The Birth of Chinese American Cuisine
When a fad for Chinese food started making headlines among non-Chinese in the late 1890s, aficionados had to seek it out in the nation’s Chinatowns, where restaurants run by men supplied other members of the Chinese bachelor society with meals solidly rooted in a certain culinary tradition. Fifty or sixty years later, the geographical and social circumstances under which restaurants usually served Chinese dishes to white or black Americans would be dramatically rearranged. So would the food itself.
Today’s tastemakers routinely dismiss chop suey, chow mein, and other bedrock elements of the Chinese American restaurant cooking style formed during the Exclusion era as horrible excuses for real Chinese cooking. I submit that the usual hauteur needs some tempering. We can learn much from this now-derided food in the light of two easily forgotten realities: It was a chunk of true Americana created, at a time of shameful injustice, by American residents either completely or partly denied the privileges of citizenship. And for more than a century it has given great pleasure to millions who did enjoy those privileges. In fact, it is alive in our day, though not among citizens of any “United States of Arugula.”
Prelude to Chinese American Cooking
The cookery now scornfully summed up by some in the mere phrase “chop suey” spoke to non-Chinese patrons across racial boundaries. It was the first purposefully synthesized cooking style ever presented to American eaters—a deliberate, audience-targeted construct whose general outlines took shape between the mid-1890s and about 1910. Before that time, Toisanese men on Gold Mountain had cooked their own food to please themselves, observed with different degrees of apprehensive curiosity by many or most white people. Memories of excellent restaurants where Chinese newcomers served American food to white counterparts in Gold Rush San Francisco had disappeared, along with the culinary-cultural exchange that they had represented.
What the missionary Otis Gibson described as the Chinese way of “cutting everything up fine, and mixing different things together” seemed suspicious or silly to some commentators.1 The historian Hubert Howe Bancroft slightingly described “the Chinaman” as “having to have everything cut and minced, ready for the stomach,” thus sparing “teeth and digestive organs the work which may as well be done by chopper and masher.”2 The English writer George Augustus Sala thought that the cuisine reflected the Chinaman’s “predominant shortcomings of faintness and feebleness.”3 Sir Edwin Arnold, Sala’s boss at the Daily Telegraph, announced with a palpable shudder that a San Francisco Chinese food shop might have supplied the witches in Macbeth with “all the ingredients of their cauldron, at one marketing.”4
For other visitors, it was love at first bite. In the mid-1870s Otis Gibson, himself not wholly comfortable with the smell and taste of Chinese food, took several uninitiated easterners to a San Francisco Chinatown establishment, with some trepidation. To his amazement, one instantly converted clerical guest was just getting warmed up “when I thought he must be about filled,” while the man’s wife was so delighted that she pitched in with fingers instead of chopsticks.5 By 1888 several hundred white customers were reported to be regularly dining at New York China town restaurants “in orthodox Chinese fashion, with chopsticks.”6
A larger contingent, most likely recalling popular wisecracks about lizard soup and cat fricassee, wavered between cautious interest and doubt. Chinese restaurateurs not only managed to win over this public but did so during the bleakest, generally family-deprived days of Exclusion. The Chinese on the West Coast had already shown an uncanny ability—previously developed around Guangzhou and Hong Kong—to cook white people’s food for white people. When they came eastward to seek a less violent racial and political climate, they arrived in midwestern and eastern cities equipped with much prior insight into the American palate.
The cooking style that they brought to birth over the last years of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth could never have had the same impact at any previous moment. Chinese food had been inaccessible to diners in most of the country as long as Chinese workers remained concentrated in western states. Besides, earlier food trends had disseminated only slowly beyond any one neighborhood or city. The moment at which Chinatowns began attracting newspaper attention in major cities also saw regional news wire services coalescing into nationwide networks, allowing small-town papers everywhere to pick up news of glamorous metropolitan doings. The economic demographer Susan B. Carter, who has meticulously studied the spread of Chinese American food during the Exclusion era, points out that it benefited from a sort of media revolution.7 A reporter’s account of a Chinese eatery in New York or Chicago might entertain readers in Arkansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, or even New South Wales within days or weeks. During Li Hung Chang’s 1896 visit, big-city newspapers stood ready to rush accounts of the event into print while many more counterparts in country districts waited to reproduce their stories. In the next few years, the sensation dubbed “chop suey” emerged as America’s first full-blown nationwide culinary craze.
But despite this new fame, almost no concrete knowledge about how Chinese cooking worked ever reached magazines and newspapers for lay readers. In hindsight, we can see that important food-related information did circulate. But it was usually limited to specialized publications.
American botanists and horticulturalists knew of food plants being raised by and for Chinese on the East as well as the West Coasts. An 1888 report in Garden and Forest mentions that gardeners at Woodhaven and Astoria in today’s New York City borough of Queens were growing some twenty kinds of vegetables “for the Mott Street market-places”; the writer had trouble with names, but the list apparently included bitter melon, yard-long beans, water spinach and several other greens, daikon radish, and “parsley of a high flavor” (that is, the green coriander now usually called cilantro).8
More systematic surveys in an 1894 New York State Agricultural Experiment Station bulletin and an 1899 USDA Office of Experiment Stations bulletin were usefully buttressed by photographs, botanical names, and—most important of all—printed Chinese characters.9 These accounts clearly establish that Chinese restaurant and other cooks had access to fresh bok choy and related brassicas, ginger, jicama (a Mesoamerican native naturalized in the Far East, sometimes still called “chop suey yam” in Hawaii), lotus root, lily bulbs, Chinese sweet potato cultivars, taro, cassava, bamboo shoots, fresh ginger, and ginkgo nuts. Several edible aquatic roots were also available. Today the most important are what we call water chestnuts (Eleocharis dulcis); at the time, Chinese cooks also used the somewhat similar “arrowhead” (Sagittaria sagitti-folia). Both were often called “Chinese potato.” A late-summer favorite, sometimes also confusingly known as “water chestnut,” was the pleasantly mealy-textured, much more chestnut-like water caltrop (Trapa spp.). At the time, some of these items probably were being imported from China along with litchis, longans, jujubes, and dried day lily buds. Well before 1900, litchis, pineapple, bamboo shoots, and other perishable produce were also being put up and exported by a nascent canning and preserving industry in southern China and parts of Southeast Asia. They reached Chinese American communities everywhere through the still-important jin shan zhuang pipeline.
In Chinatowns large and small, people often sprouted mung beans indoors on trays or large flat dishes. It is unclear whether Chinese in this country were also planting field crops like red beans (adzuki) and different varieties of soybeans. But U.S. agronomists were tremendously interested in the last, which had attracted scattered attention as livestock feed even before the Civil War. The 1899 bulletin not only gave a fairly detailed description of “the method used by the Chinese of San Francisco in the preparation of the bean cheese used by them” but also mentioned soybean milk and bean milk skin, soy sauce (“resembling the Japanese ‘shoju’”), and the condiment now often called “bean paste” or “bean sauce” (Cantonese, tau ban jeong; Mandarin, dou ban jiang).10
Unfortunately, this knowledge had no way of reaching ordinary American food writers or home cooks. Neither did any insight into the cooking equipment and methods behind the culinary effects that first captivated some non-Chinese fans. Most of the relevant factors are clearly mentioned in the entry “Chinese Cookery,” with information unsystematically plagiarized from several sources, in an 1889 compilation titled The Steward’s Handbook by the Chicago hotelier Jessup Whitehead. It is doubtful that Whitehead himself or his readers understood any implications of the comments on equipment and preparation:
The cooking is done on brick furnaces and with hickory wood, and the half globes of iron set into the glazing coals cook the food with a rapidity that would startle an American cuisinier. . . . Raw materials are prepared for almost every possible order, and seldom require more than five minutes in cooking. All bulky foods are served and eaten in pieces not larger than the end of the thumb. . . .
Another aid to quick cooking is high heat. The almond eyed cook uses kiln dried hickory or oak for fuel, and makes so hot a fire that water over it explodes rather than boils, and oil becomes a seething mass of liquid and vapor. . . .
The boiler in which the staff of life in Southern China—rice—is prepared is made of the thinnest cast iron, so thin that a very slight tap is enough to fracture it, heated over an earthenware vessel containing a few pieces of charcoal; and directly the cooking is completed, each piece of charcoal is carefully lifted out, extinguised [sic], and put away for future use. An enterprising European firm once thought to supersede the “gimcrack” native pot by a good substantial article of Birmingham make; but the enterprise proved a failure.11
The Steward’s Handbook entry gave no recipes, and these crucial bits of information probably remained unknown to American diners or cookbook authors. For the next fifty-plus years, a large audience continued to talk about, eat, and sometimes try to cook “chop suey” and the ilk with either imaginary ideas or no ideas of what happened in real Chinese kitchens.
Why wasn’t the germane culinary knowledge transmitted more accurately? It did not help that the twentieth century produced an inexhaustible American fondness for hodgepodge dishes rooted in boisterous anarchy, a club into which chop suey was ignorantly welcomed. But a more crucial reason is the same factor that handicapped Chinese newcomers beyond any other immigrant group for more than a century: the unique language impasse.
“Chow”: The Hidden Key to Chop Suey
I have compared the position of American and Chinese people trying to exchange culinary information to the position of the blind and the deaf trying to “translate” each other’s terms for sounds and colors. In effect, there is no counterpart in American attempts to understand any other foreign group’s cooking.
The actual wherewithal of Chinese cooking was too alien to Westerners for helpful English-language description. Moreover, the Chinese simply did not have written recipes on the Western model for cooking either restaurant or home dishes, and for the most part still don’t.
