Look, dark gray goo in a white ball! Don't you want to eat it? Yes!...
Well, I do because I know it's just a sesame rice ball, known as tang yuan in Chinese and one of the few Chinese desserts that I'd actually long for. Bite into the glutinous rice-based skin and unleash the hot, sweet, black sesame paste within. Where I'm Cooking From knows what I'm talking about; she says, "Now all I want is to introduce as many people as I can to the sesame rice ball experience, if only to have company while I eat mine."
Even though I don't live in Seattle, I'm hooked on MSG150, a blog that aims to review every restaurant in Seattle's International District (Chinatown) with freakishly precise data (such as quality of chopsticks, length of waiting time for food, and fortunes received from post-meal fortune cookies), excessive photos, and humorous commentary. If all this information is too much for you, you can skim reviews just by looking at the number of chopsticks awarded to each restaurant from a scale of 1 ("dog food") to 5 ("great!"). The world needs more obsessively comprehensive food blogs like this one.
I never gave much thought to Chinese food before moving away from the Midwest. Hot and sour soup, chop suey, sweet, sweet General Tso's chicken—all followed by a fortune cookie—well, isn't that just what folks ate in China? After landing on the East Coast, I was shocked to discover my beloved crab rangoon missing from the menus of Chinese restaurants here.
"You do know those aren't authentically Chinese, don't you?" my girlfriend said after I had complained about the subject once too often. "Come on: cream cheese? Deep-fried in wonton skins? That's clearly American Chinese food."
After the scales had fallen from my eyes, I wondered what else on the menus of typical U.S. Chinese restaurants was invented for American tastes—and what, exactly, the story was behind crab rangoon. So when I learned in late 2005 that New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee had just signed a book deal to write The Fortune Cookie Chronicles—an account of Chinese food in America—I knew all I had to do was sit back and wait for it to come out.
The Grocery Ninja leaves no aisle unexplored, no jar unopened, no produce untasted. Creep along with her below, and read her past market missions here.
My housemates get visibly nervous when I offer them food—particularly if I’m bounding towards them, mystery item in hand, with a huge grin on my face. After the (well-intentioned) durian fudge cake of '06 and the Szechuan pepper-in-the-peppermill experiment of ’07, they’ve developed a cautiousness (rather unhealthy, to my mind, and completely un-fun) to the food I bring home.
Posted by Wan Yan Ling, February 25, 2008 at 9:30 AM
The Grocery Ninja leaves no aisle unexplored, no jar unopened, no produce untasted. Creep along with her below, and read her past market missions here.
Long before I was introduced to the snap, crackle, and pop of Rice Krispie treats, I was sinking my teeth into these Chinese soft flour cakes, or sachima. Made with flour, eggs, maltose, and lard (yes, lard—which, gram for gram, has “less saturated fat, more unsaturated fat, and less cholesterol” than butter, so I’ve never understood why people get so antsy about it), these are chewy, sticky-sweet, and have that fun, universally adored “mozzarella stretch effect," trailing gossamer strands of golden malt syrup between bites.
No, you do not want to eat these with braces or a newly installed crown.
Today marks the first day of Chinese New Year, the Year of the Rat. Although the holiday marks the time for people to clean up their homes, reorganize their lives, pay respect to their ancestors, appease the Kitchen God, and conjure up enough luck to last them through the rest of the year, everyone knows that the central element to celebrating the new year is to stuff yourself with lots of food.
Foods chosen for Chinese New year tend to carry auspicious meanings. Wealth may be symbolized by whole fish, dried tofu, oranges, egg rolls, and dumplings. Long life may be represented by "long foods," such as noodles and string beans. All of the above and more relate to luck in addition to dried oysters, tangerines and turnips. As long as you eat...you know, something, you're probably going to be in good shape for the new year, whether that means adding an extra 10 years to your life, getting a raise, or giving birth to a baby boy.
Since Chinese New Year lasts from the first to the 15th day of the lunar month (new moon to full moon), that gives you two weeks to whip up some Chinese New Year-related recipes. After the jump are some recipes I've picked from the food blogosphere.
Posted by Adam Kuban, February 6, 2008 at 12:30 PM
Just ahead of the Chinese New Year, the folks at Ask.com have released some search rankings that focus on which Chinese take-out dishes web users are searching for on the cusp of the Year of the Rat. Think you know what they are?
