cutting of the Amazon and the displacement of the indigenous people who lived in those regions of Amazonia, while, in the more distant past, certain forested regions (Tibet, Iceland, large sections of the US Midwest) were deliberately denuded of forests in order to expand pasturage.
While you may want to discuss the more recent history (and society, economics and ecology) for your favourite recipe, be sure to bring the discussion back to the late medieval/early modern periods.
The format should be 12 point ordinary font (such as Times New Roman), double spaced, ordinary margins. Footnotes, of which there generally should be many, are likely to be in a 10 point font and single spaced.
Length: About 5 pages, not including notes, title page, pictures, quotations, etc.