Culinary treatises of various kinds had been around for many centuries, but by no stretch of the imagination can most of them be called cookbooks. They were generally written not by cooks but by patrician dilettanti. Even when they present formulas with elements like approximate amounts of particular ingredients, only in rare cases would such instructions be recognizable to today’s Western cooks as “recipes.” The most famous exception, the Suiyuan Shidan of the middle-Qing-era poet Yuan Mei, does indeed contain many formulas that to this day could be followed with some exactness by a skilled and knowledgeable Chinese cook.12 But even this celebrated treatise was conceived more as esthetic manifesto than workaday manual. It can be categorically stated that at the end of the nineteenth century neither professionally trained nor self-taught practitioners, neither men nor women, cooked from written—much less printed—directions.
“As there are no cook books in China the apprentice must learn by watching, tasting, and smelling,” the American educator Alice Moore wrote from Beijing to a cousin on Long Island in 1923.13 Reducing a cook’s skills to directions for exact degrees of heat, premeasured amounts of painstakingly labeled ingredients, and stop-watch timings would not have made sense to any Chinese. Conversely, trying to reproduce Chinese dishes without such details would not have made sense to any American. If we possessed even one American-published Chinese-language compilation of Chinese recipes from the Exclusion era, many mysteries would become clearer. But as far as I know, no such magical clue exists. The few Chinese characters included in a handful of early English-language books on Chinese food give very scattered gleams of light.
It was all but impossible for both parties to ask questions and receive answers with any rational understanding. No one could have wrestled Chinese cooking processes into the confines of contemporary American recipe formulas. The few people who tried it deserve our sympathy, not ridicule, for undertaking a task that was nearly doomed by the complete absence of any common culinary vocabulary.
“Chop suey” itself is a case in point. Chinese and non-Chinese American cooks and historians have loudly disputed just what the term means. Some oracles claim that it isn’t Chinese at all. Others note that the name certainly exists in Chinese as tsap sui (Cantonese) or za sui (Mandarin), meaning “miscellaneous fragments” or “broken-up odds and ends.” A few follow the lead of the admirable culinary essayist and historian John Thorne, who pointed to Hong Kong Surgeon, the autobiography of Li Shu-fan, for a firm assertion that chop suey was being served in Toisan restaurants by 1894.14 But it’s hard to find anyone seriously grappling with the real question: Just what did the early Exclusion-era Chinese in America, or the whites who gradually came to frequent their restaurants, understand by the variously romanized “chop soly,” “chop sooy,” “chop sui,” and so forth?
The contemporary accounts point to one simple, mystery-dispelling conclusion: What turn-of-the-twentieth-century non-Chinese American restaurant-goers and cooks first identified as chop suey were Cantonese stir-fried dishes as a class. But the English language lacked words to make sense of these dishes. The very idea of stir-frying long remained as opaque to Western minds as the idea of baking a cake would be in a society that had never seen ovens, cake pans, wheat flour, and the rest of the necessary underpinnings.
Scattered pieces of accurate or inaccurate information began floating around in English-language accounts as early as 1884, when the Brooklyn Daily Eagle published an article titled “Chinese Cooking” with the mangled byline of “Wing Chinfoo.” The author was in fact the witty, pugnacious, prolific, and publicity-minded Chinese-born journalist and lecturer Wong Chin (or “Ching”) Foo, already well known as a defender of his native civilization against ignorant American Sinophobia. As a Mandarin-speaker from Shandong province and an American citizen naturalized in 1874, he came to the task with the advantages of non-peasant, non-Toisanese origin and a considerable Western education. Wong’s was the first account by any American to depict the Chinese as a race of culinary sophisticates. It also broke new ground in treating Chinese ingredients and dishes from an informed standpoint. He returned to the subject several times, notably in a series of columns (“The Cook in the Orient,” 1885) published in a short-lived culinary newsletter titled The Cook and an 1888 article about the New York Chinese written for another new magazine, The Cosmopolitan. Because the Eagle piece was widely reprinted in other newspapers throughout the country, and bits of his other accounts were cribbed by various writers including Jessup Whitehead, Wong’s observations reached a considerable audience, though often without credit. Certainly he sowed the seed for real interest in the Chinese as epicures.
“Chop soly is a ragout and may be justly termed the national dish of China,” Wong announced in the 1884 article. “Each cook has his own recipe.”15 This certainly is misleading if we take chop soly/suey to be a single standardized dish like sole Marguery, but has enough truth to be a useful point of departure. The real clue is to be found in the 1888 account, where Wong uses the more precise term “chow chop suey.”16
Of course, in 1884 or 1888 nobody could have found this phrase on a restaurant menu, or grasped its meaning once found, without being able to read the Chinese characters. To any Chinese patron, the significance of the word now usually romanized as “chow,” “chau,” or “chao” would have been plain. Unfortunately, no English equivalent could have been devised at the time. It means “stir-fry,” a concept that would have defied translation. “Chow/chau/chao” may be justly termed the national cooking method of China.
“Chow chop suey” (Cantonese, chau tsap sui; Mandarin, chao za sui) might conceivably refer to any assemblage of stir-fried ingredients. It cannot ever have had a fixed composition. But quite often the “odds and ends” (tsap, za) would include cut-up bits of offal (gizzards, kidneys, liver, and/or tripe), something still observable in Chinese-language entries on menus today where the characters for gai tsap or ji za indicate a dish made mostly of chicken innards.
But the “chop suey” part of the phrase “chow chop suey” happens to be a red herring in the search for any original meaning, because the majority of chow/chau/chao dishes don’t involve tsap sui/za sui. The most common stir-fries combine some chosen meat or seafood with aromatics (especially ginger) and a few such vegetables as bean sprouts, water chestnuts, dried mushrooms (reconstituted), scallions (possibly onions), bamboo shoots, peppers, celery, or snow peas. There are also all-vegetable versions. The simple stir-fry pan sauces usually involve a little soy sauce with or without some broth and rice wine, often lightly bound with a small amount of starch.
It is self-evident that the Cantonese in America cooked such chow or chau dishes for themselves, and that some of them were indeed composed of tsap. We can easily see how curious Americans could have sampled some odds-and-ends version, tried to ask about it across the unbridgeable language barrier, and confusedly latched onto the wrong end of the phrase “chow chop suey.” All who now frequent Chinese restaurants run by people with little English know that such misunderstandings are still routine occurrences. Having no standardized printed source to check the last two words against, they then leapt to the conclusion that these—rather than “chow”—applied to a general category of dishes partly resembling the first one they’d tasted. American eaters thus came to believe in the existence of “shrimp chop suey,” “vegetable chop suey,” “chicken chop suey,” and others named for duck, pork, beef, and so forth, while the Chinese characters on restaurant menus continued to proclaim “chow shrimp,” “chow vegetables,” “chow chicken,” and so on.
Not until 1945 would a whimsical Chinese-born, Western-educated linguist come up with the English term “stir-frying” for chow/chau/chao cooking. Before then, no American cook could have grasped the requirements for properly cooking dozens of Chinese dishes. The necessary conditions are a short blast of powerful heat from a stove or brazier designed for the purpose, a properly shaped and briefly preheated cooking vessel, carefully judged amounts of fat (usually oil, sometimes lard) as cooking medium, pieces of food cut into precisely right shapes and sizes and added in precisely right order, and lightning-fast stirring and tossing of the ingredients as they hit the hot fat and metal.
That Westerners identified chow/chau/chao cooking with chop suey is clear from the introduction of the commercial-scale “chop suey stove,” with removable adaptor rings, at about 1913. This early version of today’s “chop suey ranges” was specifically developed for Chinese restaurant kitchens by makers of gas-powered restaurant equipment. “This work requires an intense heat for quick and efficient work,” a writer for American Gas Engineering Journal explained in 1917. “The chop suey is placed in shallow pans, which are placed on the openings with or without one or more of the loose rings or not as required by the size of pan employed.”17 It should be no surprise that the American observer couldn’t follow the train of steps by which “the chop suey” gets into and out of the “shallow pan.” But he did grasp that intense heat and quick work must be crucial.
The “Intangible Something” of the Wok
The first sustained attempt at an English-language Chinese cookbook was a pretty little unpaginated volume titled Chinese Cookery in the Home Kitchen (1911) by Jessie Louise Nolton, a writer for the Chicago Inter-Ocean. It assures readers that even a skeptical neophyte “falls under the spell” of glamorous, mysterious Chinese cuisine after a few encounters. “He acknowledges that these Chinese dishes possess an intangible something which no other cooking can approach.”18 This quality—which Nolton herself could not have put a name to—was certainly the wok hei, or “vital essence of the pan,” prized by Cantonese cooks. We can see in hindsight that the basic technique responsible for the “intangible something” was stir-frying in a wok: “The Chinese Chop Sooy kettle is made of steel with a narrow rounded base and a flaring rim, and with small handles riveted on two sides of the rim.” An advertisement by a Chicago restaurant supplier, published in 1920 in The Chinese Students’ Monthly, settles the question beyond doubt. It contains a photograph of a two-handled wok next to the caption “Manufacture of Hand Hammered Chop Suey Pans.”19
To Nolton and her readers, “chop sooy” comprised the kinds of dishes that got cooked in this vessel. She explained that chop sooy, “in its various forms, is the foundation of three fourths of all the dishes served in the Chinese restaurants.” But it would have been vain to tell readers to buy the right “kettle.” (Nolton cannot ever have tried cooking in a wok on an American stove. Though confusedly aware that the shape of the pan mattered in some way, she assured readers that they could use an ordinary “porcelain lined or granite kettle.”20) The blitzkrieg five-minute performance noted in the Steward’s Handbook entry, made possible by both explosive stove heat and the contours of the pot, was not reproducible in any home kitchen. Through no fault of her own, the “intangible something” of real chow cooking was a closed book to Nolton as well as all white or black American diners. Newspaper writers on food regularly complained that when Chinese chefs could be persuaded to part with recipes for admired dishes, they deliberately left out some secret ingredient. The language barrier and gap between types of equipment didn’t permit them to perceive what actually had been left out.
