Chop Suey Sandwich, Anyone?

September 3, 2014
Chop suey was once the rage for diners across the land but has long fallen out of favor.  A sandwich 'variant,'  however, that was found in parts of New England still seems to be a regional favorite, along with its cousin, the chow mein sandwich.


 
According to Wikipedia,
"Originating in Fall River, Massachusetts, in the 1930s or 1940s, the chow mein sandwich, which typically consists of a hamburger-style bun with a brown gravy-based chow mein mixture placed between and served hot, is popular on Chinese-American restaurant menus throughout southeastern Massachusetts and parts of neighboring Rhode Island. 
Typically, customers ask for their sandwiches to be “strained” or “unstrained.” This refers to whether they would like their sandwich with vegetables. If the chow mein is strained it has no vegetables.  

Anthropologist Imogene Lim published a good history of the chow mein/chop suey sandwich, including suggestions for how you can prepare your own versions of these sandwiches!  For more info, check this bibliography of newspaper articles on chow mein and chop suey in the sandwich format.

Posted by John Jung. Posted In : Chinese food 

 

Eating His Way Through Chinatowns of America

October 25, 2013
Chinese food today, comes in almost as many varieties as the Heinz 57 food products, and isn't the same as it used to be. It is indeed an enviable pastime to try them all, but somebody had to do it, and David Chan, a third generation Chinese American living in Los Angeles has the stomach (claims to have eaten in over 6200 Chinese restaurants so far), and the brains, for finding and reporting on great places for all types of Chinese cuisine.  He has several appetizing culinary posts on this fantastic foodie blog.

Three recent ones that make up a 'Tale of Three Cities" present his recommendations for San Francisco, Los Angeles , and New York City. But he gives the highest praise for Flushing, New York!

Have you eaten yet?

Posted by John Jung. Posted In : Chinese restaurants 

 

Who Ate What in Early Chinatown Cafes?

October 20, 2013
The early Chinese cafes were quite different from what Chinese restaurants have become today. They served working class Chinese immigrants who, due to exclusionary laws, lived in bachelor societies. They did not cater to the tourist trade, although they did attract and serve non-Chinese as well. A brief glimpse into one New York Chinese eating hole in 1892 shows that the patronage were varied.



The dining area was a large room dimly lit by oil lamps mounted along the walls. Chinese waiters, with bare feet in wooden sandlers, shuffled betweetn the kitchen and the dining room.  The furniture was cheap and made with unpainted wood.  You could smell opium that floated down from an upstairs den.  On the day of the reporter's visit, poor whites and blacks from the Bowery outnumbered the Chinese customers.  The food that was served was not at all like what you would find in a typical Chinese restaurant of today.  The dishes served matched the desires of customers, who came from varied backgrounds, so many non-Chinese foods were served such as scambled eggs and macaroni, as described in the excerpt below


 .


Over time, Chinese restaurants evolved and began to realize their potential as a business that could attract a larger base of non-Chinese customers, especially in areas where there were few Chinese residents.




Posted by John Jung. Posted In : Chinese restaurants 

 

Cleveland Chinese Restaurants of the First Half of the 20th Century

February 6, 2013


Cleveland, Ohio never had a large Chinese immigrant population.  The 1920 U. S. Census records show there were about 240 Chinese there, the highest number in the early 20th century.  That total includes children, so the number of adults was even smaller.  Yet, there were many Chinese restaurants, as shown in the montage above, that operated there from around the 1920s to 1960s for the most part. The 12 restaurants shown above from picture postcards were rather large and nicely decorated.  Many had dance floors and featured live bands and singers. Each restaurant would have required a large staff of cooks, waiters, kitchen helpers, and managers. Of course, not all employees had to have been Chinese but still it seems unusual that with less than 200 Chinese adults in Cleveland, and many of them working in laundries or other jobs, that there would have been enough Chinese to staff more than a handful of large Chinese restaurants. 

There was never a large "Chinatown" in Cleveland but the Chinese restaurants were concentrated in a few blocks, as the census listings of addresses for Chinese in Cleveland indicate showing that many lived on Ontario St. in 1910 and  on Superior St. in 1920, respectively.

  


  A directory of Chinese businesses in America for 1946 showed that Cleveland increased its number of Chinese restaurants to 31 by then. These restaurants could not have survived on business from the small Chinese population which did not show much growth and even dropped during the Depression. The growth in the number of Chinese restaurants reflected the growth of popularity of Chinese food starting in the 1920s. After W. W. II, there was further expansion as more people began to eat out with a return of prosperity. 

By 1940, Census records reveal a concentration of 80 or more Chinese lived on the 2100 block of Rockwell Ave. in rooming houses above stores and the three-story On Leong Tong building in the middle of the block. The area deteriorated since then as the photograph below from around 2010 shows but there is presently an attempt to revitalize the historic street with new restaurants and stores.

