Comment by jzb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jzb | Hacker News Reader

I grew up in a small town in Missouri in the 70s and 80s. I literally had never had any form of Chinese food until I was about 17, and I loved it. So a friend and I would go into "the city" on the regular for a Chinese buffet -- on average once a week during the summer.

I'm pretty sure the owner winced every time we pulled into the parking lot in my friend's heavily used Ford Escort. They had the best Crab Rangoon, and we would knock back between 3-5 heavily loaded plates, each. (Not only Crab Rangoon.) And then heaping bowls of self-serve ice cream.

The restaurant is long gone now -- it folded sometime after I moved out of state (so I don't think it was our feasting that did it) -- which is a shame. I can't put away food the way I did as a teen, and I wish I could go back and have a few much more reasonably sized meals to help restore balance. In my limited defense we always tipped heavily even though we were poor teenagers with part-time amusement park wages.

> I literally had never had any form of Chinese ... They had the best Crab Rangoon

What the hell is that stuff? I lived most of my life in Asia, but went to a Chinese buffet on a visit to the USA. Crab Rangoon sounded exciting... but it was full of cream cheese or something? Absolutely shocking. I'm very confident that's not a Chinese (or Burmese) dish.

Chinese-American cuisine is it's own thing with dishes that reflect the ingredients available to Chinese immigrants in the 19th and 20th century and the demands of American consumers. It's typically a sweeter version of Guangdong food, with one or two Hunan or Sichuan dishes thrown in, and maybe some Japanese food as well. Then you've got uniquely Chinese-American food, like Egg Foo Young.

Around here (Midwest) we joke, it's not a complete Chinese Buffet unless it has mac-n-cheese.

In Shanghai, if you visit a Papa John's Pizza, you will have no trouble ordering black pepper beef chow mein.

But I would hesitate to call that "pizza" just because of the name of the restaurant. I would not even call it "American food". That's not why it's on the menu.

Mac-n-cheese is very popular in (at least) Singapore, and that includes amongst our ethnically-Chinese people.

So it's Chinese enough by that standard.

In Shanghai, cheese is something of a novelty item, but milk is sold in every convenience store. I find this surprising given that more than 90% of Chinese are lactose intolerant.

On the other hand, I have gotten the comment several times from a cashier while buying milk, "wow, I've never seen anyone buy that much milk at once!"

How much milk do you need to buy to trigger that comment? One gallon. I drink that much in about two days. (This is several cartons; the largest carton you can buy is 1350 mL of milk.)

So I conclude that Chinese people expect to be able to buy milk, but regardless of that expectation, they actually buy almost zero milk.

The concept of lactose intolerance doesn't seem to be well known. I had someone react with horror when she asked what I was going to have for lunch and I said milk. She assured me that if I were to drink milk on an empty stomach, I would suffer from diarrhea. She was confused when I responded that that wouldn't happen to me because I'm white.

Singapore is a bit more westernised, so people are more familiar with dairy products. We also have enough people from the wider Indian subcontinent (India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, etc), who traditionally have more of a dairy culture.

Plus Singapore is reasonably fond of her time as a British colony.

> She was confused when I responded that that wouldn't happen to me because I'm white.

Of course, we also have populations of westerners with less lactose tolerance. I think Italians fall among them?

European-style lactase persistence is centered in northern Europe, so yes, Italians have less of it.

But the maybe 38% of Italians who can digest lactose ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28673071/ ) still dwarf the ~7% of Chinese who can. If your only exposure to whites was Italians, with their very strong cultural features of cheese†, cream-based sauces, and ice cream‡, you'd still know that (1) whites consume much, much, much more dairy than Chinese do; and (2) they are much less likely to suffer any negative consequences from doing so. On the other hand, Italians would probably sympathize with the risk of indigestion from drinking milk "wrong" where Danes or Dutchmen would most likely just be confused at the idea.

My white ancestry is mostly drawn from England, Ireland, Sweden, and Russia, so the baseline expectation for me to be able to digest lactose would be a lot higher than the Italian baseline. Visually I do look more like a southern European.

† To the best of my knowledge, there is no significant amount of lactose in cheese. But it is still a good indicator that milk features in the culture.

‡ Ice cream is also very popular among the native Chinese.

> † To the best of my knowledge, there is no significant amount of lactose in cheese. But it is still a good indicator that milk features in the culture.

Lactose content depends on the kind of cheese. As a rule of thumb, the longer your cheese is matured, the less lactose remains.

> In Shanghai, cheese is something of a novelty item, but milk is sold in every convenience store. I find this surprising given that more than 90% of Chinese are lactose intolerant.

I'm not sure that that's that surprising (particularly if it's UHT/shelf-stable milk); go to any convenience store anywhere in the developed world, and you'll find plenty of items that far less than 10% of the customer base have any interest in buying. As long as _enough_ people will buy it, they'll sell it; doesn't need to be the whole population or anything like it.

