A Taste of Hakka Food: A Historical Sketch of the Hakka Cuisine from the Twentieth Century
Friday, 02 May 2025 | 11:30 to 13:30 EDT | Room 857, Eighth Floor, Kaneff Tower, Keele Campus, York University
With Food Historian Cecilia Leong-Salobir
The Hakka people are a Chinese group originating from north central China and from the seventeenth century have settled in southern China and throughout the world. Today about 40 million comprise the Hakka diaspora and about the same number in China. Defined by language and food, the Hakkas self-perpetuate their characteristics of adaptability, diligence, resilience and thrift. Hakka cuisine is robust, utilising much pork, beef and chicken and condiments like soya sauce, red fermented bean curd, star anise and other aromatics. As a diasporic food, Hakka cuisine can be ascribed to transnationalism with distinct cultural attributes. The multiple ways of cooking and eating Hakka food at home and in public eateries are influenced not only by the ingredients available but by dominant cultures in new environments.
Dr Cecilia Leong-Salobir is a food historian affiliated with the University of Western Australia. Her books on food history are Urban Food Culture: Sydney, Shanghai and Singapore in the Twentieth Century (Palgrave Macmillan 2019); Routledge Handbook of Food in Asia (editor, 2019); and Food Culture in Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire (Routledge 2011). Dr Leong-Salobir’s current book project is part Hakka food history and part memoir. She explores global history of Hakka food, looking at the food practices of the Chinese Hakka diaspora from the twentieth century. She serves on editorial advisory boards for Bloomsbury Food Library, Food, Culture & Society and Global Food History.
Non-Hakka food lunch will be served.
