That’s a really interesting video. I love Japanese food, but the restaurant near where I live has what seems to be more authentic Asian cuisine. They don’t serve the type of Americanized stuff that is generally associated with Chinese food. And I prefer the real kind.

America pretty much bastardizes any different cultural traditions brought into the culture, so it doesn’t surprise me that it’s the same with food. I think a lot of Eastern food is so much better than what we have here, and I’ve noticed there are a lot of vegetarian options at the Japanese restaurant I go to, and apparently this is true with Thai and Middle Eastern food as well.

American food is just another symptom of what I’ve come to think of as America’s culture of “the bigger and faker the better.” This video now reminds me of the “Whopper virgin” commercial by Burger King. I think the people they got to try it were better off with their native food. With McDonald’s and America’s corporate food chains spreading throughout the world, I think there is no doubt our unhealthy food habits are going to have negative effects on other countries.

“America pretty much bastardizes any different cultural traditions brought into the culture, so it doesn’t surprise me that it’s the same with food.”

This isn’t uniquely American. British Chinese food is different to American Chinese food, is different to French Chinese food… is all different to the actual food that Chinese people in China eat, or serve in their restaurants. The food gets adapted to the local tastes and creates its own ‘traditional’ dishes.

Why am I thinking about the Yao Min gets a phone call ad?  EAT THE HEAD!

This is why I like heading the block or two into the adjacent chinatown area with my co workers (Indian American boss, Japanese/Indian friend, NYC Jew Friend who eats anything) for dim sum.  Plenty of it is authentic, but if it is too unusual for my taste, my buddies will usually soak up the balance.

Good talk by Jennifer 8 Lee, not the least of which is that she didn’t start it by saying “IwenttoHarvard,didyougotoHarvard?”

Seriously, I loved her point about McDonalds:Microsoft as Chinese Restaurants:Linux. Good crunchy, meaty, sweet stuff about self-organising grassroots systems, and the benefits that can occur when participants aren’t obsessed with intellectual property, fame, and fortune.

And more seriously, Lee provides a timely reminder that, 100 years ago, exclusionary racism against immigrants was just as much (if not more so) the province of left-wing labour unions as it was of right-wing plutocrats. I’d hope that the current American union leadership, while continuing to regard exploitative globalism with skepticism, will take a more enlightened and balanced view of the “immigration” (really labour) issue than Gompers did, and that they’ll resist the attempts of Buchanan and Paul and other xenophobic Know-Nothings to make common cause against people who want to become productive and enthusiastic citizens.

She’s really interesting and entertaining.

A few years ago my ex(who is Pakistani)introduced me to Pakistani-Chinese food. He was so excited to find a restaurant in St. Louis that made it just like in Karachi. He takes his family there every time they come to visit. 

I was pleased to find a restaurant in Cleveland that serves it.  Think of it as fusion cuisine.

My husband’s granddad was a phenomenal cook and he was an immigrant from China.  We’ve taken his recipes and feel so much healthier and fuller on fewer ingredients, with less kitchen clutter, and with less cost.  He ran a restaurant in Boston’s Chinatown.  The other Cantonese immigrants and their kids loved it, but it didn’t do much business because the tourists couldn’t stand it.

What I’ve noticed about “American-Chinese” food is the tendency to have more salt and sugar than real Chinese food.

My Eurasian grandfather used to complain that carrots weren’t part of Chinese food, as they seem to be a part of most stir-fry you find in Chinese food these days here in America.

Chinese home cooking?  Lots of combinations of soy sauce/oyster sauce/hosin sauce with dry white wine/sherry along with garlic, ginger, onion, and your meat/vegetable of choice.  5 spice powder is good for making a rice porridge with chicken/beef/shrimp, etc.

Mother Avenger would enjoy Szechuan-style pickled vegetables, which also had the virtue of clearing out your sinuses if you take a big whiff of the smell.  She also recommended a big bowl of hot and sour soup to do the same on a more permanent basis.  There are packets to make it with, the Kikkoman variety being pretty decent, as is the Knorr brand.