The concept of wok hei (Mandarin, huo qi, though people from the Mandarin-speaking north pay less attention to it than Cantonese) has been elucidated in our time by Grace Young’s fine books on wok cookery.21 Wok hei is what Cantonese connoisseurs seek above all in a magnificently realized stir-fry. It is kindled when the searing-hot metal of the wok, lightly glossed with oil, makes brief and breathtaking contact with certain carefully prepared ingredients. Wok hei is as unmistakable as the sight of a rainbow, and equally fleeting. Other cooking flavors make only crude comparisons. It captures an arrested stage of high-heat cooking at which food is just on the verge of becoming deeply browned or lightly charred but doesn’t quite get there. The word that comes closest to evoking the effect is “smoky,” but in this case “closest” really isn’t very close.
Chow/chau/chao dishes, as cooked in Chinatown restaurants serving a Cantonese-born clientele that knew wok hei, were a magnet for the first Americans to “discover” them. We know that Chinatown restaurants for Chinese had been frequented by some white customers before Li Hung Chang’s visit and the ensuing chop suey craze. The same issue of the New York Journal that described the great man’s meals at the Waldorf also reported that as a result of Li Hung Chang fever, “regular patrons of Chinese restaurants have been very much distressed at the influx of greenhorns. One of them went to his favorite place last night for the first time in a week. There was no seat for him.”22
With chop suey’s publicity-fueled leap to national stardom, a small and somewhat clued-in group of non-Chinese habitués was abruptly swamped by a much larger audience of “greenhorns” who had no culinary frame of reference except the mainstream American cooking of the day. They could not have known that knowledgeable Chinese admired Cantonese cuisine for a subtly judged balance of salty, sweet, sour, and bitter flavors, according to the needs of any individual dish. They were ignorant of everything about the chop suey sensation except that it was a sensation. The genius of the Chinatown cooks who developed a novel culinary idiom for this audience was to marry the chow/chau/chao technique—unintelligible to American cooks—with a neatly judged blend of certain effects that were as American as apple pie and others that registered on the inexperienced American palate as heady, intoxicating departures.
New Clienteles, New Stratagems
No other corps of either natives or immigrants could have managed to turn a wholly foreign cuisine into a kind of edible pidgin English that Americans could feel proud of having mastered. Chinese American restaurant food felt more Chinese to its fans than anything that could have been devised by less skilled mind readers. It had its own calculated equilibrium of flavors and textures, just enough unlike anything else in the intended clientele’s experience to strike them with delight. Chinatown cooks manning powerful restaurant stoves could carry it off with bravura and even wok hei (though the latter sometimes might have been hard to taste through the accents of the new made-up “language”). That it also travestied a cuisine loved and honored by its creators was part of the price that they had to pay for making a living in Exclusion-era America.
Very soon Chinese restaurateurs realized that if chop suey could draw a sizable non-Chinese clientele to Chinatown, a much larger public was waiting for them beyond the ghetto. In 1903 a New York Times article headlined “Chop Suey Resorts: Chinese Dish Now Served in Many Parts of the City” reported that “an ambitious young Chinaman” unaccountably nicknamed “Boston” claimed to have led an exodus of restaurateurs several years earlier from Chinatown to the nearby Lower East Side (Third Avenue near Rivington) and thence uptown to Seventh Avenue around 34th Street. Construction for the new Pennsylvania Railroad Station soon wiped out that neighborhood. A Chinese contingent then settled in a few blocks north, in the Longacre district (today’s Times Square), while one adventurer presciently invaded Harlem.23
An eager trans-Chinatown black clientele was forming as fast as the white counterpart. An officer of the New York Police Department told the Times reporter of “chop suey places patronized exclusively by negroes. In fact, they have developed an extreme fondness for chop suey since places were opened up town. Negroes were afraid to go to Chinatown, for some reason or other. But they like the chop suey well enough, possibly because of the large proportion of chicken in it.”24 In 2002 the historian Huping Ling was informed by an elderly Chinese-born St. Louisan who came to the city as a child that during the early 1930s his father had had “a small Chinese restaurant on Jefferson Avenue that catered to the African American community. . . . The restaurant devised a simple menu of fried rice and duck noodles, and the patrons used forks instead of chopsticks. . . . The restaurant also hired African Americans as servers—one of the early instances of racial collaboration and harmony in pre-desegregated America.”25
With the removal to non-Chinese neighborhoods, there was little reason for the new crop of restaurants to address the palates of knowledgeable Chinese diners. There was even less when Chinese entrepreneurs began adjusting their sights to target a developing urban nightlife in the next few decades of the twentieth century. New York and San Francisco sprouted a range of colorful Prohibition-era establishments modeled on mainstream honky-tonks, cabarets, or (eventually) nightclubs, with dancing and jazz as entertainment and menus founded on many “chop suey” variations. A Philadelphia reporter exploring the New York Chinese restaurant scene in 1924 noted two theater-district establishments “equipped with jazz bands and large dance floors. They are run like any first-class American eatery.” The writer astutely noted that “prices are reasonable—in fact, that is the quaint characteristic of all the Chinese restaurants, which extend from the handsome Port Arthur on Mott street downtown to Sun Hung Far’s place away up in the Bronx.”26
This “quaint characteristic” was one of the signal claims that the new Chinese restaurants exerted on mainstream consumer loyalty. The farther they penetrated into non-Chinese neighborhoods, the better positioned they were to compete with the many urban eating places dependent on short-order service and low prices that had sprung up since the early nineteenth century and were still expanding into new forms (for instance, the self-service cafeterias that began appearing at around the turn of the century). Chinese eateries for non-Chinese had at least two advantages over the rest. Even when furnished on the cheap, they offered more atmospheric surroundings than coffee shops, luncheonettes, and the like. Besides, Cantonese-style stir-fried dishes represented one of the few branches of world cookery in which—American clients’ culinary barbarism notwithstanding—lightning-fast service was perfectly compatible with elegant and finished culinary execution.
Some non-Chinese did sense that the popular restaurant dishes often drifted away from any Chinese originals. Qualms on this score set in as early as 1902, when many newspapers picked up a piece from the well-known literary magazine The Forum lauding the culinary discernment of real Chinese people and firmly stating, “Chop sooy is made to sell to curious white persons who visit Chinatown.”27 But the craze was already too far gone to be deflected.
Soy Sauce Comes to Town
The infant cuisine cannot have been one rigidly uniform creation. We can assume that it was practiced with some individuality by different cooks and reflected varying compromises with original Cantonese standards. But wherever it appeared, it displayed several prominent features. Among the most instantly recognizable was a greatly expanded use of soy sauce.
This part of the story is surrounded by confused terminology. Not only are there several different Chinese names for soy sauce, but since the early to mid-nineteenth century, American cookbooks had unsystematically used the word “soy” for a kind of homemade catsup. Wong Chin Foo grappled with the problem in 1885, when he wrote a short squib for The Cook about “Kau-Tsi,” the commonest type of dumpling in northern China (modern pinyin, jiaozi). No American cook could conceivably have untangled the instructions, and it is impossible to tell whether Wong himself had ever tried to make dumplings. But the piece is historically important as apparently having been the first English-language recipe (with two variants) for any Chinese dish:
The most popular dish in Northern China is Kau-Tsi. It is nothing more than a small dumpling, boiled, baked or fried. The dough (of rice flour or wheat flour) should be rolled until it is thin as card-board, and should be then cut out into circles by a small goblet or large muffinring. The filling of the dumpling is left to the cook’s taste. A number of recipes are given below. An ounce of filling is the proper weight. The dough is brought together around the filling so as to form a ball, a half-moon or a cocked hat. Place the dumplings in boiling water and boil for ten minutes; then throw in the pot two cups of cold water, raise to boiling and boil again for ten minutes; then raise from water and steam for fifteen minutes. They are now ready to be served, or to be baked or fried. Bake in a hot oven for ten minutes, or fry in hot lard three minutes.
Fillings for Kau-Tsi.
I.
One pound of beef, veal, mutton, lamb, chicken, turkey or duck; one-quarter pound of pork; salt and pepper to taste; one tablespoonful Indian soy; one-quarter ounce of ginger; seasoning to taste. Cut all up to a pulp together.
II.
Boil asparagus tips, green peas, cauliflower, carrots, two parsnips, until almost done. To one ounce of each of these when put on the dough, add a small piece of chopped-up fresh pork, and seasoning as in above.28
Already soy sauce plays a crucial role in the meat filling. Wong undoubtedly meant to avoid confusion with the American condiment by specifying “Indian soy”—i.e., an article imported from the Far East.
