How Did Chop Suey Become a Staple of Chinese American Cuisine?
catapult.co
catapult.co
Vietnamese food is also very popular in Australian capital cities, especially banh mi. The fact at some stage a crusty French bread roll merged with delicious Vietnamese meats is one of those pleasant parts of otherwise complex and questionable colonialism.
In Australia, we're still yet to properly come to terms with some of the unsavoury elements of our colonial history, and I'm reminded of this when I enjoy Australia's most popular foods: the mix of food cultures of the many migrants who have settled here is wonderful, even when their other cultural elements are less visible.
Unsurprisingly, Vietnam is also a major coffee producer.
(also, spam is surprisingly good. I had it for the first time as a ~40 year old American recently and realized I've let public righteousness / shitty opinions keep me from something good)
The problem is mostly that your average American does not know how to properly treat it.
It is technically edible out of the can but you really want to brown it in a pan. And you need a relatively large amount of carbs to soak up all the sodium (so for Asians and Hawaiians, rice.)
Hakka cuisine is also interesting since it is originally Chinese-Indian but now that people have brought it to Canada I guess the kind we get here would qualify as Chinese-Indian-Canadian.
Apparently there was a large wave of Hakka immigration into India, where they developed a kind of fusion cuisine, which they brought with them when later moving to Canada.
It has all the comforting qualities of a Chinese stir fry but is spicy to boot. Interestingly I’ve noticed that most patrons of Hakka restaurants are South Asian, not East Asian, which means more latitude to deploy stronger spices.
Shocking trip down the Wiki entries.
Thank you to the author.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cap_cai
Depending on dialect, cai can be pronounced choy, tsoi, sai etc.
In fact I've seen Detroit pictures from that era and you can see big signs advertising Chop Suey restaurants.
But sometime in the eighties it began disappearing from Chinese restaurant menus and I'm not certain why? Perhaps it became less popular over time.
You might find this interesting - it seems like every few years we get a new history / analysis of chinese-american food like this, and this student project is one of my favorite versions (I'd seen it shared previously in the comments of another article on the same topic) . It uses an NYPL database of historical restaurant menus and proposes some ideas about why the menus changed over time.
You do have to go to an American Chinese restaurant though - these are usually the ones located in strip malls or in the suburbs. Newer Chinese restaurants tend to be run by more recent immigrants and therefore don’t serve American Chinese — American Chinese is a different cuisine from Chinese.
Roast pork is a wonderful thing, and while I find a lot of commercial styles cloyingly sweet, the recipe is fairly simple in a convection oven or sous vide with a broil at the end.