Chop Suey: Chinese Cuisine's Prodigal Son

Chop suey was nothing less than the poster child for Chinese-American food in the mid-Twentieth Century. Iconized in art (Edward Hopper) and song (Flower Drum Song), it was also the signature offering of many Chinese-American restaurants, judging from their signage, which displayed "Chop Suey" more prominently than the restaurant's name. The origins of chop suey have been extensively studied by Jacqueline Newman (at least two articles in Flavor & Fortune Magazine), Jennifer 8 Lee (The Fortune Cookie Chronicles) and by Andrew Coe in a new book named, yes, Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the Unided States, among others. Although evidence has been uncovered that chop suey has an antecedent in a south China dish named za sui ("mixed remnants") consisting of stir-fried chicken gizzards and other offal, something in our collective psyche seems to want it to be of American invention, our contribution to global Chinese cuisine. Several different stories have been cited to validate chop suey's American invention, the most accepted of which revolves around a traveling Chinese statesman named Li Hongzhang, of whom more below.

In researching another Chinese culinary mystery, namely why Anhui cuisine is named as one of China's "Eight Great Culinary Traditions" I kept coming across references to a dish named "Li Hongzhang Hotchpotch." This dish is usually listed as one of the four or five landmark dishes of Anhui cuisine, and one source describes the dish as follows:

Li Hongzhang hotchpotch is a popular dish named after one of Anhui's famous personages. Li Hongzhang was a top official of the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911 AD). When he was in office, he paid a visit to the US and hosted a banquet for all his American friends. As the specially prepared dishes continued to flow, the chefs, with limited resources, began to fret. Upon Li Hongzhang's order, the remaining kitchen ingredients were thrown together into an impromptu stew, containing sea cucumber, squid, tofu, ham, mushroom, chicken meat and other less identifiable food materials! Thus appetites were quenched and a dish was created.

"Li Hongzhang Hotchpotch," it is immediately evident, is the very dish we call "chop suey." So, an obscure dish with humble origins in China is reinvented and achieves fame abroad as the ultimate in adaptive cuisine, and then the land of its reputed creator is proud to welcome it home and bask in its reflected glory.

Go figure.

Did the Chinese invent the Turducken?

If you've listened to football broadcaster John Madden around Thanksgiving, or even if you haven't, you may know about "turducken." That's a mashup of the words "turkey," "duck," and "chicken" and the name of an over-the top Thanksgiving specialty. The turducken consists of a turkey stuffed with a duck, which is in turn stuffed with a chicken, all of the creatures having been first deboned. The chicken, in its turn is also stuffed with some form of conventional stuffing. According to the Wikipedia entry for turducken, this delicacy was apparently invented in Louisiana, possibly even by the legendary Paul Prudhomme. One shop in Louisiana prepares around 5,000 turduckens per week around Thanksgiving, and they are even available by mail order.

Surely such a monument to meat could only be born in America, or some other Western nation prone to fresser excess, right? Well not exactly. As every wise person knows everything originated in China, and could turducken be any exception?

While searching recently for information on the eats in Zhengzhou, Henan Province (where a friend has invited me to visit), I came across references to "taosibao" (套四宝), or "four treasures wrap." This was not some kind of Chinese burrito but, according to an introduction to the food of Henan I found on the web, a dish that existed at least as long ago as the Qing Dynasty:

The dish is famous for integrating chicken, duck, dove and quail that represent strong, fragrant, fresh and wild flavor respectively. The four birds are combined with the bigger containing the small ones, which are as a whole without any bone. Being placed in a fine pottery soup bowl with blue patterns, the dinners can only see a whole duck floating in the soup. After eating up the delicious duck, they will find a fragrant whole chicken. Eating up the chicken, they will again find a delicious whole dove in front of them. Finally, they will find a quail which is also as a whole and stuffed with sea cucumber puddings, shredded fragrant mushroom, and water － soaked bamboo slice.

Well, it's not exactly a turducken, as no turkeys were apparently to be had, but the dish outdoes a turducken by having four birds telescoped into one instead of three. If a turkey had been available, you can rest assured that it would have formed a fifth layer of a "套五宝."

How does a taosibao go down? According to the same article, "The dish contains several tastes, is neither fatty nor greasy and is tasty and refreshing. The customers praise that the course is strong, delicious, and nutritious so that the aftertaste is continuous." In other words, it's a gift that keeps on giving.