Last Friday while eating at Grand Sichuan I came across a section of the menu, "PRODIGAL DAUGHTER'S DISHES OF CHINESE EMPEROR," that initially sounded like poorly translated Chinese names, but upon a closer look read more like poetry. That, or potential titles for Múm songs.
Are the dishes as exciting as the name? Eh, I would expect more from "WE WOULD BE TWO LOVE-BIRDS FLYING WING TO WING ON HIGH" than "sautéed spicy baby chicken pieces with fresh ginger," but I'll admit that Grand Sichuan makes some awesome chicken dishes.
Posted by Erin Zimmer, December 18, 2007 at 5:15 PM
It's a fusion tradition that ain't on swanky menus but is very rooted in America's melting pot culture. Just think of cream cheese wontons (right), Soy Vay products, and how many Peking Dragons are open on Christmas. This dude [video] knows what I'm talking about. It's a curious overlap, but this post on the New York Times City Room blog went where few other Jewish-Chinese fusions have gone before.
Pastrami egg rolls and Chinese hot dogs, available at Eden Wok on 34th Street in Manhattan.
If you've never browsed an Asian grocery store before, you're missing out on a whole world of poorly translated, and thus entertaining, snacks and foodstuffs. Rachelle Robles found these burned meat biscuits at a Chinese grocery store in Texas. Mmm!...um...
Alice Waters said of Cecilia Chiang that she did for Chinese cuisine in America what Julia Child did for French. Each relished her role as ambassador of deliciousness, broadening the collective culinary horizons of America in the '60s. There are other similarities: Both worked for the OSS during World War II, both stumbled into their culinary careers, both did so at a relatively advanced age in an era when for a woman, being a homemaker was far more common than being an entrepreneur (Child was 37 when she started to cook and closer to 40 when she started to teach cooking; Chiang was 36 when she opened her first restaurant). But Child is a revered and well-known figure, whereas Chiang doesn't even show up in Wikipedia results. How is it that a woman this influential (she introduced America to high-end Chinese cuisine and continues to consult on restaurant menus at 87 years old) is so beneath the radar?
Chiang's memoir-cum-cookbook, The Seventh Daughter: My Culinary Journey from Beijing to San Francisco, may change that. Written with Lisa Weiss, the book opens with Chiang's arrival in the U.S., establishes her as a canny, classy businesswoman in jet-set San Francisco and recounts the success and growth of her restaurant, The Mandarin. It then backs up to tell the story of her life, touching on 20th century Chinese history at the same time illustrating how Chiang came to know and appreciate food.
SE's designer Raphaël excitedly brought in a strange Chinese take-out menu to the office this morning.
"It's Chinese food...from the future!"
After looking over the menu, I'm sad to report that the Chinese take-out food of 2008 is no more advanced than the Chinese take-out food of the present.
Pork floss: it's a strange name, but a fitting description for the light, fluffy, thread-like seasoned dried pork product that can be used to add porkiness to just about anything. Although it's easily found at Chinese grocery stores in large, clear plastic containers, you can also make a fresh batch in your own kitchen. Check out Chow Times' pork floss recipe with step-by-step photos next time you get a hankering for pork floss (or perhaps if you want to fill your home with sweet, porky fumes).
If you don't know what to use pork floss for, read Chow Times' earlier pork floss post for ideas. My favorite way of eating it is just to put it on rice. Boring and lacking in nutrition, but tasty and temporarily hunger-suppressing.
Posted by Wan Yan Ling, September 17, 2007 at 5:00 PM
Editor's note: You might remember Wan Yan Ling from her summertime series Snapshots from Asia. Ling's back in the U.S. and will be bringing us new snapshots, this time from various ethnic grocery stores and under the rubric "Grocery Ninja," which we quite liked here at Serious Eats HQ. Here's the first of what will be a weekly column. Enjoy! —Adam
The day I moved into my new home in Providence, Rhode Island, my heart nearly stopped. I was poking around in the kitchen cabinets, looking for something to munch on while the general clean-up operation was taking place. I had high hopes for crackers or some such, but what I found were mouse droppings. Lots and lots of mouse droppings. Not being at all used to mice—I have lived in tiny apartments high up in the air my entire life—I was even more freaked to find, seconds later, what I thought were the droppings of a giant, mutant rodent. They looked like shriveled up beetles, with smooth backs and grooved underbellies. And, because I wasn't about to pick them up or sniff them, it took a panicked phone call to the housemate (vacationing in Europe) to find out they were actually coffee beans, dropped and lost over the years.