As the puzzling novelty became better known, some American cooks and diners acquired a taste for it either because of or in spite of its singular brewed bouquet. A 1915 chop suey recipe in the Chicago Tribune laconically says, “If cooked right soy sauce not needed to color, if the flavor is not liked.”29 Some sophisticates recognized it as the nearly identical twin of a Japanese product being imported as “shoyu” or “shoju,” a name originally derived from the Chinese si yau (Cantonese) or chi you (Mandarin). Louis J. Beck’s 1898 survey of Manhattan Chinatown gives the name of the “high flavored” condiment as “See Ow” and describes it as “a popular sauce affected by the Chinese . . . made from beans, star aniseeds and spices, and exposed to the sun.”30 English-language food writers tried many romanizations on the order of “syou” or “see yu,” and sent reader-users to Chinatown to buy the unpronounceable stuff. The 1915 edition of The Settlement Cook Book cluelessly rendered it as “Shoyn.”31 The Boston Cooking School Cook Book was still calling it “shoyu” in 1929.32
Part of soy sauce’s growing appeal was that it provided an appetizing (at least for Americans) brown tint in contexts where Cantonese would have used it very discreetly or not at all—for instance, stir-fried rice, or the pan sauces of many “chop sueys.” Discriminating Cantonese cooks disliked a strong brown color in stir-fried rice and many or most other stir-fries. But they were more than happy to revv up this accent for the sake of their new clientele. They often gratified white patrons’ avid preference with a heavy all-purpose brown gravy made from soy sauce and another product that may have started out as a by-product of Chinese sugar refining but eventually devolved into a syrupy cousin of English “gravy browning” (i.e., caramelized sugar dissolved in water with a few other seasonings). The Chinese name was “pearl sauce” or “bead sauce” (Cantonese, jyu yau; Mandarin, zhu you). Unlike soy sauce, it could be used at will without oversalting a dish, though it did add some sweetness. The Chinese brown gravy that became a standard part of many presentations generally contained a little stock, some starch, and a soy sauce–pearl sauce combination.
Jessie Louise Nolton recommended seasoning “chop sooy” with a mixture of two condiments that she called “Chinese seasoning sauce” and “Chinese flavoring sauce.” The first (“A rather salty sauce with a sort of meaty flavor,” essential “to obtain the peculiar flavor which makes the chief charm of the dish”) was certainly soy sauce. The other (“A sauce which is somewhat like molasses in appearance and is used in most of the Chop Sooy dishes”) was most likely pearl sauce.33
In a few years soy sauce could be bought in Chinatown shops as “chop suey sauce”; the product that an enterprising New York firm trademarked under that name in 1915 probably was soy sauce.34 Soon American food writers and home cooks were trying to incorporate soy sauce into their own “Chinese” recipes. The prolific authority Ida Bailey Allen’s version of chop suey in Mrs. Allen’s Cook Book (1917) called for half a cup (with additional salt to taste), an amount suggesting very slender acquaintance with the stuff.35 She was outdone by Buster Keaton, who called chop suey his favorite dish. His wildly baroque rendition, published in a 1929 fundraising cookbook by a Beverly Hills women’s club, featured a fanfare of ingredients including raw pork cubes, water chestnuts, bamboo shoots, “Chinese greens,” salted almonds, and the meat of a whole roast chicken, and called for “a cup of ‘Soy’ sauce added to season it and give it the proper dark color.”36 Mrs. Allen, meanwhile, had become a ubiquitously visible flack for Mazola corn oil. A 1927 newspaper advertisement presented her version of “Chop Suey as the Chinese Make It,” featuring Mazola along with products from other Allen clients (Kingsford or Argo cornstarch, Blue Label Karo syrup) and calling for Worcestershire sauce to taste. “Soy sauce, can be used instead of the Worcestershire,” she noted. “It can be obtained at Chinese restaurants.”37
Unfortunately, Westerners no more grasped the varied possibilities of soy sauce than sixteenth-century Aztecs could have grasped the scope of European grape wines. Many different versions of soy sauce exist in various parts of China, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia. Some are thick, sweetish, and nearly black; others thin and lighter-colored with a clean, salty flavor. All result from a complex double fermentation of soybeans (usually with wheat) over a period of at least several months; especially prized kinds may take two or three years. All contain innumerable subtle flavor nuances contributed by different by-products of fermentation, especially the glutamic acid salts responsible for the meatiness—“umami” in today’s parlance—mentioned by Nolton. Cooks often combine several soy sauces in varying proportions. The Cantonese have famously preferred light, delicate kinds for most purposes and disliked what they consider a coarse overuse of soy sauces in some regional cuisines (e.g., Shanghainese).
Such knowledge lay far outside non-Chinese cooks’ and diners’ reach at the height of the chop suey era. For several decades, the “syou” or “soy” called for in chop suey recipes came from abroad and had to be inquired for in Chinatown. It could be liable to spoilage since at the time it was not routinely pasteurized. By the early 1930s a domestic alternative had appeared. Applying the already well-known manufacturing technique of acid hydrolysis to soybeans by boiling them in the presence of a strong acid, American know-how presented American consumers with a hydrolyzed soy protein solution that could be cheaply manufactured in weeks, colored brown, heavily salted, and sold as soy or shoyu sauce with no legal objection. The A. E. Staley Company of Decatur, Illinois, pioneered in the bulk manufacture of hydrolyzed soy sauce.38 The new La Choy company, founded in Detroit in 1922 by a Korean immigrant and a native Michigander who had met as university students, soon started buying the product from Staley for retail bottling and distribution under its own label.39
Chinese restaurants continued to cook with imported brewed soy sauce, bumping up amounts to suit Western tastes. But meanwhile, other domestic manufacturers followed the lead of Staley and La Choy. Soy sauce was now free to conquer American palates, in caricatured form. The harsh-tasting hydrolyzed product had none of the fragrant, meaty interplay between brininess and mellowness that distinguished properly brewed soy sauces. But it was easy for grocers to stock anywhere in the country, and nearly imperishable.
Culinary Ways and Means
Actual eating experiences in the new Chinese American eateries, from small chop suey joint to cabaret, revolved around a repertoire of effects deeply satisfying to non-Chinese patrons. The most instantly recognizable, after big doses of soy sauce, were glossy, viscous sauces bathing most “chop sueys” (i.e., stir-fries); boneless chunks of meat, poultry, or fish fried in batter-coatings; a heavy hand with sugar; and a rich brown color in nearly everything. All these logically paralleled some flourishing trends in mainstream American cuisine already well known to Chinese who worked as cooks in private homes.
Thick roux-based white sauces were a hallmark of the age. Fritters, croquettes, and cutlets dipped in batters or breadings before frying were enjoying great popularity. The uses of sugar were expanding from the dessert and confection repertoire into new territory as a delirious gelatin-salad vogue overtook the nation and old standbys like baked ham or Boston baked beans acquired a prodigious sweetness. Brown sauces were as admired as the white counterparts—and in fact often were roux-based white sauces doctored with a bit of caramelized sugar or a handy newish product called Kitchen Bouquet. The same trick gave a deeper color to many underbrowned braises and pan gravies.
Chinese cooks, of course, didn’t use roux to bind sauces. Their equivalent was starch obtained from water chestnuts, tapioca, or wheat flour from which the gluten had been extracted by a kneading process. Once in North America, many cooks switched to the cheap and readily available cornstarch. All starches gave sauces a translucent gloss while thickening them to any desired degree—and non-Chinese patrons preferred them quite thick, often with a brown tint. Batter-dipped fried foods were not a prominent feature of Cantonese cuisine except as imagined by non-Chinese eaters, who especially liked batter-fried boneless nuggets of pork or chicken set off by another newly conspicuous element: sweet-and-sour sauces made up to please the national sweet tooth.
The actual structure of menus also underwent some rearrangement over time, to satisfy American ideas about the meaning of different courses and the order in which they should appear. At first Chinatown restaurants seem to have set out little dishes of fruits, sweet preserves, and salted seeds or nuts as a starting course. The gesture probably echoed the custom of beginning Chinese formal banquets with prescribed arrays of such items. In a decade or two, the practice faded in meals meant for non-Chinese. It became more usual to greet Westerners with soups—traditionally the last course in Chinese meals—or “appetizers,” a word that was gradually driving out the more formal older term “hors d’oeuvre.”
The concept of soups presented great obstacles to international understanding. Chinese cuisine is rich in soupy dishes, either savory or sweet, that confound all Western notions of soup. The soul of savory kinds was, of course, a basic stock. The best Guangdong restaurant kitchens were as proud of excellent meat or poultry stocks as any French counterpart. They would never be without seung tong (Mandarin, shang tang), or literally “superior broth,” made with great care from chicken or other poultry, fresh and cured pork, and a few seasonings like ginger and scallion. (Tong or tang usually refers to clear broths or thin, clear soups made with them.)
From a huge spectrum of possibilities, only wonton soup and a starch-thickened version of egg drop soup took up permanent residence on plebeian Chinese American menus in the “soup” pigeonhole. (Bird’s nest and shark’s fin soups were favorites at higher-end dining spots, probably more esteemed by Americans as exotic luxury items than from any sense of their merits.) But menus of the period testify to quick and lasting enthusiasm for other standard items from the scarcely translatable repertoire of Chinese “soup noodles” (see below).
American Chinese appetizers usually included sweet-and-sour spareribs as well as an innovation called “egg rolls,” which weren’t sweet but were served with a dipping sauce that more than made up for the lack. Called “plum sauce” or later “duck sauce” (from the supposition that it went with roast duck), it was vaguely modeled on syun mui jeung (Cantonese) or suan mei jiang (Mandarin), a sweet-sour-salty condiment made from Prunus mume, a unique Far Eastern relative of plums and apricots. Egg rolls themselves apparently were invented in New York Chinatown during the chop suey era as a heftier stick-to-the-ribs variant of “spring rolls,” a delicate, thin-skinned, and shatteringly crisp fried specialty of the Chinese New Year celebration.40
The egg roll filling came to be a general medley of bean sprouts, shredded celery and bamboo shoots, and any other desired vegetable along with bits of pork and (often) shrimp. As with some other naturalized citizens of the Chinese American restaurant kitchen, a sturdy crunch was just what non-Chinese restaurant-goers wanted in the thick wrapping.