On Dog, Guinea Pig and Real Pig (Not you, AB)

Persons with reservations about the practice of eating dog in Asia are probably not tinfoil hat-wearing PETA regulars, vegans or even anti-red meat. Their often expressed concerns are that a creature nature intended as a pet and a friend is ending up on someone's dinner table. But what if they had it backward?

Dogs are the descendents of wolves, and according to a recent New York Times Article, a new study of dogs worldwide suggests that wolves may have first been domesticated for their meat. The study, performed by a team of geneticists at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden lays out the story. Based on samples of mitochondrial DNA from dogs all over the world, all dogs appear to have come from a common lineage, and that lineage appears to have originated in (where else?) South China more than 10,000 years ago. Timing and other factors (including lack of a plausible alternative motive, I suppose) suggest that the purpose of muzzling, caging and breeding wolves was for meat for the dinner table, or whatever they ate on in those days.

Continuing the subject of edible pets (or pettable edibles, if you will), I blogged sometime ago about a modest proposal for Peru to export cuy, a.k.a. guinea pig, to China. Cuy is a delicacy in Peruvian cuisine, the country is currently producing more than they can eat and, as I explained, introducing the delights of cuy to China would partly repay Peru's culinary debt to China. This blog post, which included a picture of a cutie of a guinea pig, drew an avalanche of comments (well, four at last count). One of these comments is worth repeating here:

I'm an American married to a Peruvian living in China. I love cuy and would be ecstatic if I could order one off a menu here in China!!!

My wife's grandmother raised her own cuy (so she could feed them only the best) until she passed away, and they tasted amazing.

Incidentally, my wife and I run two small restaurants (www.snowymtncafe.com) for tourists here in the foothills of Tibet, and we serve a sampling of Peruvian dishes. I would add cuy to the menu tomorrow if we could find any!

Eugene, the author of the comment and his Peruvian wife Cindy operate their restuarants in Xiahe and Langmusi. According to their website, their menu offers:

Chicken Quesadillas

Homemade French Fries

Pizza w/ lots of Cheese

Spaghetti Bolognese

Lomo Saltado

Bistec a lo Pobre

(Peruvian Style Steak)

... & Tons of Local Dishes

Next time you're in Xiahe or Langmusi stop in and yak it up with Eugene and Cindy to and let me know if cuy has made it to the Himalayas yet. Even if not, enjoy the rare opportunity of enjoying lomo saltado with your momos.

As for the "real pig" in the title to this blog post, it has to do with Anthony Bourdain, and no, I'm not calling him a pig.

As I noted in an earlier post, Lao Liang's Xi'an Ming Chi at the Golden Mall in Flushing was to be included in Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations TV series on September 7, and as promised, I monitored Bourdain's visit on the edge of my seat. Before I comment on the subject, I need to do some penitence.

In the past I've been anything but a Bourdain fan, for reasons that are no longer important, and have not been shy about letting people know it. However, after watching the Outer Boroughs episode, and before it (once I found out where the Travel Channel was on my cable dial) the 2009 San Francisco episode, I have decided that AB is, at this stage of his and my lives, a mensch, and that we are really soulmates. The politics of food have become as polarized as electoral politics these days, and Anthony and I happen to sit on the same part of the foodie spectrum, the place for real people who like real food (note the lower case initials), distant from foodies who breathe correctness and gorge on labels like "sustainable," "organic," and "humane," which have no direct relationship to tastiness. What I once thought was Bourdain's schtick has become a stick to beat Alice Waters with, and I like that.

So where does the pig come in? Overall, I thought the New York Outer Boroughs segment was excellent, and happy to see Bourdain enjoying the well-known "lamb burger" (roujiamo) at Xi'an Ming Chi and giving Lao Liang's place some strokes. The only nit I would pick was that he didn't have time to try anything a little more out there, such as the notorious "lamb face salad," which you can take as literally as you like. However, Lao Liang was up against another stall in the Golden Mall which featured a bounty of golden fried pig offal, and who could blame Anthony Bourdain from being seduced and, er, pigging out on those before he even reached Lao Liang's stall?

Lao Liang's Got His Roujiamo Workin'!