I probably shouldn't have made that confession in public (how could I not recognize coffee beans?), but I reckon if my housemate had found these beans scattered in the pantry, her imagination would have taken flight too:
The English translation of Chinese menus are sometimes straightforward (beef and broccoli, beef and snow peas, beef and [insert other vegetable]) but may also be very confusing and unintentionally obscene. To be on the safe side, brush up on your Chinese menu ordering skills at How to Order Chinese Food, where U.S. expat Ben Ross lists the the names of common Chinese characters with their English translations and gives their pronunciations in pinyin (numbers refer to tones). The dishes are helpfully organized by main ingredient and region of origin and most are accompanied by a photograph. The website is still in its infancy; if you have any suggestions, leave a comment on Ben's blog.
For a comprehensive guide to reading the characters on Chinese menus (not so much how to pronounce them), go to Mei Wah: How to Eat in Chinese.
Those of us who have Chinese friends may have heard them speculate on the "heating" or "cooling" properties of food. The curious among us may even have pressed them to elaborate on this singular notion that foods have "temperatures"—and no, it doesn't refer to ice cream being cold or hot potatoes being hot.
Based on a Buddhist Taoism belief that food is medicine, the kind and amount of food one takes is intimately related to one's health, and the selection of the "right" food is dependent on one's bodily condition at that time. The need to maintain balance—the complementary forces of yin and yang—for optimal health informs the categorization of food into hot or cold, and less significantly, wet or dry groups. Nourishing food is considered bu, which literally means "to repair" but is generally associated with "strengthening the bodily systems."
Whenever I take someone out to dinner for soup dumplings who's never had them before, they can never understand why I'm so excited: "Uh, it's just dumplings in soup. Big deal?" But it is a big deal! They are wrong! The dumplings are not in the soup, the soup is in the dumplings! They've got lovely pork fillings inside them, sometimes crab too, but the star attraction is the hot, savoury broth that you suck out through a hole you've delicately nibbled.
I live within walking distance of my favorite places to get these wonders of deliciousness, but for those of you who didn't plan your habitats so strategically, this month's issue of Bon Appétit has a short piece that explains how they work as well as a recipe plus tips on where to get the various ingredients from New York chef Anita Lo, so you can make the magic happen at home. Her way is a sure path to deliciousness, but if you're lazy and want to take a shortcut, your local Chinatown grocery just might have some in the freezer!
Barbara Fisher of Tiger & Strawberries has an excellent post this week on fresh garlic, ginger and scallions, the three pillars of Chinese cooking: "It is a rare savory Chinese dish which does not contain at least two and very often three of these pillars of flavor in some form or another. When stir frying, these three intrepid aromatics are usually the very first ingredients to hit the hot wok where they bathe in the sizzling oil, flavoring it intensely, so that the ingredients which follow their lead are kissed by the scent and savor of ginger, garlic and scallion."
She does a great job of explaining both why these ingredients are so important and how to cook with them, so consider this a must-read if you're at all interested in learning how to cook Chinese food.
Putting Easter and dim sum together, I devised these bunny shaped bao, or steamed buns. (The inspiration for the shape came from a pair of fluffy white bunny slippers I saw at a flea market last summer.) They are quite simple really: tender steamed bun dough is filled and formed into an oval, and the ears are cut with scissors.
Ito filled these steamed buns with a mixture of egg, bacon, and chives.
If you like both noodles and science, you should get a kick out of this video from the physicist Philip Morrison's 1987 PBS show The Ring of Truth: Atoms, in which chef Mark Pi makes noodles to demonstrate the principle of halving:
After handpulling and folding the noodles just twelve times, Pi's created 4,096 strands so thin they're called dragon's beard noodles; Morrison points out that if Pi pulls and folds them another thirty times, the noodles would be so fine as to approach atomic thickness!