The chief fixture of the new menus was, of course, “chop suey” as understood by Americans—i.e., some chow/chau/chao dish. “Chicken chop suey” was the most prestigious since at the time chicken was an expensive meat that Americans associated with a fine Sunday dinner. Though Chinese cooks were used to whacking a chicken into small, flavorful bone-in pieces for stir-fries, Americans were unnerved by chunks of poultry on the bone and considered breast meat the most desirable part of the bird. To them “chicken chop suey” made with breast meat was worth paying extra for. The dish might be embellished with either Chinese or ordinary white mushrooms.
Just plain “chop suey” usually indicated a pork version. Two other popular variations were spawned by Americans’ love of beef and the cheapness of veal. (At the time, veal usually came from unwanted bull calves that dairy farmers were eager to get rid of.) Duck, squab, turkey, shrimp, and/or lobster chop suey were often available at large restaurants.
Chow mein, as beloved as chop suey, was equally the victim of mistaken identity. “Mein” really meant “wheat noodles” (Cantonese, min; Mandarin, mian)—fresh, supple, and usually made with egg. “Chow,” again, meant “stir-fried.” Cantonese cooks were especially renowned for the wok hei of their chau min.
Noodles were only beginning to become known to most American diners. Wong Chin Foo, in the 1884 Brooklyn Eagle piece, could only lamely mention boiled “pieces of dough,” “very much like the ‘nudeln’ of our German cousins.”41 For chau min, the Cantonese boiled and drained the noodles before the dish was assembled. Of the usual procedures, the simplest was to stir-fry aromatics and any other desired ingredients, add the cooked noodles, and swiftly toss everything in the surpassingly hot wok, usually together with a little stock and seasonings. Or the noodles might get a separate stir-frying by themselves before being combined with the other elements. The same approaches were used for dried, soaked, and drained rice vermicelli to create Cantonese chau fun (Mandarin chao fen); sometimes fresh rice noodle sheets cut into ribbons were the star ingredient.
The “chow mein” that captured the American imagination along with chop suey resembled none of these. What Americans rapidly came to expect in “chow mein noodles”—a phrase as illogical as “chowder soup”—was a crisp crunch utterly unlike the delicate suppleness of the original. The likely source of the notion that the noodles had to be crisp was a popular Hong Kong variant of chow mein, leung min wong (Cantonese; the Mandarin is liang mian huang). The name means “both sides brown” (or “yellow,” which is the same word in Chinese). The dish was made by boiling and draining fine, thin egg noodles and pressing them into a pillowy mass like a pancake. This was lifted out into a little hot oil in a wok and cooked on both sides only until it was golden and slightly crisp on the outside, soft on the inside. Any desired stir-fry of meat, poultry, seafood, or vegetables was then poured over the hot drained noodles. Chinese eaters loved the contrast between the fragile brittleness of the outer “crust” and the suave interior of the loosely formed cake.
I believe that “both sides brown” helped start chow mein on the road to—if not ruin—Americanization as a bed of uniformly crunchy noodles topped with some “chop suey” version. Jessie Louise Nolton’s “Chow Mein” recipe is a good instance. She had the cook start with handmade noodles, and continued:
Put olive oil in pan having the oil about one inch deep when heated. Spread the noodles over bottom of pan and let fry slowly till a golden color. Then turn over with wide bladed knife or pancake turner and let fry on the other side until done. Perhaps ten minutes will be right, or fifteen. Remove noodles and drain carefully to remove oil. Put on platter and serve with any of the Chop Sooy dishes you prefer. The Chop Sooy must be ready and hot, and the noodles served immediately when done.42
The reason for Nolton’s use of olive oil is unclear. (She usually recommends peanut oil.) But, tellingly, she had been taught to understand chow mein as deep-fried noodles served with chop suey. Deep-frying (ja in Cantonese; zha in Mandarin) is a technique unrelated to chow/chau/chao. Probably Chinatown restaurateurs had grasped American patrons’ preference for complete crispness and neatly obliged.
Chow mein thus came to be judged by a coarse crunch far removed from the lovely, not-quite-crusty finish of ordinary chau min or the pleasing textural contrast of “both sides brown” fresh out of the wok. Andrew Coe’s lively history Chop Suey cites a 1902 salute to chow mein—uttered in the persona of a birdbrained chorus girl—as something like potato chips in vermicelli form.43
Later recipes by American authors followed Jessie Louise Nolton’s lead in frying the noodles completely crisp before covering them with chop suey. Within a couple of decades La Choy had perfected a shortcut: thick, heavy noodles baked to a cracker-like crunch that survived being topped by a sauce. Sold in a can by itself, the product was proudly labeled “chow mein” despite a total lack of connection with the chow/chau/chao stir-frying method. (La Choy also managed to can bean sprouts and ready-to-heat chop suey.)44
A pan-fried noodle dish somewhat closer to real chau min did find a place on Chinese American menus: lo mein (Cantonese, lou min; Mandarin, luo mian, from a word meaning “dredge up” or “stir up”). It differed from chau min in requiring only a brief tossing of the noodles in the pan with the other ingredients—too brief to produce the ultimate wok hei, but flavorful nonetheless.
As mentioned earlier, the new menus also enlarged the role of “sweet-and-sour” meat or seafood dishes—pork, chicken, fish, shrimp. They were not, as some critics now suppose, invented in North America out of whole cloth. It should be noted that both sugarcane raising and sugar refining were longstanding enterprises in Guangdong province, and that pineapple—frequently used in such dishes—was already being canned there after a few centuries as a plantation crop. But Cantonese antecedents of the newly popularized sweet-and-sour dishes had been fewer and more subtle.
For their new American clientele, Chinatown kitchens rang nimble changes on the theme employing several can’t-miss elements: boneless, bite-sized chunks of the main ingredient; an eggy batter; enough fat for deep-frying the coated morsels; and a sauce sweet and sour enough to overpower other flavors. Some versions used canned pineapple with its juice; others, a combination of vinegar and sugar. The sauce often had a dash or a hefty slug of red coloring.
Many Americans were already partial to sweet-sour sauces like the English-style mint sauce that James Beard remembered his mother and their Chinese cook Jue Let arguing over as an accompaniment to leg of lamb. Let thought it drowned out the meat’s flavor; Elizabeth Beard half-conceded the point but loved it anyhow.45 Sugar-vinegar combinations were also familiar enough to German and Eastern European Jewish immigrants to have helped encourage an American fondness for Chinese sweet-and-sour dishes. The higher the sugar content, the happier the audience. By 1903 a writer for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle was singing the praises of New York Chinatown’s “‘sweet and pungent chop suey’ which strongly resembles Indian chutney.”46 In the same year an article in the Minneapolis Journal mentioned pineapple fish with the approving comment, “No one possibly, tasting it, would imagine it contained fish.”47
Among the most popular menu standbys were fried rice and “egg foo young,” both considerably altered from the originals. Fried rice, which in Cantonese kitchens was supposed to have any meats or vegetables added with discretion and to be as white and delicate as plain rice, became a free-for-all of cooked rice and the usual “chop suey” vegetables (bean sprouts, water chestnuts, green pepper, celery) colored a deep brown with soy sauce. In China, foo yung (Cantonese) or fu rong (Mandarin) was a dish as simple as it was elegant. It is also the name of several flowers, including the beautiful white Chinese hibiscus. (Some especially delicate versions used only egg whites.) It can be made with any sort of seafood, meat, or poultry added in judicious amounts. But the form that conquered American palates was a thick egg-bound patty studded with the standard chop suey-ish elements and napped with the Chinese brown-gravy-of-all-work.
The “soup noodles” mentioned above comprised several dishes that, for Chinese, were nearly synonymous with humble but excellent fast food often peddled by street vendors. The general concept was not entirely new to American cooks. But the nearest parallel—“vermicelli soup” with thin Italian pasta—originally had other associations; American hostesses had considered it a particularly elegant, refined company dish since the eighteenth century.
The very different egg noodles arrived with German as well as Chinese immigrants. But it was the Chinese who brought soup-and-noodle dishes to thousands of middle-class and working-class eaters wherever Chinese restaurants were to be found. The most popular kinds were yat ca mein (which had variant spellings ranging from “yockamin” to “yet gaw mi”), war mein, and wonton soup.
Yat ca mein (Cantonese, yat goh min; Mandarin, yi ge mian, meaning “single order of noodles”) was dished out in one-person servings by putting boiled and drained noodles into a deep bowl with a few seasonings like sesame oil, pouring hot soup stock over them, and adding a substantial garnish, most often half a hard-boiled egg and a few slivers of roast pork or poached chicken. At its best, it was based on very fine stock. War mein (Cantonese, wor min; Mandarin, wo mian, from a word for “nest”) was usually presented in a large tureen-like vessel and featured thick, absorbent noodles with a wider selection of vegetables, also in a good stock.
