Abstract

In his influential book Que vivan los tamales!: Food and the Making of Mexican Identity, Jeffrey M. Pilcher has examined the complicated relationships between the national cuisine and the construction of national identity in Mexico. Not only does he emphasize the role that class, gender and the political-economic structure of capitalism played in shaping the national cuisine, he also pays attention to the native and the non-native factors. In other words, he suggests we cannot ignore the population flow from outside and the accompanying culinary cultural trends. Especially in the regions of multiple ethnic groups produced by colonization, the native culinary resources and styles interacted and integrated with the foreign ones. This was what happened in Mexico as well as in Taiwan.
This article aims to examine the main trends and diversity of cookbook publishing between the post-war era and the end of the twentieth century in Taiwan. By doing so, it explores the transformation and configuration of culinary culture in post-war Taiwan. Going beyond the perspective of any notion of national cuisine, this article looks into the internal diversity of cookbook writing and publishing, and investigates the element of transnational communication in this phenomenon. It also examines various kinds of published cookbooks and their relationships with the political, economic, cultural, medical, and ethnic context by revealing that apart from the categories of ‘Chinese cuisine/Fu Pei-Mei’ and ‘Taiwanese cuisine/Ah-Chi-Shi,’ there were other categories of cookbooks. Furthermore, this article examines the role that cross-regional exchange played in the making of the culinary writing in post-war Taiwan. Finally, this article proposes and considers some questions important for the study of Taiwanese cookbooks for further research.