I don't bat an eye at fancy, pricey chocolates any more, but two dollar candies? YuzuMura.com charges $17.50 for a box containing a mere nine pieces of Dragon Beard Candy, which is "made using a 2000-year old technique first introduced to the imperial court in ancient China. A skilled candy-maker repeatedly stretches and doubles a small mass of sugar and maltose until over 8000 fine strands are formed. Finally, the strands are trimmed and wrapped around finely chopped, lightly roasted coconut, peanuts and sesame seeds."
candyaddict.com tried them in 2005 and said they're "very good, a unique taste and texture and definitely one of the most interesting candies I have ever had." If you live near a fair-sized Chinatown, you might be able to get some there too, maybe even fresh!
Sam Sifton, currently the New York Times culture editor, is the greatest writer about food you've never heard of. Although he is too busy in his present job to write much at all these days, he does find time to occasionally contribute to the New York Times Magazine. Yesterday he wrote a fantastic piece about the history and evolution of cold sesame noodles. He even includes a recipe, with the help and aid of yarn-spinner and Chinese restaurateur Eddie Schoenfeld (aka "Chop Sooey Looey"). It calls for a tablespoon of smooth peanut butter and a quarter cup of chopped roasted peanuts. Alas, no jelly.
Taiwan is not a country that generally comes to mind when the food-obsessed think of where to vacation, but everyone I know who's ever been has come back completely gobsmacked by everything they've eaten there, vowing to return and in some cases already planning their second trip back. Mei is lucky enough to live in Taiwan, and she put together her own local snacking guide, Top Ten Taiwanese Tucks.
Everything she describes sounds delicious, from the stuffed pastries to the knife-sliced noodles, but the listing that intrigues me most is her favorite shaved-ice place: "Xin Fa Ting in the Shilin Night Market. Winter or summer, come rain or shine, this place is always packed. What makes the ice here so special is that the store actually makes the ice out of condensed milk."
It's been open for more than 30 years, so it must be doing something right.
Keith of unrelatednews was wondering why his reliable Chinese delivery place had suddenly gone bad, and "then yesterday I was taking a cab home and as we passed 10th and 4th, I saw that Rosie was closed! And right then and there it all makes sense! Another Chinese delivery place took their number and have been pretending to be Rosie! They've gone as far as trying to offer what was on their menu."
So sneaky! I've had old favorites change management and change cooks on me, too, but I've never experienced a fake out like this.
Our own Megnut and my friend Andrew both sent me this article on the supposed unhealthiness of Chinese food written by Libby Quaid, based on a report released yesterday by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (which, by the way has serious detractors). All three of us were incredulous at how ignorant the piece is, the lede being a prime example: "The typical Chinese restaurant menu is a sea of nutritional no-nos, a consumer group has found. A plate of General Tso's chicken, for example, is loaded with about 40 percent more sodium and more than half the calories an average adult needs for an entire day. " Are you kidding me? Did someone just seriously start a piece on Chinese cuisine by holding up a dish invented in New York for the American palate? It doesn't get any better the further you go.
The problem with Quaid's piece is that it so happily sounds alarm bells about Chinese food without ever once taking into account that a) what most people in the US encounter at stripmall hole-in-the-walls would be pretty unrecognizable to what Chinese eat in China, or even in a proper Chinatown, b) people eat family-style, taking only a few spoonfuls from any given dish among many on the table, and c) individual portions of any cuisine in the US are usually twice to thrice the size of what they would be in their country of origin. If Chinese cuisine was really so intrinsically and terribly fattening, you'd think that after millennia of, you know, eating it on a daily basis, the Chinese would be both terribly fat and short-lived, but the truth is the opposite. The Chinese approach to food is all about eating well, but that means eating a wide range of food and eating in moderation, things every healthy eater already knows and follows.
Carolyn Nardiello of the NY Daily News tells us where fortune cookies come from: "The next time you eat Chinese food, chances are the fortune cookies that complete the meal began their journey in a nondescript building in Long Island City, Queens. Wonton Food pumps out 4.5 million of the crunchy, message-bearing treats every day from its 70-worker plant on 37th St., near Greenpoint Ave. It is the largest fortune cookie maker in the nation, with equipment rumbling around the clock."