There is a postscript to the yat ca mein story: For some reason several U.S. and Canadian cities decided, and believe to this day, that the dish was their own birthright possession. Beef versions now compete with pork or chicken. The New Orleans African American community took a transfigured yat ca mein (spaghetti, beef, Cajun seasonings) to its bosom as a hangover remedy under the nickname of “Old Sober.” A catsup-laced relative reached African Americans in the Tidewater-Chesapeake regions of Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware as simply “yock” or “yat.”48
In the northern Chinatowns where non-Chinese first tasted it, yat ca mein gradually faded away except in very old-style Cantonese rice shops. Wonton soup, on the other hand, became better known and loved after the 1920s and probably underwent less distortion in American Chinese restaurants than any other Chinese dish.
With their usual instinct for tailoring performance to alien expectations, Chinese restaurateurs removed such unpopular items as bean curd, whole fish, duck or chicken feet, and most steamed dishes from bills of fare meant for non-Chinese. They created at least a token section of dessert offerings (almond cookies, sliced pineapple, litchis, preserved ginger). Some put white bread and butter on the table, recognizing that a meal without them would be unintelligible to many patrons. A sizable number of restaurants went further, positioning themselves as split-identity eating houses with both Chinese and mainstream American personas that allowed different members of a party to go the chow mein–spareribs–litchi route or stick with veal cutlets, Virginia ham, and chocolate cake. (Ambitious restaurateurs sometimes saw a Chinese eatery as a stepping stone to opening a high-class Western establishment.) Simultaneously, many large American hotels took to offering chop suey as a sign of cosmopolitan awareness. Versions of the dish eventually became standard on luncheonette and diner menus everywhere in North America.
The huge popularity of chop suey and the other standard offerings was bound to spark a demand for printed recipes. The handicaps to arriving at any sort of adequate formulas were so many and so incomprehensible that it is foolish to criticize the results. It would have taken superhuman effort for anyone to have gotten within hailing distance of Chinese American restaurant dishes without speaking and reading Chinese.
Jessie Louise Nolton, the first writer to make a serious effort, clearly had done her best to take on a daunting task. Her title, Chinese Cookery in the Home Kitchen, in itself implies a pitch to American aficionados of Chinatown restaurants. The slender volume contained blank lined pages for a cook’s notes opposite each recipe—a clear tip-off that people would need to do much of their own road-map construction. The contents show a struggle to fit a certain amount of real teaching into the context of a ladies’ “theme”-entertainment cookbook, complete with suggestions for table decorations and recipes for fruit salads.
Nolton makes game stabs at describing necessary ingredients including “Chinese potatoes” (water chestnuts or arrowhead), “sesamum” oil, preserved ginger, dried mushrooms, and bamboo shoots. She cautions that “American imitations” won’t work and shows a laudable insistence on details like the proper handling of rice. She goes so far as to give directions for making noodles from scratch and growing one’s own bean sprouts. She argues for peanut oil—then rare in American kitchens—as the most suitable cooking fat in most cases. She understands that a “Chinese Chef . . . is apt to leave the vegetables a little under done, according to the taste of the average American palate”; though she allows a little leeway in the matter, she warns that overdone vegetables “would spoil the dish entirely.” Surprisingly, she gives (or at least, tries to give) directions for preparing “Chinese Cured Pork,” a homemade version of cha siu/cha shao that she regards as indispensable in many dishes.49
But lacking the kitchen furnishings necessary for the fast and furious stir-frying process (and having no English name for it), Nolton cannot explain how to replicate it. Her timings for most dishes add up to something more than fifteen minutes—unusually fast by contemporary American standards for cooking combinations of meat and vegetables, but disastrously overlong for the right effect. The amount of knowledge that she managed to absorb and convey despite the linguistic and cultural-culinary barriers is remarkable; she must have spent much time trying to ask the right questions of people with whom she shared no common language. We should not be surprised at her lack of specificity about the particular shapes and sizes in which vegetables and meats must be cut. Chinese cooks who had absorbed this knowledge from the cradle never stopped to puzzle over mathematical details. For American cooks who hadn’t, spelling out fractions of an inch would have looked like childish busywork without a clear explanation of why such details affected the outcome of “chop suey.”
The number of English-language Chinese cookbooks increased only slowly for several decades. Among them, Chinese-Japanese Cook Book by the semifictitious team of Sara Bossé and Onoto Watanna (published by Rand McNally in 1914) is a slapdash affair evincing very little understanding of either Eastern or Western cooking principles.50 On the other hand, The Chinese Cook Book by Shiu Wong Chan is noteworthy on several counts. It was issued in 1917 by Frederick A. Stokes Company, a New York firm that already was carving out a small niche in cookbook publishing. It took the important step of printing the titles of all recipes and a sprinkling of other information in Chinese characters, along with romanized spellings and English translations.51 The actual characters may not have helped American users at the time, but they provide many retrospective clues to real meanings.
If Jessie Louise Nolton’s brave try couldn’t overcome the barriers of written/spoken Cantonese added to the barriers of the Cantonese kitchen “idiom,” the problem here is the reverse. The unknown author (he was certainly a man, given Chinese women’s general lack of access to public venues at the time) clearly was at home with crucial Chinese culinary concepts and cooking terms. He provides recipes for a wealth of dishes that Americans would seldom or never have tasted in run-of-the-mill pre–World War I Chinese American restaurants but that, as the book shows, were being made by Chinese cooks for Chinese patrons. Unfortunately, he had next to no frame of reference for translating the crucial information into English. One pictures him and Nolton gazing at each other from opposite sides of a yet-unbreachable linguistic and culinary-cultural chasm, “so near and yet so far” from each other’s comprehension.
The Chinese characters and romanizations, though often garbled, allow us to see that Shiu Wong Chan wanted to introduce Western cooks to many underpinnings of the cuisine. Virtually all of his “chop suey” recipes, whether for bean curd, pigeon, or lobster, bear the character chow/chau/chao, directly indicating the stir-fry method. He presents “superior broth”—the foundation stock as necessary to Chinese as to French cooking—under the name of “Primary Soup.” He tries to explain how to ferment “Chinese sauce” (soy sauce), grind “sesamum-seed” and peanuts to oil, and make “white cheese” (bean curd) or “red cheese” (a fermented version important as a flavoring) as well as several cured meats, including a few variants of “Chinese frankfurters” (the sausages commonly known as lap cheung in Cantonese, la chang in Mandarin). The aim here is not complete directions but sketches of what goes into the production of some indispensable cooking materials.
The recipes tantalizingly suggest what a splendid range of dishes Chinese cooks could manage to produce in the United States in the depths of the Exclusion era, from chicken baked in salt to the festive New Year’s dish called “raw fish” (Cantonese, yue sang; Mandarin, yu sheng), made with pieces of uncooked fish and finely cut raw vegetables topped with a seasoned dressing.52 (It is traditional in parts of southern China as well as the Chinese communities of Singapore and Malaysia.) The bilingual list of ingredients and equipment available from Chinatown sources includes pharmaceuticals (astragalus, the Cordyceps caterpillar fungus), rice flour, “sorghum wine,” “cooking shovel” (wok spatula), and “frying pan” (iron wok).
The knowledge that went into this pioneering book was sadly destined to remain locked up in its pages, through the author’s incomprehensible English and inability to fill in procedural details that would have been terra incognita to his audience. In 1917 serious Chinese-language instruction was becoming established at American universities, but it was far removed from the world of mere cooks. Chinese–English dictionaries paid scant attention to any sort of specialized culinary vocabulary, a failing that persists today. Shiu Wong Chan labored mightily to translate the words for what we now call star anise (“octogon spicery”), taro (“gray potatoes,”), eggplant (“Chinese tomato”), silk squash (“star melon”), ginkgo nuts (“white nuts”), fermented yellow bean sauce (“Chinese sauce residue”) and much more.53 But none of the effort would have gone far to help his readers.
Chopping Suey with a Vengeance
Of course most of the people trying to teach Americans how to cook Chinese dishes were Americans who spoke no Chinese and couldn’t tell what they knew from what they didn’t know. Through their diligent efforts we can see chop suey developing a sort of multiple personality disorder over the first decades of the twentieth century.
Cut off from any means of understanding the lightning-fast stir-fry method with its unique equipment, highly structured preparations, and ferocious heat, American observers initially described chop suey as a “hash” but usually came to prefer “stew.” That word covered just about any moist-cooked savory dish that wasn’t officially called a soup. Nearly the only thing most kinds had in common was that they cooked with liquid over moderate or low heat long enough to “stew” everything to tenderness—the exact opposite of what gave any chow/chau/chao dish its dashing brio. To most minds, no particular technique distinguished one stew from another, and the order in which ingredients were added usually didn’t matter. No one deeply examined the subtleties behind other ethnic borrowings such as chili con carne or Hungarian goulash, which reached middle-class American kitchens at about the same time as chop suey and were also nonchalantly welcomed into the stew club.
The unstructured American approach to chop suey is well illustrated by a lecture-demonstration at an Indianapolis church in 1906. The instructor, a Mrs. Saunders, knowingly warned her audience, “The brown sauce served with chop suey in some Chinese restaurants is sweetened to hide the opium.” (Chop suey joints were sometimes rumored to start customers on a slippery slope toward opium dens.) Her lesson in making it “the American way” averted that peril by substituting Kitchen Bouquet. The other ingredients were cut-up chicken breast and pork tenderloin, onions, celery, button mushrooms, ground salted peanuts, and enough water “almost to cover the ingredients”; the meats were briefly cooked in butter before everything else was thrown in together for a final fifteen minutes.54
These directions were not entirely unreasonable for cooks who thought stewing was stewing and, unlike Jessie Louise Nolton and her readers, might have had great difficulty in buying peanut oil, “sesamum oil,” or “Chinese Seasoning Sauce” from Chinese groceries. A number of early-twentieth-century authorities stuck to a similar approach, certainly the best that could have been managed without insight into the real technique. Many tried to keep cooking times short by American standards—a worthy idea doomed to failure since cooks were unable to meet other necessary conditions like super-fast tossing and stirring of ingredients over prodigious heat in an appropriate cooking pan. And the authorities themselves weren’t always happy with the results of brief cooking. “The chop suey that we buy in restaurants is very often not cooked long enough to suit our American taste,” a home economics column for the Cincinnati Enquirer observed in 1919.55 The instinctive national distrust of undercooking explains why many recipes started with already cooked chicken or meat.