Phillipino food includes egg rolls they call lumpia, one variety is known as “The Shanghai”, which usually has beef/pork/shrimp inside.  Yummy stuff.  One of Ilocano Avengers’ specialties. Obviously they have some sort of Chinese influence.

I recommend the sauce packets from Lee Kum Kee for better-than-take-out meals, they just need a little jazzing up(more meat than called for, and a little crushed red pepper for the hot dishes) and they’re easy to spot because of the panda on the package.  “You can find them where fine Asian foods are sold.”

One of the things she neglects to cover in this otherwise wonderful explication:  regional cuisines.  There is a lot of Chinese Food that I never saw before I moved east because it was Sichuan and not Cantonese.  I think if you handed somebody in Sichuan a dish from Harbin or Taiwan, they very well may not identify it as “their” Chinese because it would be nearly as estranged from their own cuisine as American dishes are.

The US doesn’t necessarily bastardize for the worse. Living in Korea, it was almost impossible to get any vegetarian Chinese, Thai, or Vietnamese food. Same thing in France - little to no chance of finding tofu options anywhere. Came back to the States, even back home in podunk Wisconsin and voila, the bastardization had brought veggie versions of all my favorites. For once, I could grunt with pride, USA! USA!

As for the video itself, yeah, it makes a fascinating tale, but I can’t help but quibble. I know this view won’t be popular, but it smacked a bit much of feel-good multi-culti identity pride and pique: a mix of Asian superiority and “ain’t whitey stupid” seasoned with the precious giggles of a NYT wunderkind. If she’d added a bit on how American food gets bastardized in China, then it would have universalized the story a bit, showing how the local seeks to consume and transform the global, not just East to West, but West to East as well.

I know it’s a bit much to expect a point, but she did seem bent on making one (granted she should since I’m sure the NYT or somebody paid a pretty penny for her globe-trotting project), and if it was about “the little people who self-organize and make big trends,” isn’t it true for just about every ethnic variation around, including the “Americana diner” menu? Seems more like a function of risk averse entrepreneurs copying what seems to work elsewhere, manifesting itself in whatever niche arises, whether it be Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Italian or what have you.

Gracchus- In Gompers defense; he most likely considered the availability of Chinese immigrant labor to be a threat to his unionization efforts.

British Chinese food is different to American Chinese food, is different to French Chinese food…

Hell. San Francisco Chinese food is different to NY Chinese food, is different to DC Chinese food.

When I lived in Japan, I discovered Americanized versions of foreign foods, that were then Japanisized.

Mexican>American>Japanese pretty much means huge plates of melted cheddar cheese, jalepenos and white white white rice, covering some kind of meat—usually chicken.

Italian>American>Japanese is sometimes pizza with corn and spam and salted cuttlefish on top.

Don’t get me started on the stuff you find in Hawaii. Or the “Hawaiian” food you find in the US, for that matter.

“Chinese” fusion with non-Asian cuisine seems to work best when both share the same base staples of rice and hot peppers. When I lived in NYC, Cuban-Chinese restaurants were popular for that reason (I’m sure the dash of nominal Marxism also helped)

if it was about “the little people who self-organize and make big trends,” isn’t it true for just about every ethnic variation around, including the “Americana diner” menu? Seems more like a function of risk averse entrepreneurs copying what seems to work elsewhere, manifesting itself in whatever niche arises, whether it be Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Italian or what have you.

Agreed, but it’s a useful and compelling illustration. A nice and familiar counter-argument to those conservatives who would claim that McDonald’s/Microsoft top-down bigcorps as the only path to popular and consumer-friendly standards in America.

Gracchus- In Gompers defense; he most likely considered the availability of Chinese immigrant labor to be a threat to his unionization efforts.

Oh, absolutely. I admire Gompers for many things, and understand that motivation completely. I’d even forgive him the casual racism present in his writing, since I don’t judge historical figures on the basis of current attitudes and norms.

However, I do judge him for contributing to the continued institutional racism of the Democratic Party of the day despite his otherwise progressive views, and for making common cause with the worst elements of xenophobic populist nationalism. It’s important to be reminded that the American left, even with the best intentions, can fall prey to what we now think of as a disease exclusive to right-wingers.

