The Gourmet’s Recipe: Edible Bird’s Nests and Early Modern Cultures of Taste

Edible bird’s nests, made from the hardened saliva of a rare species of cave-nesting swiftlets in littoral and insular Southeast Asia, rank among the top of the list of luxurious Chinese delicacies. I examine how edible bird’s nests not only became a popular item for Chinese elite consumption but also became quintessentially “Chinese” in its global imagination, by looking at the almost simultaneous encounter with bird’s nests by the Chinese and the Europeans in the early modern era. I unpack the divergent meanings ascribed to the exotic edible—by the Chinese as a replenishing tonic, a luxurious banquet dish, and a signifier of wealth and cultural sophistication; and by the Europeans as a commodity to profit from intra-Asian trade with no essential value of its own and as a representation of the unscrupulous stomach of the Chinese and presumably their morality. The social act of eating (and not eating) illuminates the construction of cultural hierarchies both within and across boundaries.