"Shark's fin wrapped in lotus leaf, shrimp cakes, crystal-clear pigeon eggs, chicken fried in onions, crab and asparagus soup, spring rolls, deep-fried salted duck, Pekinese cabbage, abalone in chitterling gravy, stewed fish, assorted fruit with almonds, and pastries for dessert." Thus read the Japanese travelogue A Journey on Taiwan's Railroads written in the Japanese occupation era.

"Lobster salad, smoked swan, five-flavored clams, lilies and almonds, deep-fried rice balls, steamed fish rolls, shark's fin with bamboo sprouts, shrimp and mushrooms in oyster sauce, bamboo hearts with mushrooms, sea cucumber with betelpalm sprouts, 'luck and longevity plate' [various deep-fried delicacies], chitterlings with scallops, and a fruit juice dessert." Thus read the menu for the bando that Lin Tien-sheng threw in honor of his son's wedding.

The two menus are separated by half a century. In the last fifty years, Taiwanese cuisine has changed and improved a great deal, both in terms of ingredients and methods of preparation. Bamboo hearts, betel-palm sprouts, and swan meat, for example, are all rare and new ingredients. Swan meat is even imported from overseas.

The many deep-fried delicacies of a "luck and longevity plate".

A new hybrid

As early as a thousand years ago, some of the coastal residents of Fujian and Guangdong migrated to Taiwan. Of these, most came from the Zhangzhou and Quanzhou regions of Fujian, and Taiwanese cuisine bears their heavy imprint.

The roots of Taiwanese food lie in Fujianese cuisine. The common saying goes, "Mild in the south, salty in the north, sour in the east, and spicy in the west." The food of Fujian, which lies in the south of China, is best known for its light, fresh flavor. Other aspects of Fujianese cuisine, such as delicate knife work and an emphasis on seafood, have also become major parts of Taiwanese culinary custom.

Taiwan was governed by Japan for fifty years, and during this long period its food could not help absorbing some Japanese flavor. The most obvious borrowing from Japan is the Taiwanese penchant for raw, chilled dishes, such as sashimi and tossed vegetable salad, food not easy to find in Fujian.

With the influx in the last fifty years of Chinese from all over the mainland, Taiwanese food has incorporated the tastes of many different Chinese provinces. Lin Tien-sheng admits that today Taiwanese food has improved a lot, but he adds that it has lost some traditional special features.

A soup for every entree?

Nowadays, the venue where one can most easily sink one's teeth into traditional Taiwanese food is the bando. In Taiwan, bando usually serves exclusively Taiwanese fare. When other regional flavors of Chinese food were introduced to Taiwan at the end of Japanese rule, they quickly made their way into restaurants, but few took on the form of the open-air bando.

Right in front of one's own door, at the side of the road, in the market, or in an activity center or a school auditorium, just throw up a big tent and move in some tables and chairs. The head chef will cook things up right on the spot, and a spicy, boisterous bando banquet can instantly be concocted.

Generally speaking, religious festivals, engagements, weddings, birthdays, funerals, house-warming parties, or a baby's one-month anniversary are all good excuses for a bando. So almost every Taiwanese has at one time or another been either the host or a guest at a bando feast.

Behind the bando tradition lies a body of culinary wisdom and taboos. Lin Tien-sheng points out that the chef must understand the customs of Chinese from different ethnic backgrounds. For those of Quanzhou descent (the Taipei area), you absolutely must fry up two plates of "birthday noodles." Those of Tong'an extraction (the east coast around Ilan) have to have sticky-rice-ball soup (signifying togetherness). The post-Japanese-era wave of mainlanders require fried "New Year's cake," made of sticky rice. For the Hakka, celery dishes (symbolizing a close family), scallions (longevity), and turnips (good luck) are all essential. Some dishes cannot be used during a wedding banquet, often because their Chinese names are homonyms for inauspicious things. For instance, silver carp (lianyu) sounds like "again and again" (lianxu), and you only want to marry once. Duck (ya) sounds like stress (ya). A crab bears its fangs and flourishes its claws, portending marital violence, and the turtle signifies troubled relations.

Many people consider soup in abundance to be the signature of Taiwanese victuals. The close association between Taiwanese cuisine and copious bowls of boiling water may very well be related to the way bandos are organized. "A plate of food, then a bowl of soup" is the traditional way to serve up a bando. Lin Tien-sheng explains that in the past, bandos did not include juice or soda. When the crowd was eating glass noodles and drinking rice wine, they needed to drink a lot of soup.

Bed of green

Besides this, the alternation of food with soup is closely connected to limitations in terms of locale and equipment. Lin Tien-sheng notes that in the past cooking with charcoal or firewood did not produce a strong enough fire, and it was not easy to quickly stir-fry. Therefore, steaming and stewing were more convenient. And a bando banquet can sometimes be as large as 100 or 200 tables (each seating between 10 and 12 people); the soups can be prepared in advance, to avoid a frantic rush at the time of the event. The volume of the soup can also be increased or decreased at any time, according to the number of guests.

Beds of vegetables are another specialty of Taiwanese cuisine. Both soups and entrees commonly feature a base of green vegetables like Pekinese cabbage, turnips, bamboo shoots or beans. Fluffing up the bottom of the dish with veggies has been disparagingly described as "shirking one's duty" and "scrimping on ingredients." Nevertheless, the greens, which sit and simmer for a long time, soaking up the delicious flavors of the other ingredients, are actually the tastiest treats of all.

Some people have the impression that bando includes precisely 12 courses. This is not necessarily the case; any even number of courses will do. And the famous 36-course bando of the Ilan area does not really offer 36 full courses. "In the past, the diet was lacking in oil, and people had to eat a lot to feel full. The bowls were also small, so if one bowl wasn't enough, they'd fill up another bowl of the same food. So all it really meant was an unending refill," Lin Tien-sheng explains.

From the boondocks to the palace

After Taiwan returned to Chinese rule in the late 1940s, a large number of well-known cooks from all over the mainland congregated in Taiwan, and all the restaurants rushed to solicit the services of the mainland chefs. Pushed out of this turf, local Taiwanese cuisine moved to drinking establishments, which then became the home of the Taiwanese cooking legacy. Head chef Lin Tien-sheng moved to Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan when he was 18 to work as a cook in the Cherry Blossom Wine House.

In the early post-World-War-II era, most of the people of Taiwan were impoverished; only mainlander bureaucrats, officers or entrepreneurs could afford to eat in restaurants. For this reason, restaurants were entirely the domain of mainland cuisine. As Taiwan's economy began to take off, people's incomes rose, and Taiwanese bando gradually began to flourish too.

Around 1974 Taiwan's prestigious hotels, such as the Ambassador, the Lai Lai Sheraton and the Howard Plaza also began serving Taiwanese food. Thereafter, Taiwanese-style seafood restaurants like the Monarch of the Seas appeared one after another. In the years since, chain restaurants serving traditional "clear-congee side dishes," such as Green Leaf, Happy Leaf and The Plum, have also become very popular. And word is out that Taiwanese-style restaurants have even been opening up recently in that Mecca of haute cuisine, Hong Kong. It seems that Taiwanese cuisine is gradually moving from the boondocks into the imperial palace.

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A perfect pair-- the dragon and the phoenix

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The many deep-fried delicacies of a "luck and longevity plate"