I just hope that the modern union movement understands that there’s a third way besides the cheap-labour gastarbeiter programmes of the neoCons and the exclusionary fantasies of the Know-Nothing racists.

Jennifer 8 Lee’s book The Cookie Chronicles is really interesting.  The tape had some of the information from the book, but there’s a lot more.  Part of it was about a Chinese family who bought a restaurant in Hiawassee, Georgia and the problems they had with Child and Family Services.  The book isn’t just about food, even though the food parts were what I read it for.  It’s worth reading.

A lot of “ethnic” things in the USA are unknown in their home countries. Oregano does not traditionally go in Italian pasta sauce. To no one’s surprise, the Greek diner coffee cups (and, for that matter, diners) are mostly unknown in Greece.

I don’t think the interest in and striving for authenticity is all bad. One of the reasons people eat Chinese food (or any ethnic food) is because they are interested in the country of origin of the food (or they’re working late on a friday night and need food). And if you are eating food because you’re interested in the experience of learning about the cuisine of different countries and reasons, that’s when people start to be concerned about and think about authenticity. While I don’t think that striving for authenticity is necessary (and I don’t much care most nights when I’m getting Chinese takeout), I can see why people think about it so much. We can’t necessarily afford to go to a foreign country, but we would sometimes like to know what the food is like there.

Seems more like a function of risk averse entrepreneurs copying what seems to work elsewhere

While you call it “risk averse”, the entrepreneurs themselves would call it “good business sense.”

I have to say that in general I have found authentic chinese food, or at least authentic san francisco style cantonese food, to be really unappealing. Not that its actually bad food, but for some reason I don’t like it much.

Its easy to get caught up in authenticity, because obviously there is no real authentic anything. I love indian style chinese, its super good. I also like san francisco style burritos. They aren’t mexican really, but they are damn good.

While you call it “risk averse”, the entrepreneurs themselves would call it “good business sense.”

I don’t think he was using it in the perjorative sense, just as a statement of fact. For all their outlaw hacker mystique, the developers of the various Linux distros are more risk-averse in their releases than Microsoft, which takes huge and often disastrous (Microsoft Bob, WinME, Vista) risks with their OS releases. I’m sure similar parallels could be drawn between the fairly stable and standard menu at all those Chinese restaurants vs. McDonald’s grand experiments (e.g. their Pizza).

With OSS or Chinese restaurants, certain entrepreneurs will take risks on a local level. Whether the new product gets picked up by other entrepreneurs is usually more dependent on quality,  innovation and word of mouth rather than test-marketing, focus groups and heavy-duty R&D;.

And the great thing is, both types of model now have their place in the American market. Or perhaps, according to Jennifer Lee in this talk, they always did.

A Chinese buffet restaurant near where I sometimes work has all sorts of Chinese delicacies:  garlic bread, pizza, french fries.  Yum!

There is a lot of Chinese Food that I never saw before I moved east because it was Sichuan and not Cantonese.  I think if you handed somebody in Sichuan a dish from Harbin or Taiwan, they very well may not identify it as “their” Chinese because it would be nearly as estranged from their own cuisine as American dishes are.

Bingo! Not only are there different cuisines from different provinces or even regions within each of those provinces, but also regionally.  Though rice is popularly identified as “Chinese” in the US and Western nations, that wasn’t necessarily the case, especially in the past when long-distance trade wasn’t as convenient.  In the northern regions, meals tended to be centered more around breads made of wheat or other grains as rice didn’t grow as well in that region. 

Though rice is commonly available nearly all over China, including the northern regions now…..rice was considered an expensive luxury only several decades ago.  Heard a story from an older family member about how in Shandong, a northern province which was mired in poverty back then (1940s and before), a bowl of rice was considered such a luxury that anyone lucky enough to have it would rather eat it in public to show off their relative ostentatious affluence to their neighbors rather than eat it in private.  In contrast, a bowl of rice was so commonplace in southern China, even among the poor that it wasn’t considered a big deal.

Heh. This post reminded me of a “Mexican” place my family used to laugh at long ago.

Thanks for the replies (and moreover thanks for this great blog, I’m a long~~~ time lurker suddenly interloping).

