ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Chinese and Italian migrants as case studies to examine how novel foods emerged during particular period through a form of working-class cosmopolitanism that contributed significantly to culinary globalization. China experienced widespread instability and hunger in the nineteenth century as colonial wars and domestic insurgency undermined the Qing dynasty. Migrants formed extensive social networks to compensate for the disorientation of being uprooted from their homelands. Both Chinese and Italian workers usually traveled without female relatives and had to provide domestic services such as cooking for themselves. Western images of coolie labor belie the diversity of Chinese migration patterns. Even as they invented new creolized cuisines, Chinese migrants sought out familiar foods, making ethnic grocery shops an important institution within the migrant community. Regional cuisines varied widely in Italy, and the macaroni common in the south differed greatly from the polenta and risotto eaten in the north.
