Posted by A few years back, I wrote an article titled, “Macarons versus Macaroons.” In it, I lambasted the North American habit of borrowing cuisines from various cultures and then completely bastardising them. I focused heavily on Italian, French and Japanese cuisines as it is commonly referred to in North America and how we get it so completely wrong. To the original list of grievances, I should have added pepperoni; you know, the stable of every American-style pizza ever. Not only will you not get a pepperoni pizza in Italy, pepperoni doesn’t even exist. As it turns out pepperoni is an Italian-American invention which we now wholesale believe to be an Italian ingredient. As Wikipedia puts it, “Pepperoni, an Italian-American creation, is a cured dry sausage, with similarities to the spicy salamis of southern Italy, such as salsiccia Napoletana piccante, a spicy dry sausage from Naples, or the soppressata from Calabria.”
Now don’t get me wrong. I have no problems with fusion cooking or even modifying or changing ingredients as long as you properly identify it as such. My disagreement is when we start doing so and then try to pass it off as “authentic” which it clearly is not.
With this in mind, we get this crazy article that proclaims that, “Western-Chinese food is authentic — and isn’t white washing our culture.” Yeah sorry to Kathryn Mannie, the author of the article, it really is. “I have white-passing privilege and don’t speak Chinese. I’ve always felt insecure about my Chinese identity so I began to use my cooking to assert a degree of authenticity I felt was lacking in me, intrinsically, because of my mixed race background.”
Well, you are in good company with the legions of Italian-Americans who changed Carbonara into a cream sauce with peas and bacon and invented pepperoni. That doesn’t make it really Italian, it makes it Italian-style adapted to suit local tastes and possibly ingredients. I mean it takes a lot of looking around specialty import stores to find Pancetta so yeah, we substitute something similar that is much cheaper and easier to find like bacon. As this blog points out, “What’s the Difference Between Bacon, Pancetta, and Prosciutto?” they are similar but at the same time are very different. Like I said before, go ahead and substitute it as long as you correctly identify and label it as such like these domestic products that call it Pancetta Americana (although Italian-style bacon is a bit of a stretch). Personally, I actually only buy imported Italian prosciutto because I find that the domestic made ones are really salty and taste massively different – probably because they are processed foods that they speed up the curing process using other chemicals and maybe excess salt so that it only takes a few months rather than the years that traditional Italian prosciutto takes.
But getting back to the original article on Western-Chinese food. Yes, it does exist and it is fine as long as we realize that it isn’t “authentic” as the author tries to convince us that it is. I mean fortune cookies do not exist anywhere in China, they are clearly a product of Western-Chinese cuisine so don’t get upset if you don’t get one after a meal at an “authentic” Chinese restaurant. As she points out, “Despite Western-Chinese food having deep ties in older Chinese diaspora communities — representing early waves of Cantonese immigration — the cuisine has been relegated to the rank of guilty pleasure among younger foodies. It’s derided as fake. A watering down of real Chinese cuisine.” Yeah, it really is and to claim that it is anything but is just some post modern relativism. “Far from a watering down of Chinese culture, Western-Chinese food is a celebration of Chinese excellence.” Uh no, it is not. It is a reflection of the lack of proper ingredients and spices required to make authentic Chinese food; especially when this particularly style of Westernised Chinese cuisine started say 100 years ago.
Sorry, but my my grandparents started with a Chinese restaurant which my parents worked at as well. My aunt’s and uncles started Chinese restaurants in big cities and rural small towns as well. To this day, my father grows Chinese vegetables in our garden every summer as they were not really available in the supermarkets when I was growing up. Now we have large Chinese supermarket chains like T&T that have managed to convince farmers down south and in Mexico to provide fresh grown Bok Choy and other vegetables so we can have a steady supply year round. They also important many ingredients and spices that were not readily available 50 years ago. So in the old days, people made due with what they had and made substitutions to create Western-Chinese food but do not kid yourself that it is anywhere close to being authentic. And they know it, unlike their grandkids who can’t speak Chinese and are trying to be apologists for this travesty of food culture and history.