Just to clarify… I don’t mind pointing out the racism, it certainly bears our notice. What I don’t quite get is what it added to her point. White America ate Chop Suey to assuage the guilt of the Chinese Exclusionary Act of 1882? Will people 100 years from now read our hummous love as atonement for Gaza? (at least our hummous is “real” though ((or is it? i dunno)) ... we’ve advanced on that account!)

The problem I got from the laughing (not just hers, but the audience’s too) was largely built into a “you people think you eat Chinese food, now watch Chinese people laugh at your ignorance - Hahahahahahah… I’m smart” which is kind of a cheap shot, because all cultures warp other culture’s food/music/drink/dance what have you. They might have been laughing at other stuff too… but the mocking was key, especially with the fortune cookie, General Tso’s, and the “fried gelato” bit (and did she name drop Alessandra Stanley there?).

And Tyro: yes, like Gracchus said, I was pointing out “risk averse” as a common business/investment term, not a pejorative. And as you alluded, it is standard practice of entrepreneurs, which supports my point that the practice she seems to claim for Chinese restaurateurs is one you find in all small-scale entrepreneurs, of all stripes, in all aspects of small-business.

I know this isn’t a huge issue, and the substantive book project sounds cool. She’s obviously super talented and her presentation skills are incredible. I don’t want to be hatin’ on someone just trying to make some cool culture. But as someone who supports smart identity politics (i.e. that which doesn’t rely on liberal guilt to scapegoat whitey for cheap laughs), I get a bit annoyed with less than smart identity politics and this seemed to rub me just that wrong way. And when I say scapegoat whitey, I don’t mean we can’t ridicule the dominant culture. There is room for, and a need for it. I mean to single out white america for mockery about things you’ll find wrong in every culture, including the one that is lobbing the jokes at the dominant culture. Would we laugh if we brought some ‘bastardized’ foreign McDonald’s to white Americans and watched them make faces and mock its incomprehensibility? don’t think so.)

I just started watching the video but was so excited to see a quick shot of Wok and Roll which is the place where I get sushi in my neighborhood.  They deliver and the prices aren’t bad.

Italian>American>Japanese is sometimes pizza with corn and spam and salted cuttlefish on top.

Oh my God.  Well that trumps my cheese on sushi in Mexico story.

@Tyro:

I don’t think the “Greek Diner coffee cup” is generally thought of as ethnic in the same way as the Italian pasta sauce.  I might have assumed that “Italian” pasta sauce in America basically resembles something commonly consumed in Italy, but I doubt anyone I know thinks that the coffee cups are actually from Greece—they’re just something that appeal to Greek-Americans, who operate many of the diners in this country.

OTOH the coffee cups might even by considered more “ethnic” in the sense that they’re a token of Greekness, while the pasta sauce is just something to put on your pasta.

We can’t necessarily afford to go to a foreign country, but we would sometimes like to know what the food is like there.

When I was in junior high, they used to take us on a field trip every year to an international food festival in Milwaukee where we got to go from booth to booth tasting all kinds of international foods for something like $1 a pop.  Since it was generally people cooking from Grandma’s recipe and not professional restaurant owners, I’m guessing it was at least somewhat authentic.

Let’s face it, though—even corned beef and cabbage isn’t an authentic dish.  We only use corned beef in the States because Irish immigrants picked it up from their Jewish neighbors and made do.  A huge amount of American cuisine is about people coming from other places, looking around for stuff that was kind of similar to what they could get at home, and doing the best they could with it.

My favorite fusion restaurant that I never went to:  Argentinian-Iranian.  I have been to the Argentinian-Italian restaurant in town, though.  It was pretty good.

I didn’t really get that she was mocking American-Chinese food.  I mean sure, she was poking fun at how Chinese food isn’t really all that Chinese.  However, before having a lengthy segment on the unrecognizability of General Tso’s Chicken, she said it was one of her favorites and that she had a recipe for it in one of her books.

I got more of a “isn’t it interesting and quirky” vibe rather than a “haha you white losers think you’re so authentic”.

I have this ideal sense that fusions of food created by ethnic influences in new cultures, adaptations to local available foods, etc, tends to end up improving foods by creating more available options. This is my perspective as a Californian, where all kinds of cuisines come to the state that has probably the most diverse agriculture within the US and is well situated for getting imported foods, too.

