What might Chinese chefs have cooked for their foreign masters in the port-cities in the 18th and 19th centuries? Hints from contemporary language learning kits and recipes

The English-Cantonese language learning kits published in Canton, San Francisco, and elsewhere in the 19th and the early 20th century contain a considerable number of Western food terms. This implies that Chinese cooks and servants needed to know these terms in order to communicate with their foreign masters, and that Chinese chefs knew how to cook these dishes with ingredients available in local markets. By comparing these dictionary terms with recipes and menus, we may further assume that these homemade dishes made in port-cities were the predecessors to restaurants’ set of choices which became commonplace in the first half of twentieth century.