• Skip to main content
  • Skip to header right navigation
  • Skip to after header navigation
  • Skip to site footer
Devour.Asia

Devour.Asia

Connie Veneracion explores Asian food, history and culture

  • Tea
  • Kitchen Tales
    • Pantry Staples
    • Kitchen Tools
    • Cooking Techniques
    • Food Trivia
  • Food Tales
  • Travel Tales
  • Search
  • All Recipes
    • Chinese
    • Japanese
    • Korean
    • Taiwanese
    • Thai
    • Vietnamese
    • Asian Fusion
    • Instant Noodles (Ramen)
  • Tea
  • Kitchen Tales
    • Pantry Staples
    • Kitchen Tools
    • Cooking Techniques
    • Food Trivia
  • Food Tales
  • Travel Tales
  • Pop Tales
  • About
  • Privacy
  • All Recipes
  • Chinese
  • Japanese
  • Korean
  • Taiwanese
  • Thai
  • Vietnamese
  • Fusion
You are here: Home / Food Tales / Fusion Cuisine Has Been Around Long Before the Term was Coined

Fusion Cuisine Has Been Around Long Before the Term was Coined

We were somewhere between the first market we visited and the riverside restaurant during the food tour. Conversation in the songthaew had been animated with topics ranging from politics to religion to the legalization of cannabis. It was inevitable, of course, that we’d return to the most important subject that night. Food.

Khao soi (Thai chicken curry noodle soup)
Khao soi (Thai chicken curry noodle soup) wouldn’t exist if Chinese settlers had not introduced noodles to Thailand

The tour guide was explaining the key differences between the cuisines of northern, central and southern Thailand. Northern Thai food, she said, is a fusion of Chinese, South Asian and ethnic cooking traditions. Chinese migrants and traders brought noodles and stir-frying to Thailand while Indian settlers brought their native spices that got assimmilated into Thai cooking.

I was surprised. As the only Southeast Asian country that was never colonized by the West, one would think of Thai cuisine as “pure” or, at least, more pure than the cuisines of its neighbors that had all been colonized at one point or another. Later that night, I would mull it in my head, over and over from different angles, until I fell asleep. I kept asking myself: Is there such a thing as “pure cuisine” today?

Fusion cuisine is both modern and ancient

Today, when we talk of fusion cuisine, we think in terms of food created by chefs who experiment by combining cooking techniques, culinary traditions and ingredients in new ways. You know, like Korean bulgogi taco. Or that taco from Episode 21 of Season 7 of The Big Bang Theory when Sheldon and Penny ate at an Asian fusion restaurant and Sheldon makes a strange sound.

Penny: What’s wrong?

Sheldon: I don’t understand my food. Chinese noodles with Korean barbecue in a taco.

Penny: It’s fusion.

Sheldon: My mother would lock her car doors if she had to drive through this hodgepodge of ethnicity.

Those are what we imagine of when when someone says “fuision cuisine”. But, the truth is, while the term “fuision cuisine” did not exist prior to the 1970s, what it is, in essence yet nameless, has been around for a long, long time.

The spice trade

Malaysian cuisine, it is claimed, is the world’s first fusion cuisine born from migration and trade with Chinese and Indians. Is it?

If we think of the spice trade and how it influenced cooking in Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas, then fusion cuisines have been around for thousands of years and it is simply impossible to pinpoint which region was first to be so heavily influenced by the introduction of foreign ingredients that led to the development of the first fusion cuisine.

Of course, it isn’t just trade that is responsible for fusion cuisines.

Colonization

The triumverate of colonization, trade and migration is responsible for the development of fusion cuisines in many parts of the world including the Philippines.

Pancit miki bihon
“Pansit”, the generic term for noodles and noodle dishes in the Philippines, is derived from the Hokkien “pian i sit,” which means “something conveniently cooked fast.”

Filipino food, as we know it today, is a combination of colonization, trade and migration. Spain brought its tomato-based stews, among others, and America got the Filipinos addicted to canned fruit. We were trading with the Chinese before were colonized by Spain and America and there were Chinese and Malays settlers in pre-colonial times. And then there’s the Mexican influence courtesy of the Manila galleon trade.

Migration

Fusion cuisine can also be born as a result of adaptation as when migrants, transported from their homelands, try to recreate their traditional dishes using the produce of their adopted land. Chinese food in America, for instance, is not traditional Chinese at all. It is Chinese American developed by Chinese migrants by way of adaptation.

Slavery — which amounts to forced and brutal migration — is one of the factors that gave birth to Creole cuisine in Louisiana.

“National” dishes that are, in fact, fusion food

Ramen is a fusion dish

Oh, you’re shocked. But it is true. Although the Italians like to say they invented the noodle, it isn’t so. Marco Polo brought noodles to Italy from China where it originated and spread to other Asian countries including Japan.

