French Culinary Connections in Contemporary Sinophone Cinema: Eric Khoo’s Recipe and Lin Cheng-sheng’s 27°C: Loaf Rocks

• In Event: Food - Media - Asia - Gender

Abstract

France appears to be the global culinary gold standard in Eric Khoo’s Singaporean telemovie, Recipe, and Lin Cheng-sheng’s biopic, 27°C: Loaf Rocks. However, these sinophone films go beyond the cliché of France as the world’s gastronomic capital. In Recipe and 27°C: Loaf Rocks, French cuisine’s cachet shapes culinary endeavors, whether restaurants or competitions, but Chinese cooking and local venues triumph over French food and restaurants. Khoo’s and Lin’s films show that despite gastronomic circulation, “Asian” cooking as well as cross-cultural cuisine disrupt France’s culinary hegemony. Familiar food provokes memory and nostalgia, in Proustian fashion.
Despite Khoo’s subtitle, “A Film on Dementia” focuses as much on food as on Alzheimer’s. In Recipe’s matriarchal culinary lineage, daughter Qiu Yun’s projected French restaurant reflects the elevated status and resulting marketability of haute cuisine in Singapore. Accordingly, the daughter’s renunciation of French gastronomy in favor of her mother’s local dishes causes her investors’ withdrawal. Khoo thus privileges food’s affective role over economics and the local over the global. 27°C: Loaf Rocks portrays greater global circulation than Recipe, as Lin’s protagonist Wu Pao-chun, based on the eponymous baker of rural Taiwanese origins, travels to Japan for training with a master and to France for a prestigious competition. Rather than opt out of French cuisine, as does Khoo’s Qiu Yun, upon return to Taiwan, prize in hand, Wu opens a bakery, fostering culinary interplay, epitomized by his European style bread, made with Taiwanese ingredients and flavors.

Author

• Michelle E. Bloom, University of California, Riverside