Not to say Chinese-American food is better than Chinese food, just that it’s nice to have Chinese-American, Chinese-Japanese-American, Chinese-Korean-American, Hawaiian, and we’ll-call-it-Pacific-Rim available. When it comes to cooking, variety truly is the spice of life.

I’m not sure why Roxanne assumes that Italian food came to Japan from America. Seems a little arrogant. I have had much excellent Italian food in Japan, it seems to me that maybe Roxanne spent too much time in family restaurants (which I think are an idea imported from America).

When I went to China (for 1 month only) I spent a lot of time in North China and the food there was completely different to boring westernized slop. Now I only eat in CHinese restaurants which say they are north chinese and include fried egg and tomato on the menu (it’s a kind of litmus-test dish).

But I agree with others, the fusion can benefit food from both cultures when it is done well.

Pacific Rim in Ann Arbor is my all-time favorite restaurant.

once upon a time in australia my ex’s chinese grandmother was teaching me how to make wontons, which was a whole family affair involving preparing stuffing and stock and then folding up great numbers of them with chop sticks. at some point I exclaimed along the lines of ‘wow, chinese restaurant cuisine is so corrupted from the stuff you actually eat’, and she retorted ‘how often does what you eat at home resemble what you eat at ‘modern australian’ restaurants?’.

I’m wary of trying too hard to strive for “authenticity”, especially since such a tendency punishes innovation.

Exactly.  That, and what counts as “authentic” changes over time - I’ve seen references to “authentic Tex-Mex,” which at one time would have been considered an oxymoron.

One of the reasons people eat Chinese food (or any ethnic food) is because they are interested in the country of origin of the food (or they’re working late on a friday night and need food).

Not at all for me.  I eat different (often quite inauthentic) “ethnic” foods because I like the flavors, and I get more variety.  (That, and on campus the lines tend to be shorter at Bollywood Cafe or Oh Bento than at Subway or Burger King.)

I think one of the other reason why ‘authenticity’ is a bit of a fool’s errand is that really, no cuisine is pure, based on how much movement there’s been of people and spices and techniques and ingredients over just the past century.  Then you keep going back, and the rest of it starts falling apart: remember, tomatoes and chili peppers are native to the New World; they’re interlopers to Italian food, Chinese food, Thai - and even Indian food, which would really be unimaginable without them and their other import, potatoes.

Then there’s Japanese curry, which came to Japan not via India, Thailand and China but via India and Great Britain, which is why it’s a usually from a packaged mix.  I think this is fun stuff.

I think the key is generally to be in a restaurant where the chef cooks what (s)he thinks tastes good, rather than what (s)he thinks the average customer is going to like, or at least, makes sure to include personal favorites somewhere on the menu.  After that, the rest of this stuff about authenticity is almost more taxonomy than anything else.

Loved the video. As a big fan of Americanized Chinese food, I’d like to point out one other virtue that is fits well into the open source metaphor—American Chinese tends to be a lot more customizable than other cuisines. It’s true that a lot of American Chinese food is really unhealthy. But most Chinese restaurants around here also offer some extremely healthy options for steamed food with a lot of veggies. Compare that to other restaurants where even the healthy options (salad?) are loaded up with cheese, bacon, etc.

Also, it was an absolute awakening for me when I discovered I could order things like “General Tso’s, not fried.” I love the sauce but I hate the clumps of breading. So far, I haven’t found a restaurant that won’t do this for me, and it’s been good every time.

Then you keep going back, and the rest of it starts falling apart: remember, tomatoes and chili peppers are native to the New World; they’re interlopers to Italian food, Chinese food, Thai - and even Indian food, which would really be unimaginable without them and their other import, potatoes.

You can also add sweet potatoes and peanuts to that list.  The former, in fact, was critical first in fostering population stabilization during the 1600s and then a relatively moderate increasing population when wars, famines, and other factors of mortality* were taken into account up until the early 1950s when Maoist family planning policies of the 1950s-1960s greatly accelerated this increase which prompted the “one child policy” in the early 1980s. 

