Translating Food Cultures: Interview with 2020 Global Taiwan awardee Stephanie Tai

Stephanie Tai, author of Tempting Formosa and 2020 Big Ideas Competition: Exploring Global Taiwan award recipient, talks to our Deputy Editor Elizabeth Shaw about her process of creating a Taiwanese dessert cookbook and paying homage to her homeland of Taiwan.

By Elizabeth Shaw

Book description: Let Tempting Formosa act as your guide to the most popular traditional Taiwanese desserts through stories of colonialism, nationalism, and modern cuisine along with recipes in an easy-to-follow flowchart format. Buy it here on Amazon.

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Elizabeth: Please introduce yourself.

Stephanie: My name is Stephanie Tai. I’m taking a gap year this year – this would’ve been my fourth year – and I’m studying City Studies, International Development, and Anthropology at UTSC.

I did this project through the Munk School’s Big Ideas Taiwan competition, which encourages participants to pursue an area of study related to Taiwan. Before COVID hit, one of the project’s criteria was that we would be able to travel to Taiwan for two to three weeks. 

I thought because I was about to return to Taiwan over the summer, it’d be nice to do something there. But everything changed and we [conducted research] from our own homes. It kind of worked out for me, though!

Could you talk a little about your project on Taiwanese cuisine? What inspired you to pursue your topic in the format of a cookbook?

My initial idea was to introduce the food of Taiwan. I had a few ideas – I wanted to develop a street food map of Taipei –, but I [eventually] settled on making an interactive cookbook for those wishing to learn about the culture.

I thought that a cookbook could help people learn about Taiwanese cuisine, especially since I’m sure people have been developing their interest in cooking, food and cuisine throughout the pandemic. I thought it’d be a good idea to put Taiwan on the map and show them that there’s this type of dessert to try.

I focused on dessert mostly because there is already an abundance of savoury Taiwanese food recipes out there. There are many cookbooks on beef noodle soup, savoury recipes…

I decided to incorporate my own culinary skills into the book and adapt recipes I found online. I don’t have a family [recipe] bank that I could draw from, so I thought it’d be nice to get creative and inspired from online sources. I selected about ten to thirteen recipes.

I feel like Taiwanese desserts are especially trendy [in North America] right now with Meet Fresh and other dessert shops coming out.

Exactly! With bubble tea being so popular right now – and I can safely say this for most Taiwanese Americans – most of us are like, “uh huh, and?” [laughs]. We’re used to bubble tea! We grew up on this stuff – it’s nothing new to us.

You mentioned during your Global Taiwan that through this recipe book you want to act as a “cultural mediator”. What is that and how did you carry it out? 

I love how you remembered that! It was really important to me to convey that I’m not creating anything new, I’m not taking credit for all the recipes. I wanted to make it clear that I’m just someone who wants to introduce my culture. 

I found most of the recipes in Mandarin – I even typed the recipe [in Google] in Mandarin and most of the results were in Mandarin, so I thought, what better way than to describe myself literally as a translator? Through introducing our culture to people who weren’t so familiar, I also became a “cultural translator” to help foreigners understand what we are all about. 

I was very lucky to have had the chance to do that, as I have experience in both cultures. That really helped me pinpoint exactly what was important to convey.

How did you adapt recipes for North Americans to understand?

Most of it came from storytelling. Instead of just throwing a recipe to the audience, I eased the recipe in by translating the origins and significance of the dish. People form a stronger emotional connection with stories. That was half the focus of this book too; to showcase the history and stories of Taiwan, and not just the food by itself, because the stories play such a big part in the food.

What I really liked about your cookbook was that you began with an introduction to yourself and your personal context, then explained the history of Taiwanese cuisine. You also mentioned how Taiwan’s history of colonialism and national identity shaped its cuisine. How did you incorporate history into your research?

When I first submitted the proposal for this project, I knew I wanted to focus on the impact of Taiwan’s history on the island. Most of the history stems from imperialism and nationalism and a lot of back-and-forthing between Eastern and Western powers. We already know the history of America and Britain, but we don’t know the history of colonized nations.

Taiwan has been colonized by four or five different countries and all from vastly different backgrounds. It’s so interesting that we have influences from the Netherlands, Britain, and Japan – all of them imprinted their cultures onto this island with roots from China. 

I wanted to incorporate these stories into my introduction on how these foods came about and how they are so popular today. I also wanted to distinguish the difference between, say, a Chinese palette and a Taiwanese palette, and how the cuisines differ.

That’s a really interesting note about why our food is popular!

Yeah, like what makes people want to eat Taiwanese cuisine. Different regions of Taiwan have different tastes, too. Most of my family is from Tainan, so [the flavours are] much sweeter and have a lot of sugar involved. There are so many different palettes, even throughout a small island. 

Could you also talk about your family’s migration story? I guess you are a member of the diaspora too, so how your family came from Taiwan and ultimately ended up in Vancouver. 

I’ve never really identified as first or second generation [Taiwanese]. My younger sister and I call ourselves “1.5 generation”. My dad went to university in Seattle... He brought a lot of American influences into our upbringing. My mom also lived abroad when she was younger, so growing up, we had a lot of Western influence and ideals. 

We were technically the first generation to be born in Canada, but it was my grandparents who immigrated to Canada in the 1980s. My sister and I were born here, then moved back to Taipei to learn Mandarin until I was ten. We always say that we’re “1.5 generation” because we’re not so much one or the other. I think that also brings a fresh perspective to the table. 