No, the fortunes aren't actually Chinese proverbs (the article says they're written by "moonlighting grad students"; yes, the lucky numbers are random and picked by computer (but they're printed on multiple fortunes, which makes for interesting lotteries); and no, there are no fortune cookies in China as they were invented in San Francisco early last century. Wonton Food "tried to market fortune cookies in China in the early 1990s, even setting up a factory there. But it didn't catch on, and they pulled out after a year." The founder's nephew Derrick Wong says, "Most of the people in China never even heard of fortune cookies."
I really love Chinese Buffets. And it is not just the fact that you get to stuff your face (something I enjoy doing very much). It’s also the no waiting (you start eating right after you sit down), the variety (it’s the spice of life!) and of course, the competition. That’s right… the competition. You vs. the Buffet. The price is really just a dare. A sign that says “All-U-Can-Eat for $14.50″, might as well just say “I dare you to eat more than $14.50 worth of food. Signed - The Buffet.”
Basically, your goal from the moment you walk into the buffet should be “Win the Game”. And the game is to eat so much food that the restaurant loses money. You want to eat so much that when they see you come back the next time, they get scared. You want them to worry that if you eat at their buffet too often, they might have to close it down. But before you can learn how to beat your enemy, you must KNOW your enemy.
I try not to stuff myself too full these days—no competitive eating for me—but Zach's third tip is good advice for any buffet situation, whether it's a bargain Chinese place, a sitdown picnic or at a fancy wedding.
"Consider the jellyfish salad or sesame jellyfish. It’s a cold dish. Very simple to prepare. You can get all of the ingredients to make it including the jellyfish at any well-supplied Chinese grocery store." Eddie Lin of Deep End Dining gives you a recipe for jellyfish salad, which sounds and looks weird but is delicious in a simultaneously sweet and salty, crunchy and slippery kind of way. Make the recipe but feel free to skip his sneaky final step—introducing it to the unwary by disguising it in a Peanut Butter and Jellyfish sandwich!
"chinese BBQ roast pork is one of my favorite foods because it’s delicious and so easily accessible in chinatown, as nearly every block will have a shop that has fresh roast meats in the window. i love anything made with it : roast pork buns, roast pork flaky pastry called “char siu so”, roast pork rice crepe, and scrumptous barbeque roast pork on its own, but i have never seen a flat roast pork cookie before." Jo Jo of Eat 2 Love discovered what sounds like may potentially be my new favorite savoury pastry treat.
Posted by Lia Bulaong, February 26, 2007 at 3:45 PM
Barbara Fisher of Tigers & Strawberries put together a really useful post for people who like to cook Chinese food at home, Staple Ingredients of the Chinese Pantry, in which she discusses her favorite brands, what qualities to look for when buying a particular item and how they're generally used in cooking.
What I liked most about her list is that she gives you a short but concise summary of why each item should be a regular fixture in your kitchen. For example, we all know about soy sauce, sesame oil and dried noodles, but have you ever considered fermented black beans? They're "black soybeans which have been cooked, salted and fermented, often with slivers of ginger, and this treatment turns them into flavor powerhouses. They smell somewhat like a good aged cheese, and surprise! They are absolutely filled with natural glutamates. They make whatever they are stir fried, stewed, steamed or simmered with taste amazing. I cannot praise them highly enough."
(What's a hot pot anyway? Wikipedia to the rescue: "It consists of a simmering pot of stock at the center of the dining table. While the hot pot is kept simmering, ingredients are placed into the pot and are cooked at the table. (...) Meat or vegetables are loaded individually into the hot cooking broth by chopsticks, and cooking time is brief. Meat often only takes 15 to 30 seconds to cook.")
Posted by Lia Bulaong, February 21, 2007 at 7:56 AM
Today in the LA Times, Charles Perry puts together the fascinating history of Chinese restaurants in Los Angeles from the 1860s to present day, with all sorts of great nuggets like how chop suey got so popular, how Cary Grant is indirectly responsible for the proliferation of Chinese chicken salad, and the timeline of when different Chinese regional cooking came to the city. This story in particular really made me laugh: "By 1904, L.A. already had its first Chinese food snobs — eager, smug and tragically less sophisticated than they hoped. A non-Chinese society woman was said to visit a chop suey joint where many of the customers were hookers and opium smokers. She would sweep in wearing a white opera cloak and a corsage and imperiously proclaim, "Pigs! All of you, pigs!" apparently miffed that the diners did not appreciate the gastronomic masterpieces they were eating. She genuinely loved the cook's chop suey, putting away two or three bowls a night. But after all, it was just chop suey, not at all a dish for connoisseurs."
