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I’m holding a Lady Chef Stampede! For the rest of the year, and maybe beyond, I’ll be posting about the dozens of women who changed the history of food. Whether they’re chefs, restauranteurs, or writers, these are the women on whose shoulders we’re all standing.

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Chu niang is not an person, it’s a whole class of professional female chefs who were the rock stars of China’s Song Dynasty (960 – 1279). Far more popular than male chefs, they charged more money for their services, were held in higher esteem, and cooked elaborate meals for nobility and scholars like hired guns who blew into a household to dazzle an important guest with a jaw-dropping meal, then disappeared in a puff of cash. They were so popular that there was actually a chu niang shortage at one point, which led to the founding of a women-only cooking school expressly opened to meet the demand.

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There’s a much repeated story online about Son San Niang, who was a famous chu niang. Hired by premier Wang Zeng, who had agreed to host a Thousand Guest Banquet, she arrived with her staff of 80 (made up mostly of women and a few men) and instantly set up the kitchen like a war room. She sat at one end of the room on a raised platform, flanked by female assistants who would run orders to the various stations.

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Her chefs set up their stations facing her, and Son San Niang communicated with them through a complicated series of signals made with colored flags. There were blue, red, yellow, purple, and white flags and each one was matched to the color of the uniforms of chefs at certain stations. The flags would signal for the relevant chef to start steaming, to double-boil, deep fry, stop cooking, start plating. Son sat on her platform and oversaw the meal prep like a general directing her troops.

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Before chu niang, Chinese women cooked, but they cooked at home. Many of them were required to take professional cooking lessons before marriage, and a housewife who was in charge of her own kitchen was called a zhongkui. But chu niang weren’t just excellent home cooks. They were paid for their work, and valued for their skills, not their baby-making potential. They weren’t cooking for their husband and children, they were cooking for important and influential men. Chefs were wildly powerful in China. The country’s first documented chef, Yi Yin, was also a Shang Dynasty prime minister, known as “God of the Kitchen” due to the massive influence he had on the policies of the Shang king.

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Chu niang were cooking food during the Song Dynasty and practicing the most elevated and refined style of Chinese cuisine. The Song was an innovative era in Chinese history that saw the invention of gunpowder and the production of the world’s first paper banknotes. It was a time when learning, literature, and art hit new heights, and right there with them, the chu niang were pushing Chinese cuisine to a higher level and protecting the traditions of the past. For 300 years, chu niang were Chinese food. For that alone, they deserve some respect.

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