You mentioned that you tailored the recipes for the book. What was your recipe testing experience like? How did you make decisions for ingredients and measurements?

I’ll start with why I chose these ten recipes in the first place. I compared what was popular on English and Mandarin websites for “popular” Taiwanese desserts. I found similarities and differences between the lists and used these similarities, and my own personal choices, to provide more nuanced histories of the dish. 

I began in May and used two or three sources per recipe. I tested and tweaked the recipe based on what I thought worked best. I added a bit of sugar here, removed a bit of sugar there, and tailored it based on personal taste. 

That was my favourite part of the research process! Testing these recipes and eating Taiwanese desserts, desserts that I hadn’t eaten in years. Well, it was my family’s favourite part of the process, anyway [laughs]. 

For the cow tongue cookies, for example, there were two different versions of the same [recipe] name. I selected the one that my family preferred, but paid homage to the other recipe in the description. 

Have you always enjoyed cooking?

I’ve always enjoyed cooking and baking. I’ve been baking since I was 16, but I mostly made Western desserts and pastries. This was my first foray into Asian desserts – I’d made tapioca pudding – but never anything with a distinct Taiwanese flavour, like pineapple cake. Much to my dad’s delight!

Your parents must’ve been so proud! You tried it and got so good, you could write a recipe book!

They were surprised! They asked, “are you actually going to go through with this?” [laughs]

So you chose the cookbook format for your project, what inspired you to work with a graphic designer?

I hired an illustrator and graphic designer to work on the book with me, because I can’t draw for the life of me! Are you part of the Facebook group, Subtle Asian Traits?

Yeah!

I found my illustrator there. In April or May, I saw one of her posts [on Subtle Asian Traits] and thought, “this girl has such pretty illustrations!” She’d illustrated Yakult bottles in watercolour and it was so beautiful that I saved her information on Facebook. 

I searched for a different illustrator online, but none of their works fit my vision. So I messaged her for samples and realised that the reason why I liked her illustrations so much was because she knew what the food looked and tasted like in real life. With the aiyu ( 愛玉) jelly, it has a very distinct colour and texture. I didn’t have to explain to her what it looked like, because she already knew!

That was super important for me, to find someone with a similar background. She is Chinese but was exposed to Taiwanese influences growing up. It worked out perfectly, because I wouldn’t have been able to describe the almost translucent, golden colour of aiyu. Even when you photograph it, it turns out yellow, but it’s not! In person it has a gold colour that’s hard to explain. 

It’s almost green but not quite.

The limes add a green tint, but by itself, it almost has no colour. It was the little things like that that made me feel like it was the right choice choosing someone who knew what she was doing. We worked together on the images and she was very receptive. I’m super picky when it comes to projects and I want every little detail to be precise. 

Which brings me to my next point! My graphic designer was actually my roommate in Toronto. She’d been dabbling in graphic design for a while, so I asked her to work with me on the book design. It worked out perfectly, because her family moved to Vancouver. We got to collaborate in person!

I’m so thankful for these two. If it weren’t for them, my book wouldn’t have looked the way it does.

What aspect of your work are you the most proud of?

I was most proud of how I was able to introduce the basics of Taiwanese cuisine. Introducing the idea of, “hey, there’s this island and we have our own dessert!”

There’s a lot more work to be done on the dialogue of cultural and regional cuisine. Not just Taiwanese food, but how we approach “foreign” and “exotic” food that is not widely available in North America. I would venture to say that most non-White North Americans are very knowledgeable about their own cultures’ cuisine and we just haven’t had the chance to let them shine.

One example would be when I visited the food section in a bookstore. One shelf was labelled Cookbooks and the other was labelled Foreign Cookbooks. The latter covered everything that wasn’t Caucasian food, and I found that to be slightly disarming. We see anything that isn’t American pasta or pizza as “foreign” or something that you’d need to study in order to know. But no, it’s just food.

The same goes for veganism and vegetarianism. A lot of other cultures practice plant-based lifestyles, but we don’t hear about their recipes here. 

I also wanted to ask about the implications of research not only within your local context, but within the global context as well. 

I’m interested in exploring the cultural food scene – not just in Taiwan but around the world too. In the future I’d like to find like minded people and collaborate on ideas that bring awareness to lesser-known cultural foods. If avocados can become super popular, I’m sure that there are foods undiscovered by the world and that it’d be a disservice not to introduce certain foods to the global village.

I study international relations and politics at school and that leads its way into the politics of food, the importance of cuisine in the development of a nation, and how a nation presents itself on the global scale. There’s been a resurgence of new food, so I think people are looking for the next big thing now and I look forward to taking part in that. 

I think that people are now realising that Taiwan has an identity separate from the Mainland and away from Hong Kong. 

Exactly! I hope that this distinction will gain traction and facilitate a dialogue around Taiwan. 

So my final question is about your experience in the Big Ideas Taiwan competition. Did it help you meet your research goals?

I had so much fun working with everyone on this project. I really need to thank my discussion group – at the start, when I didn’t know what to include in my recipe book, they suggested dessert. And I was like, “yeah! I really want to do dessert!” So I’d like to thank them for helping me narrow down my topic.

I’d also like to thank Shannon Garden-Smith for being patient and helping me with my many questions. Dr. Joseph McQuade too, for his meetings during the research stage. Both of them helped immensely.

I liked how there was so much space for creativity. It gave me a lot of freedom to explore what I wanted to with this recipe book. It allowed me to dip my toes into cultural food, beyond the Western contexts presented in [university] courses and on the Internet.