Tonkotsu ramen in Osaka
Ramen in Kyoto

China and Japan have a long intertwined history. China had a more advanced culture and a more powerful military, Japan was trying to learn from the Chinese and emulate them but there came a time when Japan felt strong enough to go to war with China. They fought over Korea.

To make a long story short, Japan defeated China, and China ceded Taiwan to Japan in 1895. At that time, Taiwan was already populated by plenty of Chinese laborers from the mainland who had been brought over by the Dutch East India Company and settled in the island. So, you can imagine what the Japanese invaders found when they occupied Taiwan. Chinese food was already all over. The Japanese — soldiers, bureaucrats and businessmen — traveling back and forth between Taiwan and Japan eventually brought with them the Chinese noodle soup culture.

In 1910, two Chinese cooks at Tokyo’s Rairaken restaurant introduced a signature dish with salty broth and noodles. They called it Shina Soba.

Shina was for China, of course. Soba was a buckwheat noodle that was a staple of the Japanese diet. These cooks kneaded their dough with kansui, a bubbly mineral water, which made for a new kind of noodle – longer, yellower and more elastic. Shina Soba caught on like gangbusters.

“Discomfort Food: The Strange and Twisted History of Ramen Noodles” in Mental Floss

Shina soba was later renamed Chuka soba. It would not be known as ramen until Momofuku Ando sold the first instant noodle called Chikin Ramen.

Beef Pho and banh mi are fusion food too

Beef pho for breakfast, Hanoi View 2 Hotel
Beef pho in Hanoi

China had been trading with most of Asia for ages and, even before the French occupied Vietnam, noodle soups were already consumed there. But what we know today as beef pho would never have happened were it not for two things.

First, the beef-loving French preferred to eat the prime cuts and discard the rest which enterprising butchers sold on discount.

Second, noodle soup hawkers, mostly Chinese settlers, traded water buffalo meat for beef scraps.

As Andrea Nguyen puts it, “What’s clear is that pho was created from cultures rubbing shoulders.”

A banh mi vendor drizzling sauce over the filling
Banh mi in Saigon

And then, there’s banh mi — that quintessential Vietnamese snack and comfort food filled with herbs and seasonings that are unmistakably Vietnamese. And yet, the bread is a smaller version of the French baguette. And, inside the bread are meat pate and mayonnaise both of which bear the signature of the French.

How can anyone argue that banh mi is not a fusion dish?

Is there such a thing as “pure cuisine” today?

I suppose the best way to answer that question is to ask if there is any human community today that has never had any lasting or meaningful interaction with outsiders.

I’m thinking of the Uncontacted Peoples – including the Sentinelese in India the Toromona in Bolivia, and the “butterfly people”, Kawahiva and Korubu in Brazil — and wondering if they are the only ones who can rightfully claim to have pure cuisines.

Inside my Asian kitchen

Varieties of kale

Introduction to Kale

shallots

Shallots, scallions, spring onions and leeks, the differences: illustrated and explained

Fresh dalanghita (mandarin orange)

What’s the Difference Between Dalandan and Dalanghita?

Asian food tales

Batchon (batchoy with lechon), Pendy's, Bacolod City

A Year Later, A New Bacolod Food Trip

From Port Klang to Kuala Lumpur

Roast Duck, Pork Face and Tea at Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown

Laksa

Enderun Colleges’ Laksa Night: Hawker Food, Fine Dining Style

Explore Asia

Scallion pancakes, Tamsui Old Street, Taipei

In Taipei, We Skipped the Night Markets and Headed for Tamsui Old Street

Sam Veneracion making pottery. Bat Trang Village, Vietnam.

The Authentic Bat Trang Ceramic Village Tour and Pottery Class

Dizzying array of food. Food Court, Takashimaya

In Japan, the Art of Discovering Good Food in Every Price Range

February 25, 2020 : Food Tales, History
Previous Post: « Fresh bananas sold in roadside stall in Tagaytay City, Philippines Banana Fruit, Heart (Blossom) and Leaves
Next Post: What is Tofu? What’s the Best Way to Cook It? Tofu on a plate »

Sidebar

Asian Pop Tales

Scene from “Lust, Caution” | Image credit: Focus Features

Ang Lee’s “Lust, Caution”

A typical Japanese breakfast of rice, egg and miso soup at the Coquelicot Manor in "From Up on Poppy Hill" | Image credit: Netflix

“From Up on Poppy Hill”

"Giri/Haji" | Image credit: Netflix

“Giri / Haji”: Masterful Storytelling, Stunning Visuals and Brilliant Acting

  • About
  • Privacy & Usage
  • Full Archive

Everything © Connie Veneracion. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.