Challenging the Palate and the Mind. Introducing Western Baking Vocabulary Into Chinese

Challenging the Palate and the Mind. Introducing Western Baking Vocabulary into Chinese. Starting from the first Western recipe book published in China in 1866, the paper analyzes the attempts to translate Western bakery vocabulary into Chinese. Although the Chinese cuisine was already very rich and refined, with a complex vocabulary, dessert had never been an integral part of a traditional meal, and, in fact, there was no specific word for it. After China’s defeat in the two Opium Wars, in the mid-19th century, the increasing foreign presence on Chinese soil meant both an increase in demand for cooks able to satisfy the dietary needs of the Westerners, and of restaurants serving Western food, especially in cities with foreign concessions, like Shanghai, where dining in such a place had become very “modern”. Zao yang fan shu (Foreign Cookery in Chinese) compiled and translated by Martha Foster Crawford, and published at The American Presbyterian Mission Press, in Shanghai, in 1866, was the first Western recipe book to be translated into Chinese. Out of the 271 recipes, 139 are desserts. Considering the resistance of the Chinese language to loanwords, especially phonetic loans, the paper looks at the solutions employed by Crawford to translate the new vocabulary, find out when were the phonetic loans used and how were they transcribed, if it was possible to identify equivalents in Chinese for the new terms, which terms were translated as semantic loans, and which are still in use today. Keywords: Zao yang fan shu, translation, recipe book, baking, phonetic/semantic loan