The more diligent writers tried to insist on cutting up things into small pieces. Some even had an idea of the principle behind Chinese ways of dicing and slicing. The USDA Bureau of Home Economics scriptwriters who prepared a 1931 installment of the well-loved radio show “Housekeeper’s Chat,” a household-advice program conducted by the fictitious “Aunt Sammy,” managed to work a good deal of accurate information into a broadcast titled “A Chinese Dinner.”56 The script began with a brisk attempt to right popular misconceptions, delivered by Aunt Sammy’s savvier friend “Claribel.” No, Sammy wouldn’t be able to duplicate the menu of a real Chinese dinner; no, chop suey wasn’t a real Chinese dish; still, “every Chinese cook I’ve ever known says it is made according to the best principles of Chinese cookery.” (This last claim was completely accurate as regarded the best restaurant chop suey. In fact, perfectly respectable stir-fries can be made from Western vegetables such as globe onions, bell peppers, and American celery as long as proper technique is observed.)
Thus instructed, Sammy embarked on directions for chicken chop suey served with fried noodles and Chinese gravy: “As in most Chinese dishes, all the ingredients are cut up or shredded. Not diced or chopped, as we American cooks would do, but cut in short thin strips, and occasionally sliced. Both vegetables and meat are cut the same size and shape.”
The cooking time for Sammy’s chop suey was less than ten minutes. Aware that most of her radio audience would be unable to buy water chestnuts, she pointed out the charm of their crunchy texture and suggested substituting sliced Jerusalem artichokes, Brazil nuts, or even apples (very briefly cooked). The other vegetables were shredded green pepper, onion, and celery. Though she didn’t require mung bean sprouts in the recipe, she described their virtues (such as vitamin content) and told listeners how to sprout the beans at home. Unwittingly proving the inescapable truth that American authorities who worked hard to get some details right could never quite avoid missing the boat on others, she began the chop suey with cooked chicken and provided a recipe for a gravy—“Chinese” by virtue of a starch thickener and a bit of soy sauce—that apparently was to be poured over the food like Thanksgiving dinner gravy.
Aunt Sammy’s creators clearly had striven to arrive at, and conscientiously explain, a formula not altogether divorced from reality. But at least half the recipes in newspapers, cookbooks, and other sources came from people to whom chop suey was simply a popular, infinitely adaptable modern mudpie.
As noted before, the dish’s rise to stardom coincided with a growing American fondness for free-spirited culinary mishmashes—for instance, gelatin salads used as edible dumping grounds for anything you felt like throwing in. A couple of decades later, casseroles would prove to be a similar vehicle for the irrepressible national omnium-gatherum approach.
We should note that long before Aunt Sammy, “chop suey” had become a stand-in for any hashed melange of ingredients. By 1903 a soda-fountain industry periodical would offer a recipe for something called a “chop suey sundae,” consisting of ice cream topped with a syrupy cooked mixture of figs, dates, and chopped walnuts.57 More colorful drugstore extravaganzas soon followed. In 1913 a New Jersey sweet shop was advertising chop suey candy at 15 cents a pound.58 A refreshing hot-weather cold platter of any desired raw vegetables chopped fine and served with pot cheese, popular among Eastern European immigrants, acquired the nickname “Farmer’s Chop Suey.”59
Some thinkers turned to the field of sandwiches, another great twentieth-century anything-goes art form. Perhaps inspired by breakthroughs like Reuben sandwiches, baked bean sandwiches, early versions of subs or hoagies, and the comic-strip exploits of Dagwood Bumstead, pre–World War II pioneers along the Rhode Island and southern Massachusetts shoreline came up with sandwiches involving all the chop suey or chow mein that you could pile into a hamburger bun. St. Louis boasted a kindred inspiration known for some reason as the St. Paul sandwich: a foo young–style egg patty between white bread slices, with the spirited addition of mayonnaise and pickles.60 Ingredients like bacon and cabbage would later invade pan-cooked chop suey, and American dessert-lovers would invent “Chop Suey Cake.”
It needs little guessing to understand why any coupling of the notions “chop suey” and “authentic” did not stir American cooks or eaters to painstaking culinary-cultural analysis. One of the first things ordinary cooks dispensed with was procuring Chinese ingredients. Jessie Louise Nolton might have assured her readers that “it is not a difficult matter to make the necessary purchases,” but a short newspaper squib published in the same year as her book expressed the contrary feelings of many:
“I’ve got a fine errand,” said the man with a grouch. “My wife has just bought a new cook book in which she found a recipe for chop suey. It said that bean sprouts, water chestnuts and other horrible ingredients could be bought at any Chinese merchant’s, so she decided that she must try to make it, and I am the goat. I have to go down and do the curious tourist act and buy those things. And then I suppose I’ll have to eat it! Wonder what they’ll put in the cook books next?”61
Interpreting the dish as a motley stew let would-be chop suey artists forgo any list of needed articles, with the usual exception of soy sauce after hydrolyzed versions became universal. Canned bean sprouts, water chestnuts, and bamboo shoots might put in an appearance or be ignored in favor of any familiar vegetable from carrots to potatoes. The more recherché sesame oil, ginger, and Chinese mushrooms were generally omitted. Peanut oil still being relatively rare, American cooks saw nothing wrong with substituting butter. Occasionally someone used lard, which really did belong to the Chinese kitchen.
Some people omitted to cut or slice any ingredient into small pieces. Some took to cooking rice or noodles in the dish itself rather than as an accompaniment. Others streamlined the procedure by putting all the ingredients into the pot at once and covering them with water or stock that would later become a thickened sauce. People accustomed to flour-bound sauces often preferred flour to starch. Many used molasses to color the sauce deep brown, and naturally came to think that sweetness was an intrinsic part of the dish. Cooking times frequently stretched out to the edge of doom. Chop suey also acquired the reputation of being easy to cook for a crowd. The Settlement Cook Book’s “Chicken Chop Suey for 15 People,” first published in 1915, called for braising a pork-veal combination for several hours before adding cooked chicken, cooking another half hour, binding the sauce with a soy-laced roux, and finally adding the supposedly classic combination of celery, bean sprouts, and canned mushrooms and water chestnuts.62
Recipe writers quickly began using the name “American chop suey” for versions with novel touches. At first the term embraced anything from a purportedly Chinese chop suey with extra broth to any long-cooked meat stew, with little rhyme or reason.63 A Minneapolis church fundraising cookbook from 1920 presents an “American Chicken Chop Suey” with chicken and pork fried in butter, Kitchen Bouquet for coloring, and a cup of ground peanuts. It is followed by “American Chop Suey” with veal and pork fried in butter and lard, two tablespoons of flour, and two tablespoons of Brer Rabbit molasses, the whole being cooked for more than two hours; and “Plain Chop Suey” with cooked hamburger, onions, and spaghetti topped with canned tomato soup and baked for half an hour.64 This last dish, which essentially fitted the voguish new culinary category of a “casserole,” was about to swap names with the other versions.
During the early 1930s, variations on the combination of hamburger, pasta (usually elbow macaroni), and something tomato-ey prepared as baked casseroles came to be semiofficially known as American chop suey—except in regions where they were baptized “goulash” or “chili,” with just as much logic. “American chop suey” was the invariable name in New England, where the invention acquired a particularly devoted fan club.
By World War II homemade chop suey of the older persuasion had lost its aura of romance and merged into the ranks of formerly latest old faithfuls, Chinese in the sense that Swedish meatballs were Swedish. A somewhat similar fate had befallen Chinese American restaurants.
A New Demography Takes Hold
The previously noted exodus of Chinese restaurants to white (and sometimes black) city districts was not the only form of out-migration from America’s Chinatowns in the early twentieth century. Susan B. Carter has studied nationwide county census records to document a prolonged, little-noticed dispersal of Chinese to lesser population centers, often too small to support any kind of Chinese community.65 As Carter points out, this long-overlooked development accompanied a steep overall decline in the Chinese American population as enforcement of Exclusion took hold. The economic base of the old communities concurrently shrank, while urban planners routinely targeted Chinatowns—seldom able to fight back—for partial or complete demolition to make room for public works projects.
As before, many Chinese were soon in motion, seeking opportunity elsewhere. Thousands spread out to inconspicuous new homes, sometimes in the chief towns of predominantly rural counties, looking to provide necessary services to whites through the self-employment strategies honed a few decades earlier. As they had in cities with big Chinatowns, most initially set up laundries and subsequently shifted to restaurants. As before, men often recruited a few real or “paper” relatives to form small partnerships in either endeavor.
With the gradual population turnaround after about 1920, another sort of restaurant organization slowly emerged as a practical option in both cities and towns. The partial evening-out of the distorted sex ratio and increase in stateside marriages meant that more wives and children could share the work of a restaurant. Family-run Chinese restaurants became more visible, from major Chinatowns to the boondocks. At first, young children as birthright citizens often were the chief legal bulwark lending countenance to one or both parents’ continued residence in America; over time, more restaurant owners were themselves American-born and thus safe against deportation.