In a blog post from last year I wrote about the delights of the Xi'an specialties at a food stall in a ramshackle basement food court in downtown Flushing, and of its personable creator, who calls himself Liang Pi. In two trips back to New York this year (a brief one in April and a two-week stay this month) I made trips early and often to his venue and am happy to report that Lao Liang has his mojo (make that roujiamo) workin'. Since my 2008 visits, the Xi'an Ming Chi stall have been featured in various media from the New York Times to China Central Television; received visits from the likes of Anthony Bourdain (more on him later) and Zhang Yimou; expanded his operations to a second outlet in the shinier (but less soulful) environs of the Flushing Mall on 39th Street; started a slick little website where you can check out his menu; and acquired a Facebook Fan page!

On my 2008 visits to Xi'an Ming Chi I was too preoccupied with trying all of the stall's hot noodle options that I never got around to trying the dish Mr. Liang is so proud of that he named himself (and his new outlet) after, Liang Pi. This cold noodle dish, made from wheat starch noodles mixed with bean sprouts, kaofu and other condiments and drenched in a complex spicy sauce is pure dynamite for hot weather eating, as I well found out this month when the temperature hovered around 90 degrees F with high humidity for most of my stay. I'm also happy to report that it travels well as takeout, since they package the sauce separately for you in a plastic bag. It made the 20-minute trip on the 7 train back to Long Island City from Flushing on a couple occasions with flying colors. (Well, the colors, mostly red, fly when you pierce the plastic baggie and hose the cold noodles with its contents; it's as satisfying as opening a hydrant on a 95 degree day.)

As readers of my blog know, I am not a big Anthony Bourdain fan, especially after his Shanghai segment two years ago. However, I will certainly be watching No Reservations on the Travel Channel on its September 7 debut, because that's when AB will be featuring New York's Outer Boroughs, and his visit to Liang Pi's Xi'an Ming Chi is slated to be shown. If Bourdain gives Lao Liang and his food its due, he will have redeemed himself for taking the fall (in my esteem) in Shanghai.

Lanzhou La Mian -- Part I

On my periodic tours of Shanghai, I'm usually on a mission to visit as many different far-flung notable small eats establishments as I can get to, which means very few repeat visits. However, when I reviewed my notes for my April stay this year, I found (not surprisingly to me) that I had visited one restaurant no less than 10 times in the space of a month. This restaurant happened to be a noodle shop of the "Lanzhou La Mian" stripe, Lanzhou Zheng Zong Niu Rou La Mian (兰州正宗牛肉拉面), roughly translated as "Authentic Lanzhou Hand-pulled Beef Noodles."

Why so many visits to this shop? For starters, it was just steps from the apartment hotel I stayed in. It was also open early and late (7:00 AM to 4:00 AM), was extremely inexpensive, and its products were tasty and filling. Thus, if it were raining (which it often was), if I were late getting around and famished, or just too plumb lazy to go further, it was there; but most of all, I had come to love the noodles from this shop from my previous visit in October 2008.

Shanghai has some 250 "Lanzhou La Mian" styled restaurants, judging from the listings in dianping.com. About 50 of these, like the one across from my hotel, are "official" Lanzhou La Mian Shops, with identical names, identical signage, identical menus, identical prices and more or less the same modus operandi: although there is a kitchen at the back of the shop, the noodles are made when ordered at a work table at the front of the shop, and passed, when finished, through a sliding window into a large pot of boiling water on stove set up outside. After all, who wants large pots of boiling water inside an un-air conditioned restaurant in a Shanghai summer?

In addition to the beef noodles, Lanzhou La Mian establishments will also offer lamb (but no pork, being Muslim and halal) noodles. In addition to pulled noodles they will have knife-shaved noodles (刀削面), lamb or beef pao mo (泡馍), or hand-torn steamed bread in soup, and other non-noodle and non-soup foods characteristic of the Lanzhou region. Despite this fairly extensive menu, the hand pulled beef noodles are always the main attraction, but don't go for them because you are a beef-eater. The thin beef slices, along with generous sprigs of cilantro are little more than garnish for the fresher-than-fresh noodles in a skillfully complex broth. A "small" bowl (enough for a hearty lunch) will set you back 4 yuan (about 60 cents), while a dinner-sized bowl if 5 yuan (about 75 cents).

It's notable that although the name and the origin of the specialty noodles come from Lanzhou, Gansu province, more often than not the Lanzhou La Mian restaurants are operated by Hui nationality Muslims from neighboring Qinghai Province. The history (and science) behind Lanzhou La Mian, and the development and popularization of today's bowl of beef hand-pulled noodle soup by one Ma Bao Zi in the early 20th Century, are fascinating subjects that will be touched on in a subsequent post.