A Macanese cuisine or two? Served in Portuguese restaurants mixed with Portuguese dishes?
Macau Business | December 2022 | Special Report | Macau as Creative City of Gastronomy
It has already become clear that the choice of Macau as a member city of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network in Gastronomy refers to all of Macau’s gastronomy.
But, according to Hugo Robarts Bandeira, from IFTM’s School of Hospitality Management, “Macanese cuisine is ‘used’ as an added value of this recognition/attribution, due to its unique and distinct characteristics, so it is understandable, I think, to ‘talk’ more about Macanese cuisine than about other cuisines found in Macau.”
Talking more does not mean, at all, a better understanding of this peculiar gastronomic offer.
“Unlike many other traditional cuisines which are institutionalized and typically come with a standard recipe, Macanese cuisine – although bearing a few hundred years of history – is rather secretive and informal,” state the authors of the research paper Food, culture and food tourism (2020).
“There’s no standard in Macanese cuisine. Each family has its own secret recipe and rarely Macanese families share with outsiders; recipes were typically passed on from generation to generation, and rarely in full – most recipes even passed down from elders in the family, require significant adjustments and improvisation,” also add the authors, both from IFTM, Lei Weng Si and Ubaldino Couto.
“The unilateral reliance of Macau’s economy on gaming revenue has called for the need of a more diversified tourism portfolio and gastronomy has been one of the foci, especially after the recent designation as City of Gastronomy. (…) Despite the aforementioned efforts, there is still a generic confusion about what Macanese cuisine really is,” the authors of Macao as a City of Gastronomy (2020) underline.
“The most common and natural occurrence is the confusion with Portuguese cuisine. Restaurants all around the city claim to serve Macanese dishes, but in reality, many of them are traditional Portuguese dishes; the same happens the other way around, though with less frequency. Both locals and tourists are misled every day in these regards,” explain Kim-Ieng Loi, Weng-Hang Kong and Hugo Robarts Bandeira.
“In addition, a vast majority of the guides to Macau and even government tourist brochures at times add to the confusion by regularly mislabelling or claiming (for marketing purposes) items that are simply ‘Made in Macau’ as somehow Macanese,” the three authors also add.
“The number of restaurants that call themselves authentic Macanese restaurants or are classified as such is only a handful, but they also have Portuguese dishes on their menus. Then there are the Portuguese restaurants that also serve Macanese dishes … so confusion reigns,” reads Macao as a City of Gastronomy.
The fact that, according to several authors, there are not one, but two Macanese cuisines can add to the difficulty of comprehending this reality.
“Among the intangible cultural heritage, Macanese cuisine is in evidence,” explains Maria João Ferreira, who carried out his doctoral thesis on this topic. “Taking advantage of its specificity, it contributes to there are two local cuisines in Macau: the Macanese descent of Portuguese and Macanese of Chinese/Cantonese descent (unique and specific, compared to all other Chinese cuisines), this being also the last one, unique, made exclusively in this part of the world, with Cantonese cuisine recipes only available in Macau.”
Nevertheless, “”usually, when addressing the issue of Macanese cuisine, only Portuguese cuisine is mentioned,” the Lisbon-based researcher tells Macau Business.
“Usually, when addressing the issue of Macanese cuisine, only Portuguese cuisine is mentioned,” the Lisbon-based researcher tells Macau Business.
According to other authors, such as Joseph Abraham Levi of the University of Hong Kong, “though sharing some characteristics with its ‘parent’ cultures, Macanese cuisine is completely independent of Chinese and Portuguese gastronomy.”
(The Macanese Gastronomic Association, in particular, has done outstanding work in the dissemination and preservation of this type of gastronomy over the last decade.
They were unable to respond to the questions sent by Macau Business.
“There’s no standard in Macanese cuisine. Each family has its own secret recipe and rarely Macanese families share with outsiders” – study
The future is modernization
One of the voices warning of the potential demise of Macanese cuisine due to the dwindling canon of recipes for a variety of reasons is researcher Annabel Jackson [see interview with her at the end of this special report].
Could this spell the demise of Macanese cuisine in the long-run?
“Macanese cuisine, an important indicator of cultural exchanges between the East and West in history, is deeply impacted by commercialization, globalization, and fast-food culture,” according to the opinion of Professor Philipe Xie. “The tension between keeping Macanese cuisine ‘traditional’ and ‘authentic’ no matter how complex the lineage a ‘traditional’ cuisine may be, and the desire of creating a ‘chic’ dish from a heritage template remains a concern.”
“The problem is that Macanese cuisine is becoming more and more a ‘cookbook phenomenon’ and as a collective memory of a gradually disappearing community,” wrote Kim-Ieng Loi, Weng-Hang Kong and Hugo Robarts Bandeira (Macao as a City of Gastronomy’ – The role of cuisine in a tourism product bundle, 2021).
“If the Macanese cuisine is going to go beyond the cookbooks and the collective memory to become part of the current ‘trend’, then it needs to be modernised, not necessarily reinvented, but needs to reflect what the consumers want, without largely compromising on the authenticity,” is the opinion of the three authors.
“Nevertheless, change may not be easy,” Loi, Kong and Bandeira explain. On the one hand, “there is high resistance from older generations.” In addition, “there is a lack of consensus on what ‘authenticity’ means and what the original recipes are, if that can ever be defined.”
The origins
“First of all, there was the Portuguese cuisine brought by the Portuguese sailors and traders. This had itself been influenced by the world with which they were in contact, providing flavours from Africa, South America, India and Malacca along with the local and regional influences from other flavours and odours wafting in from the Philippines, Pegu, Siam, Japan and China. The Portuguese began to settle in Macau (where there were only a few small fishing communities) at some point between 1552 and 1557. The traders who settled there came from Portugal or the Vice Kingdom of India. And in the early stages women did not travel with them. It was only later, when they had gained a secure footing, that they began to take women from India, Goa, Malaya, Siam, Pegu, Sumatra, Java, the Philippines and Japan who carried with them their own tastes and culinary knowledge. Portuguese sailors and traders must have been reduced to trying to recreate their favourite foods from a distant land with hands working ingredients and condiments from a different world in an attempt to satisfy their nostalgia. These were most probably the origins of this rich cuisine: women cooking dishes they were not familiar with, using their different gestures, ingredients, utensils and preparation techniques. All of this was eventually combined with the influence of the Chinese women, initially as cooks and then also as wives, and the Portuguese women who joined the Macanese community”
(Excerpt from Chinese-Portuguese Cultural Interaction and Chinese Food Culture in Macau: Macanese Cuisine-Where West and East Blend, by Fernando Sales Lopes, author of several works on Macanese cuisine, including a thesis published in 2017 by the Cultural Affairs Bureau, titled ‘Os Sabores das Nossas Memórias. Comida e Etnicidade Macaense’).