Posted by Lia Bulaong, February 19, 2007 at 3:21 PM
Fuchsia Dunlop, on China’s True Dash of Flavor: "Chinese chefs talk often of “xian wei” — their term for umami. They use many ingredients that are naturally rich in it — Yunnan ham, dried scallops and shiitake mushrooms — to enhance the flavors of their stocks and sauces (just as an Italian cook might use grated Parmigiano or truffles to enhance the umami taste of a dish of pasta). They talk of “ti xian wei” (“bringing out the umami”) in their cooking through the judicious application of salt, sugar, chicken fat and, nowadays, MSG. (...) There may be no need to add MSG to a delicate soup made from chicken, ham and dried scallops. But in some culinary contexts, it works wonders: a little MSG mixed with salt and sesame oil can lift the flavor of a simple bamboo shoot salad, or add a dash of ecstasy to a stir-fry of pea shoots and garlic. If you didn’t know it was MSG, you would simply find it delicious."
Posted by Lia Bulaong, February 16, 2007 at 2:58 PM
Whole fish is a Chinese New Year tradition that comes from "Cantonese phrases associated with whole fish, that is, fish with heads and tails intact. They mean "happy endings and beginnings," "everything is perfect," and there will be leftovers every year -- a sign of prosperity." Kimberly Moy includes a recipe for steamed whole fish, which is pretty simple to make but requires that you use the best freshest fish possible, because "in old-school Cantonese cooking, steaming a fish with the barest of ingredients is the best way to show its freshness".
Posted by Sarah Deming, February 16, 2007 at 7:00 AM
Photograph from iStockphoto.com
Serious Eats's founder, Ed Levine, briefed me about Fuchsia Dunlop. "She’s incredibly fun,” he said. “She’s this white woman from London who can speak perfect Mandarin, and the waiters can never believe it.”
He was right—the chef at the Grand Sichuan on Second Avenue and 56th Street in New York City remembered Dunlop from her last trip there and came out to talk to us in between bites of our cold spicy eggplant, slithery mung bean noodles, and General Tso’s chicken. Behind him, the entire restaurant staff cooed over Dunlop's new book. I felt glamorous by association, despite my numerous chopstick fouls.
Posted by Alaina Browne, February 16, 2007 at 6:00 AM
Photograph by Adam Kuban, Serious Eats
Chinese New Year and the year of the pig according to the Chinese zodiac, begins this Sunday, February 18. Because Chinese New Year is tied to the lunar calendar, it falls on a different date every year, usually between January 19 and February 23. It begins on the second new moon after the winter solstice and ends 15 days later with the Lantern Festival. According to tradition, the celebration gets under way on New Year's Eve with a family dinner hosted at the eldest family member's home; it is considered the most important annual family tradition. Family members travel from near and far to attend. A family's given menu will vary by region, but here are some of the more popular dishes and their symbolism:
Posted by Lia Bulaong, February 14, 2007 at 2:19 PM
In Dining high on the hog for Chinese New Year, Olivia Wu discusses traditional foods of the day, how lavishly the New Year is feted in both Asia and in San Francisco, and lists ten mission critical tips to booking and ordering a private banquet at a fine-dining Chinese restaurant. This one is I think potentially most useful: "Ask for the restaurant's fixed-price menus for a 10-course meal. They can start at around $350 and go up to $650; some restaurants have menus composed for each price level. This is a good idea, especially if you don't know the restaurant and the chef doesn't know your tastes, or you don't know how to organize and pace a 10-course meal."
Other highlights:
Forgot it was Valentine's Day or too busy to make plans? Marlena Spieler put together a last minute Valentine's Day menu, from appetizer through dessert. The Cumin Lamb Chops with Sweet Potatoes & Tomato-Ginger Chutney sound delicious!
