ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the presentation of food in three vernacular novel masterworks from late imperial China, the time period spanning the Ming dynasty and the Qing dynasty, the last two dynasties of imperial China. Little flowers and small fruitsripen once every three thousand years, and after one taste of them a man will become an immortal enlightened in the way, with healthy limbs and a lightweight body. Shuihu zhuan is a military hero romance and Xiyou ji a mythological novel about religion, gods, and demons, both published in the sixteenth century. Shuihu zhuan is important in the history of Chinese food culture because it established the dining code for masculine martial heroes to drink from a full pitcher and eat huge roasts, which became an enduring stereotype in both Chinese literary tradition and food culture. Honglou meng is an eighteenth-century novel about the domestic life of an aristocratic family.
