Seminar - August 2021
Food and the Colonies: A Potted History of Chinese Food in Twentieth-Century Sydney and Singapore
Dr Cecilia Leong-Salobir, The University of Western Australia/The University of Wollongong
For the Food Values Research Group's August 2021 seminar, we are pleased to welcome Dr Cecilia Leong-Salobir.
Sydney and Singapore share a history of British colonial encounter: Sydney as convict colony and Singapore as Crown colony. This paper examines the development of Chinese food through the settlement of Chinese communities in the two cities. The emergence of Chinese food practices in Sydney was a direct consequence of Australian immigration laws. While Chinese arrivals to Singapore dated back to the sixteenth century it was from the 1900s that numbers increased significantly. Among the first Chinese arrivals to Australia were those who worked in the gold fields amidst hostility from white workers. Chinese cooks were also employed in farms and factories and sold food from cookshops in the various urban centres. Chinese furniture factory workers in Sydney, for example, were served food prepared by Chinese cooks. The majority of these were from southern China and cooked Cantonese food. By contrast, most of the regional cooking traditions as well as several distinct Chinese dialect groups settled in Singapore, bringing with them food practices from all over China. Among the dialect groups represented were Hokkien, Teochew and Cantonese. The British, in its imperial expansion, encouraged migrants for the colony’s labour workforce, including Chinese. The historical approach adopted for this paper includes these primary sources: restaurant menus, newspapers, magazines and cookbooks. This discussion is guided by the work of food historians Jeffrey Pilcher and Ken Albala.
When: Wednesday, 25th August 2021, 12-1 PM
Where: Online. Please RSVP to foodresearch@adelaide.edu.au
Dr Cecilia Leong-Salobir is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia and University of Wollongong. She is a food historian and has published widely on colonial food history and food history of Asia and Australia. Her monographs are Urban Food Culture in Asia Pacific: Sydney, Shanghai and Singapore in the 20th Century (Palgrave Macmillan 2019) and Food Culture in Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire (Routledge 2011). She also edited the Routledge Handbook of Food in Asia (2019). Her current project is on the global history of Hakka food. Cecilia is a founding member of the editorial board for the journal Global Food History; member of the editorial board for Food, Culture and Society; and board member of the US-based Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS). She also serves on the ASFS committee on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.