After my long journey to explore my cultural roots and many years living and working abroad in Asia, I got my Chinese (both Cantonese and Mandarin) up to fluency and even learned to read that very difficult character set. Visiting relatives in Penticton on one of my trips with my young family (at the time), we went to see them in their local Chinese restaurant during the afternoon after we drove into town. After not having seen them for so many years, they asked if we were hungry but when we pointed out the all you can eat buffet that was still set up from lunch, they angrily replied, “not that, that’s for the Westerners. We’ll cook you some real Chinese food up from fresh instead.”
I then had fun reading a Western-Chinese menu and for the first time found out what so many of these so-called Chinese dishes were. Chop Suey (雜菜 or Japp-Soi) literally just means mixed vegetables. Egg foo young (芙蓉蛋 or foo yung dahn) is just an omelet mixed with vegetables like spring onion and bean sprouts. My personal favorite is sweet and sour pork (咕噜肉 or goo lo yuk) which we often mispronounce as gweilo-yuk or 鬼佬肉 which means Westerner (or white guy but literally means ghost man) meat.
Heck, I even once visited Chinatown in New York during my many visits there and ordered a sam see chow mein (三絲炒麵 three shredded meats fried noodle) and when it arrived and I had a puzzled look on my face, the waiter immediately told me in Chinese that “yeah, that’s how they make it here”. Ah, I had finally arrived when the local Chinese immigrants considered me to be a FOB (fresh off boat) guy from the motherland and not some white-washed ABC (American born Chinese).
So yes, indulge in your sweet and sour pork and chop suey if you like. Order the crap from Panda Express or Manchu Wok if you like it. There is absolutely nothing wrong with liking these Westernised Chinese foods, especially when its fast food and kept warm under heat lamps at the all you can eat buffet. Heck, you can even order Ginger Beef which doesn’t exist outside parts of Canada and is a perennial favourite around here. But don’t try to pass it off as “authentic” or make apologies for what it is. Because real Chinese people would probably react to it like this YouTube video https://youtu.be/Fo59LlkTDe4.
As a final aside, I’d like to share the humorous story of pâté chinois (or Chinese pie) which is, despite what Wikipedia says, in not just similar to, it is essentially a British shepherd pie (a.k.a. cottage pie). I only discovered that was called pâté chinois when living and studying in Montreal where the French labels are all prominent and facing outwards in the super market. So why is this quintessentially British dish called “Chinese pie” by the Quebecois? Well, according the Wikipedia, “All current theories is rejected by Jean-Pierre Lemasson, author of the book Le mystère insondable du pâté chinois. According to his research, Chinese workers simply ate rice and soybeans during the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway (ruling out the Railway Hypothesis).”
According to the British Columbia government, “With the beginning of the construction of the CPR in the 1880s, Chinese workers were crucial for building the difficult western sections of the railway. Chinese railway workers were brought by ship from both California and China to start building the CPR from the west coast at the same time that European labourers began building the eastern section from the east coast. Over the course of construction and by the end of 1882, of the 9,000 railway workers, 6,500 were Chinese Canadians. They were employed to build the B.C. segment of the railway through the most challenging and dangerous terrain.” As I heard the story, it wasn’t that the Chinese railway workers were eating shepherd’s pie, but the camp cooks were almost always Chinese and the British foremen showed them or instructed them how to cook shepherds pie for the white workers who got paid more and got better food in any case. The few French Quebecois workers on the western leg of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) likely ate with their English counterparts and discovered shepherds pie which they brought back to Quebec with them following the completion of the railway. But to them, the stuff was cooked by the Chinese and served by them and thus they called it pâté chinois when they returned and the name stuck.
So as I originally heard the story, the fact that the Chinese just ate rice and soybeans does not invalidate the railway story at all. That the first recorded references to pâté chinois only started in the 1930s doesn’t invalidate this theory either as the diffusion of the dish through Quebecois culture would have taken a long time in the old pre-internet days as it would have been through word of mouth or dinner parties. I imagine that a returnee from the railway might have instructed his wife how to make it and then one night they might have had guests who enjoyed shepherds pie for the first time and ask what is this to which the response would be pâté chinois. That process would have taken many years to slowly move through Quebec given that there were only 2500 non-Chinese working on the western leg of the railway and most of them were probably not French. As for me, I make my pâté chinois with a crust of mozzarella like a lasagna and I put bacon bits in my mashed potatoes as well as having a juicier and meatier gravy with my ground beef and corn. As I told my roommate in Montreal 30 years ago, “I put the chine in pâté chinois”.