Satay in Taiwan Diet

Satay is a common sauce in Taiwan diet. A couple of teaspoons of satay would be added to many fried dishes to refine the tastes. And when Taiwanese people enjoy hotpot, satay is an indispensable dipping sauce. Having been so familiar with it in our diet life, I thought the sauce was from Taiwan. By chance, when I was hanging around in Yancheng District, Kaohsiung Port, I noticed quite a few restaurants serving satay food. While the names varied, the signboards unanimously read Guangdong Shantou. This interested me. Does it mean satay came from Guangdong Shantou? If so, how was it spread to Taiwan and integrated into the local food culture? My curiosity led me into a research journey on the history of satay.

Through collecting documents on the satay history since 2015, I got to know that satay, originally named Sate, was from Southeast Asia and spread to my hometown by Chaozhou-Shantou migrants, and improved to today’s satay. The history so far has been studied by Chinese scholars. What interests me in particular is how the common sauce from Chaozhou-Shantou appeared in Taiwan. I had oral interviews with numerous satay restaurants from Taipei to Tainan and concluded their family migration journeys. To be concise, from the end of Second Sino-Japanese War in 1945 to the partition period of KMT and CPC in 1950, many Chaozhou-Shantou people moved to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-Shek’s troops. To make a living here, they sold common hometown dishes like satay noodles and fried beef with satay, to attract customers with the pleasant taste of satay, which enabled them to stand firm and settle down on the remote land.

Since the earlier Taiwan society was dominated by farmers who had a beef taboo, most satay beef restaurants run by Chaozhou-Shantou people were located downtown, serving people from Chaozhou-Shantou and other provinces. Since 1970s, with the popularization of tractors, urbanization and the changes in the social structure, satay beef has more diversified customers. Besides the satay restaurants on the streets, factory-produced cans under such brands as Ox Head came out, which popularized satay consumption further and combined it into Taiwan diet life gradually.

From the native land to the remote land, food undergoes a process of localization. After seven decades of baptizing from Chaozhou-Shantou to Taiwan over three generations of restaurants, satay has changed a lot in ingredient selection, tastes, eating habits and other aspects. Now satay is no longer a foreign sauce. Through the process of localization, Taiwan satay has become a brand and good companion in the Taiwan diet life!

Reference:

Book

1. 曾齡儀：《沙茶：戰後潮汕移民與臺灣飲食變遷》（臺北：前衛出版，2020年）。

Journal

1. 臺南市潮汕同鄉會：《會訊（創刊號）》 （臺南市：臺南市潮汕同鄉會，1971年）。