Whether they were located in urban Chinatowns or country towns, the new family restaurants nearly always demanded the utmost from every member old enough to do simple tasks. Many firsthand recollections of these businesses have been presented by John Jung in a monograph appropriately titled Sweet and Sour; the contributors’ memories are abundantly corroborated by shorter accounts in some other histories.
The children of Quong Wong, who founded the New Shanghai Café in Lodi, California, in 1926, described a litany of responsibilities to Jung and another interviewer:
The children usually did all the assorted menial jobs required in a family restaurant like preparing vegetables, filling small soy sauce bottles, salt and pepper shakers, sorting silverware [white patrons rarely used chopsticks in such establishments], making pots of tea, bussing tables, washing dishes, etc. Depending on their age, the children helped in various ways in the kitchen. All kinds of meat and vegetable had to be chopped, cut, diced or sliced for different dishes. Shrimps have to be shelled. Water urns have to be filled for tea. Other chores included sweeping the dining room floor and keeping a supply of change in the cash register.66
Annie Leong, one of Huping Ling’s St. Louis informants, recalled how her whole family weathered the Depression through constant work in their restaurant, with her father as chef and her mother supervising the dining room and kitchen:
We worked seven days a week, from eleven o’clock in the morning to mid-night. . . . We [she and her brothers] did everything. We wrapped wontons, took care of the dining room area, and set up restaurant. Then if they needed us, we could cook too. So we did whatever was needed. It was just natural, and we just did it. We were going to school and had to do our homework. After school, we would study, and it would get busy during dinner hours, and we took care of all the customers. In between, we would study a little, and then took care of customers. After the dinner rush was over, about eight o’clock, we could really have more time to study.”67
Depending on the restaurant in question and the kind of clientele it addressed, such tasks may or may not have prepared children to appreciate the subtleties of Chinese food. The level of execution must have varied widely from one eatery to the next, and young observers quickly realized that culinary values had to be adjusted for white patrons. In an instance of rapid promotion that occurred a few decades later but cannot have been unique, the future food writer Ken Hom began apprenticing in an uncle’s split-menu Chicago restaurant at the age of eleven and was very soon set to cooking short orders of “the stereotypical ‘Chinese’ food” for white customers: “fried rice; sweet-and-sour pork (much more sweet than sour, and artificially crimson red); and the old standby, chow mein.”68 The food cooked at home by his mother, and by the restaurant chefs for Chinese patrons, belonged to another world of knowledge and appreciation. Sweet-and-sour pork must have been far harder to swallow for people operating restaurants in small towns far from any Chinatown. They were obliged both to address only non-Chinese palates and to do so on very disadvantageous terms.
The earliest Chinese restaurants to attract a scattering of white or black patrons in America’s Chinatowns did so without seriously compromising the principles of Cantonese cuisine. They left no documentation of how far they altered (or didn’t) any particular dish to please non-Chinese palates. We know that the picture rapidly altered in the late 1890s with the purposeful creation of a Chinese American culinary repertoire. But both major restaurants and hole-in-the-wall eateries in Chinatowns could still count on a knowledgeable Cantonese customer base, no matter who else wandered in.
The situation was far different for those who eventually moved to city locations outside of Chinatown, or small-town locations far from cities. For them, the playing field had to accommodate several new factors.
The spread of Chinese American restaurants beyond Chinatown coincided with the arrival of cooking stoves connected to public utilities. Until recently, most restaurant stoves had burned coal, to which some Chinese establishments had switched after previously using hardwood or charcoal for both large fixed stoves and portable braziers. The brazier had been an ideal wok stove for families or other small groups as well as tiny restaurants and itinerant vendors. But the trend now (reinforced by municipal fire codes) was toward gas or electric ranges. For large Chinatown restaurants sufficiently well capitalized to invest in powerful gas-fired “chop suey stoves” with openings to hold giant woks, there were obvious advantages in getting rid of bulky brick ranges that had to be constantly stoked with solid fuel. The saving in labor costs and storage space might well offset the utility bill.
Smaller operations faced a less attractive tradeoff. So did home cooks. Unfortunately, the home-scale gas and electric ranges that were replacing wood- or coal-burning cast-iron stoves were a terrible fit with Chinese cooking requirements. Most restaurant counterparts were little better. They could not securely accommodate a round-bottomed wok or let it sit close enough to the heat to deliver the terrific pulse of energy necessary for stir-frying.
Though gas companies were advancing outward from the biggest metropolitan areas, there were still gaps in rural coverage; meanwhile, electric utilities and electric stoves were gaining fast on gas. A restaurateur planning to relocate to a little burg with no Chinese competition might be well advised to forgo a chop suey stove and make do with a gas or electric American restaurant model—especially if he had decided to aim for broad customer appeal by adopting a split-menu plan mostly geared toward American dishes with a token chop suey section. In that case, it often made more sense to cook everything in flat-bottomed American pots and pans than to struggle with woks for the Chinese dishes.
Setting up restaurants far from any Chinatown might also mean something relatively new to most Chinese in North America: less reliable access to Chinese foods. For a couple of generations, Chinese on Gold Mountain had been well supplied with ingredients—both those that they grew or fished themselves and others that arrived via the efficient overseas Hong Kong–San Francisco pipeline and the stateside jin shan zhuang network. White observers had marveled at the Chinese foods they saw being stocked or cooked with far into mining country. Chinese railroad crews had commanded the wherewithal to cook their own meals to their own satisfaction as Union Pacific construction inched eastward across the mountains to Utah.
Later the transplanted communities in large Midwest and East Coast cities included grocers ready to supply both retail customers and restaurants with a wide range of products shipped from California or directly imported to New York and distributed to more distant locations. Rice and good soy sauce could be taken for granted. Preserved vegetables, dried fish and shellfish, necessary herbs and spices, sesame oil, starch noodles, rice flour, and many condiments were able to reach North American outlets with only minor disruptions. Bean curd, fresh wheat noodles, and cured meats were abundantly available from small producers in San Francisco, Chicago, or New York. The specialty produce raised by Chinese truck gardeners in the orbit of many cities found a ready market in all Chinatowns. (It inspired at least one non-Chinese Michigan farmer to devote herself to the same articles and relate her success story to a Vegetable Growers Association of America conference in 1916.69)
But people starting Chinese American restaurants in rural counties weren’t in the same loop. Getting nonperishable supplies could mean periodic stocking-up trips via train, buggy, or (later) car to a nearby China town—which might not be all that nearby, and which didn’t necessarily have the range of specialty ingredients available in Chicago or New York. Restaurateurs might be able to order shipments of produce from Chinese truck gardeners. But given the limitations of their customers’ palates, it made little sense for only-game-in-town restaurants to purchase rarefied or unusual-tasting ingredients in large amounts. When they had to, they made do with whatever ordinary American produce was available.
Big-city counterparts with multiethnic clienteles had the knowledge and resources to negotiate flexible compromises between their own standards and the varied preferences of ignorant or semiknowledgeable non-Chinese patrons. And unless they were marginal one-man street operations, they could count on powerful stoves imparting real wok hei even to somewhat déclassé “chop suey.”
Their food cannot have been uniformly good or bad. It’s a reasonable guess that in the nation’s Chinatowns some restaurant cooks performed up to very high Cantonese standards even when cooking for outsiders, while some made minor adjustments. All had at least some leeway to cook without wholly abandoning their inbred culinary instincts. But elsewhere, cooks had no guarantee of being within a hundred miles of anyone else who had ever tasted proper Cantonese food or could appreciate some degree of polish in hybridized versions. Even if they had access to the right ingredients and kitchen fittings, they might be best off cooking everything in the way they thought most appealing to uncivilized palates.
The most difficult hardship of all for those who dispersed to the hinterlands was that finding a spot with no Chinese competition also meant being isolated from Chinese companionship, except for the rest of the restaurant staff. This might be a sustaining minicommunity of family and friends, or perhaps a grim handful of men working nearly around the clock to produce meals beneath any standard that they could respect.
In some ways, the transpacific exile from China itself had been less of an exile. Most Gold Mountain sojourners had formed established colonies or lived within easy reach of one; they had never lost the society of people who spoke their own language, celebrated their own festivals, and perfectly understood their own kitchen idiom. Setting out to make a living in remote communities by cooking for strangers who had only a heavily doctored image of the unique Cantonese cuisine, and still less idea of the Cantonese language and culture, was perhaps an even more lonely severance from the known and a more courageous voyage into a new unknown.
If there could be any compensation, it was that the places they founded and the Chinese American food they served in Exclusion-era America genuinely delighted other people in sleepy backwaters as well as major cities. News syndicates, movies, and the radio had in some sense brought rural or small-town America in closer touch with big cities and bright lights. But on another level, modern media had pointed up a cultural divide between metropolis and boondocks, sophisticates and hayseeds. The new communications supplied scattered white communities with compelling images of what was happening—also meaning what they were missing—in the great world. In the confines of provincial existence, a Chinese restaurant serving such fabled delicacies as chop suey and foo young could be a passage to global adventure. One taste of a canned litchi could be a glimpse into a magical unknown.
This is to say that though cooking an artificially distorted version of Cantonese food for people unable to grasp the real principles of the cuisine must have been a sort of tragicomic frustration for hundreds or perhaps thousands of Chinese American restaurant workers, it was not meaningless. It laid down a small but durable foundation of something quasi-Chinese in mainstream American society. And across forbidding cultural and racial boundaries, it gave its creators a lasting claim on the gratitude of neighbors.