Source of postcards: Michael Schwartz Library at Cleveland State University 
http://www.clevelandmemory.org/postcards/index.html
 

Posted by John Jung. Posted In : Chinese restaurants 

 

What Chinese Restaurant Families Ate But Left Off Their Menus

August 8, 2012
Chinese families in the restaurant business had their favorite dishes that they didn't dare put on the menu if most of their patrons were not Chinese.  Think of it as Chinese 'soul food,' delicious but unassuming dishes that were popular back in the Guangdong villages from where most of the early Chinese immigrants came from.

Ralph Young grew up working in his family restaurant in California and recalls:

My dad liked to cook pig stomachs.  He would take out the thick portions first; those would be used for stir frying; the rest, he would braise in a sauce consisting of star anise, dried fruit peels, and soy sauce --- this was not on the menu, but we all loved those dishes.  My mother and sisters loved dried fish, dried shrimp, and also fermented shrimp sauce; they used the dried fish and shrimp sauce to steam minced pork.  The dried shrimps were used to fry rice. I detested both the smell and taste of those items and would not eat them.  Except for our Filipino customers, I'm sure those dishes would appear gross to our American clientele. 

Pig feet, pig tails, ox tails were also our favorites; with the exception of ox tails, I don't think we could have served those items.  As I had mentioned, we also would roast ducks and chickens, but because they were time consuming to prepare and we would have to charge a premium price for those dishes so we never included them on the menu.  Various other types of dishes familiar to our parents' village in China ( i.e., chicken with diced ginger and dried vegetables cooked with rice in a single pot, roasted squab, duck feet, chicken feet, and various steamed seafood) were also prepared for our own dinners; those dishes would have been too foreign to our customers.

Posted by John Jung. Posted In : Chinese food 

 

Hung Far Low Restaurant in Grand Rapids, MI

July 30, 2012
A radio reading about an opening of a new Chinese restaurant , Hung Far Low,  in 1902 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This city has done a commendable project in celebrating its history with this and similar recordings by the Grand Rapids Historical Commission.

(Note: The link will not automatically play the audiofile. The easiest method is to click one of the STREAMING options such as MP3 via M3U  in the column on the far left of the screen under LISTEN TO AUDIO)

Posted by John Jung. Posted In : Chinese restaurants 

 

Chinese Food Authenticity As Flexible, Not Fixed

July 18, 2012
      Aficionados of Chinese, or for that matter, any cuisine obsess over the authenticity of a dish, as if this aspect was a guarantee of its gustatory delight.  Authenticity is revered as an inherent and immutable property of a dish. Yet.just as any language is not pure or fixed, but forever changing, such is true for food. 
      The studies of Chinese food in America by historian Haiming Liu provide an excellent illustration of what he calls 'flexible authenticity.' He notes that in the 1970s,   significant changes occurred in the Chinese food served in Chinese restaurants in America.  The large new influx of Chinese from Taiwan made possible by the 1965 immigration law led to the introduction of dishes from many differenti provinces, Hunan, Sichuan,and Shanghai, which displaced the then long dominant Cantonese-based cuisine in Chinese American restaurants.
      However, Liu points out that these cuisines that the Taiwanese immigrants brought to America could hardly be considered 'authentic' because they relied on 'collective memory' of what these cuisines were like in mainland China before Chiang Kai-Shek's defeated regime  was driven by the Communist China in 1949 to flee to Taiwan, then called Formosa. In short, chefs tried to recreate these dishes, but often had to improvise and reinvent to achieve their goal.     Thus, what they brought to America in the 1970s was not "authentic" in the sense that they were the dishes served in pre-1949 mainland China.  (But, for all we know they might, in some instances, taste as well as or better than the original versions.)   Haiming Liu's 2011 paper in Chinese America History & Perspectives on the successful Din Tai Fungrestaurant chain from Taiwan iprovides a detailed case history that uses Shanghai dumplings to illustrate "flexible authenticity" of ethnic cuisines.

Posted by John Jung. Posted In : Chinese food 

 

1908 Satire of Chinese Food...in New Zealand

July 18, 2012
          Chinese left their Guangdong villages for many parts of the world in the late 19th century, but no matter where they went, they were ridiculed as people in their host countries made fun of their speech, clothing, customs, and of course, food.  In the article below, mistitled "Chop Suey," perhaps because the name of that dish was stereotypical of Chinese food, the Chinese cook gets the last word in response to the white customer's joke. 

 


  (From New Zealand National Library)


 


 

Posted by John Jung.

 
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About Me


John Jung After retiring from a 40-year career as a psychology professor, I published 4 books about Chinese immigrants that detail the history of their laundries, grocery stores, and family restaurants in the U. S. and Canada.

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