* These factors of mortality used to dramatically decrease population levels which caused past Chinese population trends to be similar to boom and bust cycles.

This reminds me of two stories.

My grandparents, like all good Jews, grew up in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, and love Chinese food. But there is one dish from my grandfather’s childhood that has been extinct for years and that he still remembers with great nostalgia. Apparently they used to sell something called a chop suey burger from street carts. It was chop suey on a hamburger bun. I don’t think it actually had a burger patty in it at all. Anyway, he thought these were great when he was a kid and wishes someone would bring them back.

One of my roommates and good friends from college was Chinese-American, and when we graduated from college, her parents took the four of us from the apartment out to eat at a local Chinese restaurant. Because of the ethnic make-up of our group, they brought out a completely different set of menus for us - the Chinese menus - not in Chinese, in English, but with actual Chinese food on the menu - mostly dishes I had never eaten or even heard of. Then some discussion ensued because we were a mixed group and they brought out the “regular” menus as well. My friend admitted very sheepishly afterward that she actually prefers American Chinese food. It was my first hint that what we call Chinese food is not particularly Chinese. Anyone know how common this practice is of maintaining two menus? I’m sure some of it depends on who the restaurant thinks its clientele is, but I would think it’s difficult from an inventory/kitchen-flow standpoint as well.

As far as the General’s Chicken goes:

http://www.mykitchensnippets.com/2008/11/general-tsos-chicken.html

It comes out really, really good.

And speaking of food around the world, I’m always interested to see what ends up on a hot dog. Of course, there are great regional variations even within the United States and bitter rivalries over what “belongs” on top of a hot dog. But the most outlandish hot dogs I’ve ever seen were in Brazil. I cannot even remember all the stuff that went on that dog, but getting it “with everything” meant about 10 different toppings including mayonnaise, quail eggs and farofa (shredded, toasted yucca). Here in Arizona we have the Sonoran dog (wrapped in bacon and topped with beans, salsa, chopped tomato and onions, shredded cheese and mayonnaise) and several local chains dedicated just to this regional delicacy.

And speaking of Sonoran food, I have finally surrendered my dedication to authenticity in Mexican food and admitted to myself that chimichangas taste damn good.

There is a really, really good book about food and cooking in China written by a Chinese-American expatriate living over there: it’s called Serve the People by Jen Lin-Liu.  I highly recommend it.

James, you’ve obviously never had a pizza with Linguiça.

As for cook books, one of the best ones is the Hong Kong Gas Company cookbook, it’s bilingual and the ingredients are easily obtainable these days.  When I was a lad, aside from Kikkoman soy sauce, you had to go to Chinatown in S.F. if you wanted anything from lap chong(Cantonese sausage) to salted watermelon seeds.  We had to walk uphill a mile in the fog to get to Grant Street, and then the shopkeeper asks you if your mother wants to eat the real salty olives you’ve bought because you ‘look’ so Anglo

A lot of the local Chinese restaurants where I live are actually run by Vietnamese, a significant population in this metro area. And the local Japanese place is run by a Korean, complete with some Korean Dance Dance Revolution karaoke thingy on the big flat screen.

So, if Chiese food is really Americanized food, how come all of the Chinese restaurants I know are run by Chinese?

OMG! Why do we drive on parkways and park on driveways???!?!?

Of course, there are great regional variations even within the United States and bitter rivalries over what “belongs” on top of a hot dog.

I remember there was a brouhaha in Chicago a few years ago when Carol Moseley-Braun listed ketchup as an ingredient on her Chicago dog.  Ketchup!  When everyone knows you have to have chopped tomatoes on a Chicago dog, not .... ketchup.  Only children put ketchup on their hot dog.

Ah Dark Avenger thank you for bringing up Linguica- it’s the Chourco and mushroom pizza that’s traditional in our family.  Must be another regional difference- I don’t remember many pizza places offering a choice between the two.

I remember back when I lived in an are with good Chinese food, the Chinese students would all go to one place they claimed was more authentic, and the rest of us would go to another.  I don’t remember much difference between the dishes, but the one they preferred used less salt and things weren’t as hot.  I don’t remember anyone getting dishes I didn’t recognize, so more authentic must be relative.

