Confessions of a Sierra Pale Ale Sinner

There is no escape from the dark workings of historical predetermination

Beer became so prevalent in the Indian colony that General G.I. Wolseley lamented, “before the construction of railways it used to be said that, were we driven from the country, no trace, no monument of our rule would exist ten years afterward, beyond the empty beer-bottles we had left behind us.”

Nicholas Mehle, The India Pale Ale: Tool of British Colonial Expansion

Last night, I settled in to watch game five of the first round NBA playoff series between the Golden State Warriors and Sacramento Kings. Longtime readers will know that the historical and philosophical implications of playoff basketball are of deep interest to The Cleaver and the Butterfly. Although I wasn’t hosting a watching party, I did make sure to honor the profound significance of the moment (a pivotal game five!) by preparing one of my favorite dishes, mapo doufu, and accompanying it with my traditionally preferred pairing of an ice-cold Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. Bold flavors, in my view, have always required a bold beer. Nothing quenches, or complements, mala fire better than a fine IPA.

But then I had to stop, take a breath, and consider the historical contingencies that delivered this meal to my coffee table. Some people say grace before they eat; on this night, I summoned up the malign spirits of colonialism, globalization and class struggle, and asked: did I really choose these dishes, or were they chosen for me by forces beyond my control?

The current that swept me to this moment of truth sprung from two separate sources. One was an email written in response to my last newsletter post from Robert Delfs, author of one the earliest English-language Sichuan cookbooks, The Good Food of Szechwan. The other was a footnote in a dissertation by Richard Evan Wells, The Manchurian Bean: How the Soybean Shaped the Modern History of China's Northeast, 1862-1945.

(I am in the early stages of preparing a series of posts about the infinite worlds that can be glimpsed inside a single soybean. Stay tuned!)

Delfs was responding to my discussion of the golden age of Chinese food in Taiwan, a diasporic culinary explosion precipitated by the arrival of hundreds of thousands of mainlanders who chose to make their livings in their new home by cooking their own regional cuisines. Delfs pointed out something that should have occurred to me long ago; in the capital city of Taipei, Sichuan food was relatively over-represented because Chiang Kai-shek’s government had been headquartered in Sichuan from 1937-1946 before ultimately ending up in Taipei. Accordingly, “a large proportion of the army and government staff that were evacuated to Taiwan in 1948-1949 were Sichuanese,” wrote Delfs, “so there were a lot of Sichuan restaurants in Taipei. Not so much in other cities.”

I’ve always imagined that some kind of happy destiny was in play when I met my culinary soul mate the first time I swallowed a mouthful of mapo doufu. But a little bit of a sour aftertaste lingers in the wake of the realization that my mala epiphany was in part merely the probabilistic result of living in a city with an excessive number of Sichuan restaurants… because Chiang Kai-shek lost the Chinese civil war and then instituted a reign of terror in Taiwan. (One could go even further back – Chiang’s government moved to Sichuan in flight from the invading Japanese army… so the real prime mover here is Japanese militarism. Ugh and double ugh.)

The footnote in The Manchurian Bean alerted me to the existence of Commodities of Empire, a research project that is a collaboration between the Universities of Birmingham and London, and is devoted to the exploration of  “the networks through which particular commodities circulated both within and in the spaces between empires, with particular attention to local processes originating in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America, which significantly influenced the outcome of the encounter between the world economy and regional societies.”

Wonky papers about commodity circulation have almost the exact same seductive effect on me as hot peppers and beer, so I immediately started scrolling through the website’s working papers. And there it was: Indian Pale Ale: Icon of Empire, by Alan Pryor.

To say that a frisson of intellectual fire shuddered through my body, while the sky darkened, lightning flashed, thunder rolled, and there was maybe even an earthquake or two, would be to grossly underestimate the galvanic impact these words exerted upon me. All other research priorities were immediately shelved. The soybean would have to wait!

For someone who has consumed as many calories of various IPAs as I have over the last 35 years, I am ashamed to admit that I have devoted very little curiosity to the origin of the beverage. I had always kind of assumed that “India Pale Ale” was produced in India by British colonizers. But in fact, it was an important export from Great Britain to India for pretty much the same reason that the British forced opium on the Chinese. The British Empire suffered a drastic trade imbalance with both India and China. It was easy to fill the holds of British East Asia Company ships on their way back from the Far East and the Subcontinent with cotton goods, spices, indigo, silk, porcelain, and tea. It was a far bigger challenge to load those ships up in Liverpool or London with goods that could be sold abroad. In China, the Brits solved this quandary by fighting a couple of wars to ensure their freedom to import narcotics from India and sell them to the Chinese. With respect to India, they started exporting beer.

One key difference: the beer was not consumed by Indians, but instead targeted at the voraciously thirsty market of British soldiers and East India Company staffers: cheap porter for the men in ranks, more expensive “pale ale” for the officers and gentlemen. The distinctive hoppiness of the classic IPA was originally a chemical means of keeping the beer from spoiling on the long sea voyage.

“A combination of pale malt with an exceptionally high proportion of hops produced a distinctive bitter taste,” writes Pryor, “which proved to be a thirst-quenching drink, ideally suited for the Indian tropical climate.”

Kegs of pale ale followed the British everywhere across the globe: The first and most famous iteration -- “Hodgson’s Pale Ale” -- became a symbol of British imperial expansion.

Pryor:

The renowned magazine Punch reported that pale ale was to be found universally throughout Turkey, Syria, Greece and Egypt where “a foaming bottle of the exhilarating Hodgson could be enjoyed." William Thackeray, on his epic journey from Cornhill to Cairo, reported his joy at the arrival in Jerusalem of “a camel- load of Hodson’s pale ale from Beyrot[sic]”.

Mehle:

The IPA became not only a symbol of British colonial expansion but also served as a cultural identifier and divisive social separator for expatriates living on the subcontinent… The IPA was a central figure to the colonial population, the prized refreshment of the adventurer in the remote lands of South Asia. This was not the beverage of London dockworkers or casual publicans. Rather, this beer was the beverage of imperial actors, of adventurers taming the wild jungles, and of colonizers bringing millions of indigenous Indians under their rule.

No disrespect to the fine folks in Chico, California who have provided me with so much nourishment and solace over the years, but it distresses me to think of how the origin story of my own personal favorite opiate is not only rooted in colonial aggrandizement and white supremacy but also served as a class marker within British society. Pryor writes that the term “India Pale Ale” ended up being targeted at the domestic British market with “the implicit message that it was a drink that was appreciated by the upper classes who had connections with India, therefore its consumption was an indication of the sign of the sophisticated palate of a gentleman who could appreciate the subtle astringency of a bitter beer.”

Dear me. Dear dear me.   

Throw into the pot the hypothesis that Japan’s modernization, eventual militarization, metamorphosis into its own colonial empire and invasion of China was undoubtedly inspired by its unwelcome encounters with Western imperialism, and my celebratory meal becomes suspect on multiple dimensions.

It suddenly occurs to me that a distant relative of mine, Samuel Eliot Morison, wrote a laudatory biography of Matthew Perry, the U.S. Navy Commodore who ended Japan’s self-imposed isolation by force when he sailed his frigates into Yokohama, thus setting in motion the process that led to my eating mapo in Taiwan.

It suddenly occurs to me that my love of Sichuan food, my study of Chinese, and my embrace of alcohol are all, in one way or another, strategies of escape and transcendence from my fundamentally privileged white bread existence. But no matter how spicy I make my food or how many bottles of IPA I gulp down, even the simplest of deconstructions reveals that there is no escape!

But who am I to argue with the path that history has chosen for me?

At least the Warriors won.