> I'm not sure that that's that surprising (particularly if it's UHT/shelf-stable milk)

It isn't! To get UHT milk, you have to go to a supermarket - it's an imported product. Supermarkets will also have cheese; kind and quality of the cheese vary by store.

Convenience stores only carry fresh milk. I think my favored brand is from a local dairy.

The price of milk in Shanghai, by the way, is much higher than the price anywhere in the US. This is an extreme reversal of the normal situation for food products. Imported UHT milk is quite a bit cheaper, I assume due to economies of scale, but I can't stand the taste of UHT milk.

> go to any convenience store anywhere in the developed world, and you'll find plenty of items that far less than 10% of the customer base have any interest in buying.

Mostly those items are theoretically capable of being used to full effect by 100% of the customer base. Here we have a situation where less than 10% of the customer base is even included in the potential customer base for the product. And given that milk has no place in an ordinary Chinese diet, a very large majority of those potential customers are never going to consider buying it.

You drink half a gallon of milk a day? Wow. I'm about as white as they make 'em, and if I drank a half gallon of milk, I'd absolutely have an incident.

There's a famous weight-gaining diet called Gallon Of Milk A Day (GOMAD) recommended by strength coaches, most recently Mark Rippetoe of Starting Strength. He gets asked about it a lot: https://startingstrength.com/resources/forum/general-q-and-a...

Well, he didn't exactly recommend it outright.

It was more like a dare, along the lines of: if you claim that you can't gain weight, just take whatever you are currently doing, and add a gallon of milk a day.

A jar of peanut butter a day would also work. Or just increasing your intake of calories overall.

>This is several cartons; the largest carton you can buy is 1350 mL of milk.)

Even in other highly-lactose tolerant countries, I don't think I've ever seen milk sold in a carton or bottle more than one litre, outside of the US.

1.5l and 2l plastic bottles are quite common in eg Singapore.

In Australia the ratio in a typical supermarket is around:

- 40% 1L - 40% 2L - 20% 3L

Wha?

Then General Cho's Chicken is American, because it's very popular in Iowa. Including amongst our ethnically-whitebread people.

Ironically you picked one of the American-Chinese food dishes that is, effectively, American.

There's a fantastic documentary about it (and the Chinese food complex in American in general) -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Search_for_General_Tso

Hm. I thought it was one of the dishes mandated in China, to replace the old decadent menus with party-acceptable simple-ingredient menu item?

Anyway, point taken.

It's cream cheese. Sometimes there's some crab or krab mixed in.

My understanding is a lot of those fried American Chinese appetizers were introduced as part of the whole Trader Vics thing when he was getting underway

for reference: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-crab-rangoon

Some version of this comment has been smugly posted on every single discussion about Chinese food since the beginning of time.

If you are living in America, and you want the food made by the people in your community who are Chinese, would it make sense to call it Chinese food?

Chinese food, as in: the food the Chinese people make.

Italian food, as in: the food Italian people make.

Indian food, as in: the food that Indian people make.

America is a country made up of immigrants from other countries, so when they are here making the foods that they used to make in their home countries, we call it "Chinese food", "Italian food" etc.

I understand why this can be confusing to people who aren't used to living in culturally diverse countries. It is normal in The United States to interact with people from all over the world. Saying "Chinese food" does not literally mean food from China, it means food made by Chinese immigrants to The United States.

> If you are living in America, and you want the food made by the people in your community who are Chinese, would it make sense to call it Chinese food?

That still wouldn't include crab rangoon. It's just as homespun American as key lime pie. No Asians of any variety were ever involved, as you can tell by the fact that it is made of cheese.

> Saying "Chinese food" does not literally mean food from China, it means food made by Chinese immigrants to The United States.

Not even close. It means food that is sold in restaurants that are called Chinese restaurants. If it meant food made by Chinese immigrants, it would include Mongolian barbecue (which is Chinese food) and all Japanese cuisine (which isn't, but the Chinese like opening Japanese restaurants because the American price of Japanese food is higher).

> America is a country made up of immigrants from other countries, so when they are here making the foods that they used to make in their home countries, we call it "Chinese food", "Italian food" etc.

This seems to contradict the rest of your comment. Are you taking the position that "Chinese food" refers to food that is made by American Chinese for whatever reason, or that it refers to food that is made by Chinese in China? If the second, what are you objecting to in your parent comment?

On the topic, "Chicken Tikka Masala" is actually of British origin, and "Butter chicken", while purportedly developed in India, caught on more in the Western world as a representation of Indian food than it did in India.

I don't think that this is how it works. In Italy almost all sushi restaurants are run by Chinese immigrants, but we definitely don't think of sushi as Chinese food.

I think in the past 20 years or so fusion food has started to gain more respect.

Particularly as second and third generation immigrants gain adulthood, it's easier to recognize that Tex Mex, Cal Mex, UK Takeaway Indian, American-Chinese, LA Korean, etc. are their own categories of food worth celebrating. Yes Korean tacos from a truck aren't "authentic Korean" but they're not trying to be.

I usually just tack Country-X on food when we're talking about the fusion version. It's a little unwieldy but makes the point clear.

So, as an ethnic Chinese, when I make spaghetti carbonara in the United States, I'm making "Chinese food"?

Interesting.

I haven't made or eaten crab rangoon before, so does this fact make spaghetti carbonara "more Chinese" than crab rangoon?

I mean, personally I think the English language is still trying to adopt to the multi-ethnic situation in the USA, which is why crab rangoon would be classified as "American Chinese food" instead of "Chinese food". But I guess language is flexible enough that if enough of you insist on calling it that, eventually it will stick.

May you suggest another term for the food that Chinese people outside of the US actually make and eat? Maybe "authentic Chinese food" sounds too ethnonormative for your culturally diverse palate, but I can't think of any good alternative, and simply using the same term for both types of "Chinese food" seems counter to the cultural diversity you espouse -- I mean, unless "people all over the world" just means Americans.

> America is a country made up of immigrants from other countries, so when they are here making the foods that they used to make in their home countries, we call it "Chinese food"

Ok but nobody in China makes "crab rangoon".

> I understand why this can be confusing

That sounds a little patronizing. Obviously I am familiar with the concept of migration. I was simply surprised by something that is so wildly different from any reasonable notion of food that originated in China. The line from China to chow mein or general tso chicken is much more clear than the line to crab rangoon.

> Saying "Chinese food" does not literally mean food from China, it means food made by Chinese immigrants to The United States.

But now we're getting into the territory calling pizza Mexican food because most people in the back of the house at pizzerias in the USA are of Mexican origin.

There is food of the ethnic Chinese in America, and food from China.

Those are overlapping, but different, categories, and “Chinese food”, without additional qualifications, in the US usually refers to the former (and/or food of Chinese-themed restaurants in the US catering to general American tastes, with some inspiration from from it), without regard for whether or not it is also the latter.

(This is true of “<ethnicity> food” in the US generally, its not specific to Chinese food.)

In this case it was purportedly invented by a Chinese-American barback in a Polynesian themed establishment quite visibly owned by a white guy, named after a city in Burma, and then later adopted by a slice of American Chinese restaurants. I think it's reasonable (but not required) to consider it less Chinese than food developed more solidly within the American Chinese food tradition.

> (This is true of “<ethnicity> food” in the US generally, its not specific to Chinese food.)

Outside the US too. I remember ducking into a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant in Poland and finding that everything was served with a very Eastern European cabbage and carrot salad.

Our colloquial term for the Chinese buffets was "All you can stand Chinese".

I haven't been to one in years. A singular issue with Chinese food today is the seeming race to the bottom. They're all as commoditized and cheap as they possibly be, and it's a real shame. It's also, at least locally, seems to be getting sweeter and sweeter.

> They had the best Crab Rangoon

In late 1970's or early 1980's (I think), Super Stop & Shop's salad bar had a "seafood salad" with imitation crab meat.

So I'm wondering if your "crab" Rangoon was real crab, or something much cheaper.

Crab rangoon is almost always imitation. Sometimes just cream cheese.

I happily eat a dozen of them when the neighborhood Laotian church does its fundraiser, no matter what’s in them. Perfect snack.

Most of the places around here use the canned crab meat, but very little of it usually.

Well, most Sushi places use fake crab meat (kani). And to be honest, it is not what makes sushi good or bad. I had below average sushi with real crab meat.

Just for the guys with allergies: It contains eggs and wheat.

Random side note: kani is the Japanese word for actual crab. Fake crab is kani-kamaboko ("crab fish sausage"), but the second word was lost in translation.

thank you, I always wondered why the word used for that stuff was just its actual name in Japanese. I've never heard it referred to as kani-kamaboko, despite being quite familiar with kamaboko (i guess, just the generic term for that pink tinted rubbery roll of fish) itself. This makes a lot of sense.

However, aren't some types of imitation crab not kamaboko at all but a kind of fish fillet processed with crab juice to give it that flavor?

I actually dislike the taste of crab so I am not all that familiar with the options.

The quality of the seafood is absolutely what makes sushi good or bad. What else could make sushi good or bad? Rice is basically a solved problem with a rice cooker and vinegar. Soy sauce and wasabi are both cheap commodities.

Well, maybe the fact that sushi refers to the rice, not the fish. Cucumber avocado sushi is sushi. A piece of salmon, even though often lumped in to the category, is not. I'd rather have good rice and average fish than bad rice and good fish.

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