As for truly authentic, what would that be?  Food changes over time- and it probably has since we discovered fire.  Ever read any of those old Roman cookbooks?  Or even stuff the colonists made?  How about that ‘50’s cooking?  Yum yum!  Thank goodness we have moved beyond putting anything in aspic- ever.  I can’t help but think that someone who had only eaten food from the pre-1950’s era would not recognize much of what we eat today.  And yet- it’s all authentic- in its own way.

chingona—as far as I know the two menu practice is fairly common, particularly in urban areas or areas with large Asian immigrant populations.

Amanda: Japanese pizza is good, and usually quite cheap provided you buy it in an italian restaurant. They usually have a few kooky options, but the basic ones are great.

Nothing I have seen in Japan compares for kookiness with something I recently saw at Selfridges, an upmarket dept store in London. I saw:

chocolate-coated bacon

Jennifer’s book, The Fortune Cookie Cronicles- is awesome!!

AND a middle name of “8” is also awesome- makes me jealous that I’m stuck with a boring one!

“White America ate Chop Suey to assuage the guilt of the Chinese Exclusionary Act of 1882? Will people 100 years from now read our hummous love as atonement for Gaza?”

There are a couple other cases of cultural aggression turning into ?adoption? that line up with that, actually. The English loathed the Scots until they’d properly conquered them; George IV wanted Sir Walter Scott’s pageants and oaty foo-faw, but the last actual Highlander survivors of the clearances weren’t wanted at the parade. Similarly, the US got a lot more into the ‘noble red Injun’ only after the Indian Wars were really really over.

...And we should probably not read too much into the desirability of any novelty in cheap food.

A Chinese buffet restaurant near where I sometimes work has all sorts of Chinese delicacies:  garlic bread, pizza, french fries.  Yum! - Notorious P.A.T.

In certain nooks and crannies of this fine nation, the only place to find good fried chicken is at “Chinese” take out places and buffets.

Loved this lecture, as the general topic of food syncretism is endlessly fascinating to me. I have a couple of favorite inter-ethnic dining experiences. Years ago, I was in the UK and ate at a lot of Indian and Chinese restaurants. The best Chinese I’ve ever had was in a tiny strip-center way out on the outskirts of Leeds, of all the unlikely places. Then there was the Tamil busboy speaking in a hard-as-highlands Scottish burr. I think that was in Inverness. The best Italian I’ve ever had was in a small family-owned place in a basement in New Town, Edinburgh. The McDonald’s in London serve chicken korma naan on the regular menu, which is shockingly tasty. In Prague, I once had pizza with sweet corn as a topping. God, that was good.

And then there’s the phenomenon of the Texas State Fair, where they’d fry an engine block if not for the fact that no one can quite decide what to dip it in. One of this past year’s prize winners was fried beefy queso bites, from the same stand that came up with last year’s winner, fried guacamole. I could eat both of those things all day, every day, no problem.

If it weren’t for cuisinal innovation and multiculturalism, eating would be boring. Screw “authenticity,” if it tastes good, I’ll eat it.

In Hawaii, we have lots of Chinese restaurants (well, a lot in Honolulu, not so much here on Maui where I am—mainly Panda Express, the McDonalds of Chinese) and I have never heard of General Tso’s Chicken . Wonder if it’s a regional thing; my Chinese has always been Mu Shu Pork, Watercress Soup, and Shrimp Canton.

That thing she mentions at the end—the Philly Cheesesteak Eggroll—that must be a thing of beauty.

Ever read any of those old Roman cookbooks?  Or even stuff the colonists made?  How about that ‘50’s cooking?

For your amusement, Weight Watchers recipe cards circa 1974. 

“See how the Ceramic Mushroom Family has gathered to show their children what happens to bad little mushrooms.”

I’ve recommended this book before, but there’s a very fun read called The United States of Arugula that’s all about how America went gourmet.  At times, it’s like Easy Riders, Raging Bulls for foodies.

The best Italian I’ve ever had was in a small family-owned place in a basement in New Town, Edinburgh.

I wonder if those were my distant relatives—apparently, a couple of my great-uncles (possibly great-greats) left Italy to open an ice cream shop in Scotland.

