Food for thought: The Gourmet by Lu Wenfu

Lu Wenfu, from the Goodreads site.

A few weeks ago I attended my college reunion and sat in on a class called “A Chinese Culinary History” taught by Professor Maddalena Poli. To quote from the syllabus, “This course introduces social and historical developments using culinary history as a prism. What do cooking and food habits tell us of Chinese culture? We will explore these topics through a variety of media – primary sources, newspapers, photographs, paintings, and movies.” The session I attended was devoted to “The Gourmet”, a novella from the collection “The Gourmet and other stories of modern Chinaby Lu Wenfu.

“The Gourmet” spans the years from the 1948 revolution to the late 1970s and centers on the relationship between a peasant and a rich man who devotes his life to eating and drinking, i.e. a gourmet. After the revolution the peasant becomes a restaurant manager and decrees that the restaurant will only serve simple food appropriate for the proletariat.  The gourmet goes away to sulk and eventually marries a former courtesan who has opened a secret restaurant serving gourmet food. Meanwhile, the peasant faces a general outcry because everyone wants better food, and eventually he relents and brings back a version of the old menu.

The class, which was entirely student discussion, found it remarkable that the gourmet’s life was so “transactional”—his days were devoted to eating multi-course meals with his friends (the story is set in Suzhou, a city in Southeast China famous for its seafood) and talking about nothing but other meals they had enjoyed and meals they planned to eat. Of course, this is what we do when we go out to eat with our own friends at Burnt My Fingers, LOL.

Lu Wenfu lived from 1927 to 2005, experiencing the highs and lows of Chinese society during a turbulent time. He was reassigned as a mechanic during the Great Leap Forward and forced to wear a placard around his neck as an ideological criminal during the Cultural Revolution. He returned to writing after Mao’s death in 1976 and “The Gourmet” was published in 1983. Not surprisingly, there is much less about those dark periods in the story but there’s plenty of eating and culinary description in the early years, through the mid-50s. Check it out.