Showing Tag: "books" (Show all posts)

Fads and Fashions in Food Followup

Posted by John Jung on Friday, May 25, 2012,
In an earlier post, I used Google Books Ngram tool to show that the frequency with which popular Chinese foods were mentioned in printed books corresponded closely with the opposite trends in popularity of chop suey and dim sum over the past half century or so.  
As a followup, I checked on how well these iconic Chinese foods compared with 'fortune cookie' and 'fried rice,' two other very popular Chinese restaurant foods.  The results below show that by the early 1980s dim sum was mentioned mo...

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Whatever happened to stainless steel serving dishes in Chinese restaurants?

Posted by John Jung on Tuesday, July 12, 2011,
 Serving dishes like the one I am holding were commonly found in Chinese restaurants of a generation ago. What they lacked in "oriental" or "Chinese-y" decoration, these minimalist but clean designs by F. S. Louie Co. of Berkeley made up for by keeping your food hot over the entire meal.

At a book talk I gave in San Francisco this June to the Culinary Historians of Northern California at the small but charming Omnivore Bookstore, I was completely surprised by appearance of my friends, J...

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Is the Food in Chinese American Cookbooks "Authentic"?

Posted by John Jung on Tuesday, June 21, 2011, In : Culture and cuisine 
       The issue of 'authenticity' inevitably surfaces when ethnic foods of any type, Chinese or other, are evaluated. I have often wondered to what extent "foodie snobbism" is at work.  Food dishes, like language, evolve over time and differ over space. Can there be a single recipe that is the authentic version for a dish? Who 'decides,' and using what yardstick, whether a dish is 'authentic'? And, is authenticity the end all which trumps even 'great taste'?
      I recently stumbled upon an ...
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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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