His AFL abandoned the American industrial and agricultural workers who had been represented by the KoL in favor of currying to entrenched power and skilled labor.

Um, okay.  Organizing unskilled labor is pretty much impossible.  Low/unskilled workers earn too little to justify union dues and are too easy to replace.  And this is why the only successful unions anywhere, but especially in this country, represent workers who are too skilled to replace easily or are indispensable for other reasons.

Amanda, you spelled her name wrong.

It’s Jennifer 8. Lee.  You left out the period after the 8!

Ever read any of those old Roman cookbooks?

Surprisingly enough, a fish sauce similar to patis or nuoc mam was highly prized in classical Rome.

I wonder if the now-classic Indo-Chinese dish Chili Chicken will start appearing on Chinese restaurant menus.

I agree with the people who point out that good is better than authentic, and that sometimes they conflict. On the other hand I’m always curious about roots of these dishes. What is the original dish which General Tso’s chicken bastardizes? What is the original dish on which beef& broccoli is based? Is it beef and the “Chinese Broccoli” Lee mentions?

When I encounter General Tso’s Chicken (or even more alarming combinations of battered deep-fried meats with sauces made from maraschino cherry juice or cherry pie filling without cherries), I think, “Why not just go to McDonald’s and order McNuggets?”

There is so much more to Chinese food than that, and the authentic kind is much healthier, with lots of vegetables.

Gar Lipow:

I would imagine it’s a mostly American dish. There wasn’t a whole lot of beef eaten in China until after World War II; the original dish probably was based on pork or something like that.

Authenticity has its place, but remember—you may complain that Tex-Mex is not authentic Mexican, and you’d be right, but it’s still a big part of the actual cuisine of the American Southwest.

This discussion reminds me of my favourite episode of intercultural eating. I was living in Italy and getting very bored with eating Italian food (I love Italian food but I come from a place which is very multicultural and I’m used to variety). I was craving (craving!) asian flavours. I would have knifed someone for a bowl of pho. I finally (dubiously) went to a Chinese restaurant in the provincial city in which I was living. Every single dish came with pasta (not noodles).

Chinese broccoli is a cultivar of the same species as broccoli, but it’s a bit different:

Kai-lan is eaten widely in Chinese cuisine, and especially in Cantonese cuisine. Common preparations include kai-lan stir-fried with ginger and garlic, and boiled kai-lan served with oyster sauce. Unlike broccoli, where only the flowering parts are normally eaten, with kai-lan the leaves and stems are eaten as well, normally sliced into bits the proper size and shape to be eaten with chopsticks. It is also common in Vietnamese cuisine, where it is called cải làn or cải rổ.

JC - I had the opposite experience in Tibet, eating “pasta” in a chinese-run restaurant. I had arabiata with noodles instead of pasta. Which is kind of more authentic historically , I suppose.

DA:

I actually much prefer Chinese broccoli to Italian broccoli in my “Chinese” dishes. There’s a place here in Austin that bills itself as Taiwanese food that does a beef with broccoli, but gives you the choice. I always get it with Chinese broccoli. Easier to eat, and better tasting.

Authenticity has its place, but remember—you may complain that Tex-Mex is not authentic Mexican, and you’d be right, but it’s still a big part of the actual cuisine of the American Southwest.

Oh, it definitely is.  Cali-Mex isn’t authentic either, in the sense that it’s not what people in Mexico eat (I’ve heard it described as “surfer soul food,” which sounds about right), but it’s a real cuisine in its own right and not a failed attempt at Mexican or Tex-Mex.

jfpbookworm:

Should I talk about Italian-American food too? I’m from the northeast. Red sauce is probably more important around here (at least in eastern MA and RI) than native New England cooking in some ways. Despite the contempt that many Italian cooks in other countries have for Italian-American food, it’s the same thing—it’s real home cooking, Neapolitan/Sicilian food of the 19th century adapted to American tastes and manners.

For what it’s worth, I happen to own an Indian-Chinese cookbook… it’s probably closer to standard Chinese cooking than most of what you’ll find in the US, but it’s still got a distinct Indian accent to it.