Introduction
Prologue: Hunger and Revolution
Chapter 1. Vietnamese Culinary Imperialism
Chapter 2. Culinary Diversity in the Colonial Countryside
Chapter 3. Cooking up Monopolies
Chapter 4. Fighting Back: The Factory Alcohol Boycott
Chapter 5. Chinese Cuisine, Commerce, and Contamination
Chapter 6. Imported Foods, Imperial Foods
Chapter 7. Conspicuous Consumption
Epilogue
Notes
Glossary
Selected Bibliography and Sources
Index
Erica J. Peters is co-founder and director of the Culinary Historians of Northern California and has written on various aspects of Vietnamese history and cuisine.
Appetites and Aspirations in Vietnam is food studies at its best,
but it is also much more. Erica J. Peters demonstrates, with both
intellectual elegance and a deeply rooted sense of food, how
culinary choices are a marker of historical change. Using a diverse
array of sources, she goes against the grain to explore everyday
life in Vietnam in the long nineteenth century, affording a
penetrating insight into what Vietnamese people wanted to be in a
time of economic struggle and colonialism, and into how ordinary
people experienced habitus and change, adaptation and contestation,
even creativity. Appetites and Aspirations in Vietnam is a gourmet
meal that leaves the reader satisfied…. The wide range of
narratives of food Peters explores … sheds new light on disparities
of gender, ethnicity, and wealth. Food may have been a tool of
imperialism; it certainly became a tool of nationalism in modern
Vietnam. Nobody would have expected the history of a ‘fusion
cuisine’ would tell as much.
*Laurence Monnais, Université de Montréal*
A reviewer of the wide-ranging Appetites and Aspirations could
evaluate this rich study along any number of axes: economic
history, the history of imperial and colonial Vietnam, or the
history of race and ethnicity, to name a few. Nonetheless, food is
most emphatically Peters’s preferred ground and where she anchors
her argument that French and Vietnamese used diet to shape
radically divergent identities in colonial Indochina….It would be
unfair to expect a study so ambitious to succeed equally well on so
many fronts….Nonetheless, this fascinating and suggestive narrative
of nineteenth-century imperial and colonial Vietnam will appeal to
a wide range of general readers and specialists.
*H-France Review*
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