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Foreign settlement house in Yokohama, a woodblock print by Utagawa Yoshikazu (1861).
residents. 3 This British dominance was by no means surprising in view of
their overwhelming presence in China at the time. 4
The British residents of China treaty ports were almost unanimous
in their dismissal of local culture. They made utmost efforts to recreate
their European way of life, with ‘newspapers, local municipal councils,
chambers of commerce and other trappings of the mid-Victorian world
recognized as civilization’. 5 There was a strong reluctance to consume
Chinese food; the cuisine that was served in Western households, messes
and hotels was predominantly European, grander ones following the
London fashion for French-style dining. Increasing use over the years
was made of imported tinned food, which was convenient and protected
Westerners from the danger of food contagion. A menu of a ‘metallic’
dinner served in Shantou in the 1870s was recorded by a contemporary as
follows: ‘Tinned soup, tinned fish, tinned meat, tinned vegetables and
Christmas tinned plum pudding . . . Tinned sausages were the great standby
in those days, served with green peas (also from a tin).’ 6
Westerners in Japan held a similarly defensive attitude towards local
food. Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850‒1935), one of the most important
Western scholars and interpreters of Japan, expressed this standpoint very
delicately in Handbook for Travellers in Japan: ‘Many who view Japanese
food hopefully from a distance, have found their spirits sink and their tempers
embittered when brought face to face with its unsatisfying actuality.’ 7
Major Henry Knollys (1840‒1930), who visited Japan in the mid-1880s,
proved much blunter in his disapproval of Japanese fare:
Nothing short of actual starvation would induce a European to
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