China to Chinatown: Chinese food in the West by JAG Roberts

The sweet and sour smell of success

While not diminishing the value of this informative and readable study, the title is only half right. The first 50 per cent of the book is devoted to the Western experience of Chinese food in China.

We start (where else?) with Marco Polo, who noted that Chinese people liked to eat in restaurants. Another enduring truth was stated by a Sinologist in 1736: "French cooks... would be surpriz'd that the Chinese can outdo them... at a great deal less Expense."

This admiring view was not shared by all 18th-century visitors, though the suspicions voiced by Captain Alexander Hamilton were extreme: "The abominable Sin of Sodomy is tolerated here, so is Buggery, both with Beasts and Fowls, in so much that Europeans do not care to eat Duck, except what they bring up themselves." Victorian visitors expressed gentler doubts. A French naval officer was relieved that his dish of salted earth worms has been cut up "so I fortunately did not know what they were until I had swallowed them".

Western views of Chinese cuisine have oscillated between delight and revulsion. The latter was particularly prompted by the Chinese taste for dog and cat. Though never a mainstay, canines were consumed to provide "winter warmth". Felines were eaten even more rarely, for medical purposes. On the plus side, the expat Richard Wilhelm described a Chinese meal as a "masterpiece of social communion".

During the Cultural Revolution, a few apparatchiks lived high on the hog, but most people ate appallingly. Things had improved little by the 1990s, when Colin Thubron's dire dining around China attained a nadir with "Grainy Dog Meat with Chilli and Scallion".

The tidal wave of restaurants in the West began with a trickle in California, catering for the Chinese immigrants servicing the gold rush. The taste for oriental cuisine, albeit bastardised (chop suey derives from the Mandarin zasui, meaning "bits and pieces"), caught on across America: by 1922, there were 57 Chinese restaurants in New York. The first in England was a temporary affair created for the 1884 Health Exhibition. The Pall Mall Budget suggested "the British public will not find these sea-slug pies so bad as might be imagined".

It was not until the 20s that Chinese restaurants gained a foothold in London. One early enthusiast was Harold Acton, who retained his own Chinese chef. Another proponent was the boxer Freddie Mills, who owned a restaurant. The boom of the Sixties and Seventies was not, unfortunately, accompanied by an increase in standards. In his book Sour Sweet, Timothy Mo describes a proprietor's preference for English customers who did not share his countrymen's "insistence on fresh materials, authentically cooked and presented at a highly competitive price".

Today, mercifully, British diners can also enjoy this magical combination at deservedly bustling haunts such as the Yang Sing in Manchester or Poons in London.

Yet, only last year, false reports circulated that smuggled meat "for the Chinese catering trade might be responsible for the foot-and-mouth outbreak". The oscillation in suspicion and popularity towards the United Kingdom's 8,000 Chinese restaurants seems to be as strong as ever.