"Mayonnaise is one of the five mother sauces," says Nathan Peterson, chef-owner of Olivia restaurant in Berkeley. "It crosses through all of the classic cuisines, and when done right, is truly one of the most wonderful things in the world." Melissa Swanson explains why we should stop underestimating mayonnaise, and why and how we should make it at home ourselves.
Posted by Lia Bulaong, February 12, 2007 at 5:40 PM
Whether you live in the city or just plan on visiting, there's bound to be something interesting in New York Magazine's brand spankin' new Everything Guide to Chinatown for you.
Posted by Lia Bulaong, February 6, 2007 at 8:23 AM
Hunan Resources: "But even if General Tso’s chicken is an invented tradition, it has to be seen as a part of the story of Hunanese cuisine. After all, it embodies a narrative of the old Chinese apprentice system and the golden age of Hunanese cookery, the tragedy of civil war and exile, the struggle of the Chinese diaspora to adapt to American society and in the end the opening up of China and the re-establishment of links between Taiwan and the mainland."
Fuchsia Dunlop's NYT essay on the history of General Tso's is super interesting whether or not you like the dish; if reading it gives you deja vu, maybe you read Michael Browning's Who Was General Tso And Why Are We Eating His Chicken? in the Washington Post five years ago. Dunlop's piece gives you the impression that Peng Chang-kuei is responsible for General Tso's as we know it, while Browning's piece credits T.T. Wang; both men cooked in New York in the early 1970s.
At any rate, Dunlop's also offers a recipe for a Taiwanese version of General Tso's, "hot and sour and lack[ing] the sweetness of its Americanized counterpart", also available (along with a recipe for American-style sweet General Tso's) in her new book, Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province. And hey, if Sichuan cooking is more your style, she's your gal too—Dunlop's previous book is Land of Plenty: A Treasury of Authentic Sichuan Cooking.
Posted by Lia Bulaong, January 29, 2007 at 11:15 AM
Adam Kuban's recent curry rice feature prompted a few commenters to fret about MSG, a phenomenon that always reminds me of the essay from Jeffrey Steingarten's collection It Must've Been Something I Ate, in which he points out that a) the Chinese, who eat MSG every day, are not suffering from debilitating headaches en masse, and b) foods like Parmesan cheese and ketchup contain enough free glutamate to trigger headaches in people who say they're affected by MSG but no one ever complains about them.
The Guardian's Alex Renton wrote a great article two years ago about the mythology of MSG that goes from the discovery of umami, to the mass production of MSG, to the 1968 article that triggered the spurious conflation of MSG with Chinese Restaurant Syndrome. From the piece: "Science has still not found a convincing explanation for CRS: indeed, some researchers suggest it may well be to do with the other things diners have imbibed there - peanuts, shellfish, large amounts of lager. Others say that fear of MSG is a form of mass psychosis - you suffer the symptoms you've been told to worry about." Renton himself experiments with the stuff, to hilarious results.
I never gave much thought to Chinese food before moving away from the Midwest. Hot and sour soup, chop suey, sweet, sweet General Tso's chicken—all followed by a fortune cookie—well, isn't that just what folks ate in China? After landing on the East Coast, I was shocked to discover my beloved crab rangoon missing from the menus of Chinese restaurants here.
It's a fusion tradition that ain't on swanky menus but is very rooted in America's melting pot culture. Just think of cream cheese wontons (right), 
, may change that. Written with Lisa Weiss, the book opens with Chiang's arrival in the U.S., establishes her as a canny, classy businesswoman in jet-set San Francisco and recounts the success and growth of her restaurant, The Mandarin. It then backs up to tell the story of her life, touching on 20th century Chinese history at the same time illustrating how Chiang came to know and appreciate food.
Chinese New Year and the year of the pig according to the Chinese zodiac, begins this Sunday, February 18. Because Chinese New Year is tied to the lunar calendar, it falls on a different date every year, usually between January 19 and February 23. It begins on the second new moon after the winter solstice and ends 15 days later with the Lantern Festival. According to tradition, the celebration gets under way on New Year's Eve with a family dinner hosted at the eldest family member's home; it is considered the most important annual family tradition. Family members travel from near and far to attend. A family's given menu will vary by region, but here are some of the more popular dishes and their symbolism:
