Jennifer 8. Lee's Chinese Food Facts

Chinese Food Mysteries

New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee traveled the world to crack the case of the fortune cookie's cryptic origins, hunt for the infamous General Tso, and track chop suey back to its creator. Turned out, many of the answers were closer to home than she'd ever imagined. The author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food serves up her favorite Chinese food facts, myths and mysteries. Read on. >>

GENERAL TSO IS KNOWN FOR WAR, NOT CHICKEN
General Tso's chicken is a dish that is all but unknown in China. If you go to General Tso's hometown in Hunan Province, almost nobody, even those hundreds of his family members still there, know of the dish.
So who was General Tso and why are we eating his chicken? General Tso, also known as Zuo Zongtang, was a famous Qing-dynasty military hero who played a large role in quashing the Taiping Rebellion, which was sparked by a Chinese man who thought he was the son of God, and thus the younger brother of Jesus Christ. About 20 million people died in the Taiping Rebellion, which still makes it the largest civil war in world history.

General Tso played a large role in keeping China together.

The recipe we now recognize as General Tso's chicken was actually introduced in New York City in the early 1970s by a Chinese chef who had moved here from Taiwan as part of the Hunan cuisine revolution. It became a runaway hit in part because the dish resonated with the American palate: it was chicken, it was fried, it was sweet, and a bit spicy.

So while in America, General Tso is like Colonel Sanders and is known for chicken and not war, in China, he's known for war and not chicken.


BROCCOLI ISN'T USED IN CHINA
Beef with broccoli is not a traditional Chinese dish. Neither is chicken and broccoli, because broccoli is not a vegetable that is traditionally used in China. The Chinese have a vegetable called Chinese broccoli, similar to kale. But American Broccoli originally hails from Italy. It only became popular in America in the 1920's largely due to the successful marketing of the D'Arrigo Brothers Company, becoming a staple of the American diet by the 1930s. It continued to increase in popularity after World War II with the return of service men who had served in Europe. Meanwhile it was all but unknown in China. Today, with the forces of globalization, Chinese cooking in China and Taiwan has also discovered broccoli, though it is considered somewhat more of an exotic, rather than staple, vegetable. Guaranteeed: General Tso never saw a stalk of broccoli in his life.


TAKE OUT CARTONS ARE AN AMERICAN INVENTION
Those white take-out cartons which are a symbol of Chinese-ness across advertising and the United States? They are so American they are not even really used in Canada (which is more of an aluminum and Styrofoam market, as one carton executive put it). The white boxes were originally invented in the first half of the twentieth century to hold shucked oysters, and are thus are often called "pails" in industry lingo.

Carton executives say that sometime around World War II, they were adopted by Chinese restaurants for takeout, in part because they could hold hot liquids.

One piece of trivia: on the East Coast and the West Coast, the boxes are oriented in different directions. On the East Coast the wire runs down the short length, while on the West Coast, they run down the long length. The two styles mix only in the greater Houston area.

The box has been used in advertising campaigns ranging from Continental Airlines to FedEx when they started new businesses in China. However Fold-Pak, which is the largest takeout carton manufacturer in the world, says it get calls from countries like South Africa and the Netherlands inquiring about the boxes. People overseas see the boxes on television shows like Friends, Seinfeld and Sex and the City, and thus associate them with America.


FORTUNE COOKIES ARE FROM JAPAN
Fortune cookies are essentially unknown in China. In fact a Brooklyn-based company tried to introduce them to China in the 1990s, but gave up saying the cookies were "too American."

So where do fortune cookies originally come from? Japan. The precursor to the fortune cookie is still made in a handful of small family-owned bakeries in the Kyoto area, near the Fushimi Inari shrine. The cookies are larger, and flavored with miso and sesame, which gives them more of a nutty flavor and brown color.

The cookies were introduced in pre-World War I California by Japanese immigrants who called them fortune tea cakes at that point. A great shift in production happened around the time of World War II when the Japanese were interned and the Japanese family-run bakeries were shut down.

At the same time there was a spurt in Chinese fortune cookie manufacturing, which transformed it into a Chinese restaurant standard. By the late 1950s, when 250 million fortune cookies were being made each year. The cookies were used in the 1960 presidential campaign and in this year's Barack Obama campaign.

The summary of the cookie could be thusly put: The Japanese introduced it. The Chinese popularized it. Americans consume it.


CHINESE RESTAURANTS OUTNUMBER MC D'S
There are more Chinese restaurants in this country than McDonalds, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken combined -- some 40,000. Chinese restaurants are all over. The Washington boarding house where John Wilkes Booth and accomplices planned the assassination of Abraham Lincoln is now a Chinese restaurant called Wok n Roll.

Chinese cuisine is arguably the most pervasive on the planet. It is served on all seven continents, even Antarctica -- where Monday night is Chinese food night at McMurdo Station, the main scientific outpost on the icy continent. There is Chinese food in space. NASA offers a thermostablized sweet and sour pork to its astronauts. The scientists eat Chinese food, in part, because is a taste of home when they are far away.

If our benchmark for Americanness is apple pie, how often do you eat apple pie? Now, how often do you eat Chinese food?


RESTAURANT ENGLISH IS TAUGHT IN CHINA
Around the Chinese city of Fuzhou, where the vast majority of Chinese restaurant workers now come from, English language schools teach restaurant English to the young people who are preparing to come to the United States. Many towns have seen their populations depleted by the emigration, yet at the same time they are massively built up from with four- and five-story mansions constructed from funds sent back from workers in the United States. The town of Houyu, natural population 5,000, is about 80 percent empty today. There are few men of working age, but there are women, children and elderly scattered around the town. Houyu feels like a nation at war, only there is no war. The natives are working in the United States, serving as deliverymen, waitresses and wok cooks.


SO WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH JEWS AND CHINESE FOOD?
Why is chow mein the chosen food of the chosen people? Chinese food is arguably the ethnic food of the American Jew, as it is the cuisine that they identify most with, far more than the Eastern European food of their immigrant ancestors. Why and how this happened is a matter of academic speculation. Contributing factors include the fact that Jews and Chinese are the two largest non-Christian immigrant groups to the United States, so Chinese restaurants were always open during Christian holy days such as Sundays and Christmas. Secondly, Chinese food uses almost no dairy, so for Jews that kept kosher and thus could not mix meat and milk, Chinese food was more palatable in contrast to the two other most popular ethnic cuisines in America, Mexican and Italian, which both use dairy. Today, among the Jewish-Chinese fusion creations sold around the United States are Chinese hot dogs (beef frankfurters wrapped in egg roll skins), pastrami egg rolls, and pastrami fried rice.


CHOP SUEY IS ALL AMERICAN
The historical rumor around the creation of chop suey links it to an 1896 banquet held in honor of the Chinese diplomat Li Hongzhang in New York City. However a description of the banquet in the New York Times shows the menu was actually French and he ate chicken and rice, thus throwing questions to the true origins of chop suey and why it became so quickly popular at the turn of the 20th century.

However, a 1904 article in the New York Times tells of a Chinese man named Lem Sen who threatens to file an injunction against chop suey manufacturers in New York City's Chinatown saying he was the original creator. His story, as recounted by the article, says he was told by an American restaurant owner to invent a dish that would capitalized on Li Hongzhang's visit yet would be palatable to Americans. There is no evidence he ever actually filed an injunction.

Whereas chop suey has waned in popularity in the United States in the last 30 years, it continues to be commonly served in other countries, such as Mexico and Jamaica. Among the countries it is still popular is India, where it is made with ketchup, and is known as "American chop suey."


SOY SAUCE CONTAINS NO SOY
The American soy sauce found in the little plastic packets usually does not contain soy as an ingredient. Soy sauce from Japan and China, such as Kikkoman, is generally brewed from soy beans and wheat. However, the list of American soy sauce ingredients include water, salt, caramel color, corn syrup, and hydrolyzed vegetable protein. An effort by Asian countries to introduce international standards for soy sauce in the last decade was abandoned after several years of negotiations, in part because of lobbying from the Americans.