While the differences in how Chinese cuisine have adopted potatoes and tomatoes is interesting, both pale in comparison to how quickly capsicum peppers were adopted. Within 100 years of the European discovery of the new world, capsicums worked their way into a prominent position in almost every cuisine in the world.
Imagine Szechuan cooking without hot peppers.
Thanks for posting this info, Gary - about your own direct and real experience with the potato in authentic Chinese cookery.
Two potato recipes listed now. That is good. :)
My wife is native Chinese and has been in the US for three years. She only cooks Chinese - Chinese food. She uses potatoes a lot. If we cook American it is me that cooks that. I lived in Mainland China for 4 years. Potatoes are a big part of the Northern diet. You can not grow rice in the snow, so northern China uses potatoes just like in the good old US. South - rice, North - potatoes.
A nice simple true Chinese dish to cook is tomato and shredded potato. You hand cut a potato Long ways into thin slivers and cook in a very little bit peanut oil until tender then add diced tomatoes and cook a little while longer...finished. Can't get healther than that. Oh, by the way. If you see beef in a Chinese dish it is either Americanized or a recent addition. They just plain don't eat beef. It takes too much land to raise either with grazing or growing grain to feed the cows. The closest they get to beef is donkey, again in the north. By the way it is good. Chinese as a rule don't eat a lot of meat.
I know how you feel, Karyn. I lived in a place once where actually there wasn't even soy sauce on the grocery store shelves, but there were other things that I hadn't really gotten into yet that were more germane to the culture (ha ha listen to me - I mean there were things the people there used on a daily basis like country ham etc.).
When I moved from there into an area where the grocery stores (though still far from the TJ's or WFM (which I tend to think of not as WFM but WTF) did have different fruits, vegetables, basic ingredients from "afar" I felt really as if I had moved back to America after a stay somewhere else - an odd discombobulating feeling but a very happy one.
Karen Resta - I really wish I had ethnic markets by me. I can barely buy soy sauce, much less fermented black beans, or African spices like sumac. I should order these things online, but then I couldn't use my tip money (i.e. cash).
It's wonderful that we're able to rediscover old ingredients. Potatoes don't seem so humble in aloo gobi . . . .
It's interesting also that right now, at the present time in the New World there is a similar discovery of Asian or Far Eastern ingredients although those foods have existed in their own cultures or geographies for a very very long time.
The general exposure to these foods in the average household in the US has expanded in leaps and bounds in the past twenty or so years and many ingredients we did not have widely available or even had never seen at all are now in any average grocery store. It's absolutely fantastic, really.
supercharz, we both can thank thebasilqueen for the link to your recipe. I'm very glad she found and posted it. :)
I think it's really interesting how many traditional Middle Eastern/ European/ Asian dishes use New World Ingredients, like potatoes, tomatoes, and corn. For instance, I always heard about kabocha squash in Asian cookery - and it originated in the Americas.
Thanks for linking to my recipe, Karen... people really should try it more :)
I only came across it (as written in the post) from my old flatmate who came from northern China. She and my other flatmate, from Tsingdao, together taught me a lot about mainland Chinese cooking (as I'm from Hong Kong) - tomatoes do feature a lot, as they were quite into making tomato + scrambled eggs, or a tomato and egg drop soup. Both spectacular but I stupidly didn't get the recipe off them... however it should be quite self-explanatory ;)
But again, I really can't recommend that potato dish more!
Good point, Medieval...corn is also something that seems to be like potatoes and tomatoes in Chinese cuisine.
Its a favorite, now (and Chinese McDonalds offers a cup of corn kernals as one of its menu items alongside the french fries), but it feels like one of those adopted foods.
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