Posts Tagged → USA

How a Chef Turns Discards into Family Meals

Every day at about 4 pm, the chef deviates from the list of “projects” he needs to complete for service, and mixes ingredients that don’t belong together according to his menu. He scoops up the discards on the cutting boards before they get tossed into the bin, and what doesn’t end up as trash becomes food for his staff at the restaurant. These foods are called the “family meal,” or just “family” at Fung Tu, the Chinese American restaurant where I stage. One hour before service starts at 6pm, the front- and back-of-the-house help themselves to the food. For most of the cooks in the restaurant, including the chef Jonathan Wu, family is their first, and sometimes the only meal of the day. If they are not done prepping for service, they will eat while whipping mayonnaise, or wrapping egg rolls.

Not every ingredient for family comes from scraps. Chef stocks up bucatini pasta, chickpeas, and sweet Italian sausages specifically for family, because, he tells me matter-of-factly, they have longer shelf life. But his main aim is to minimise food waste, so he works mostly with the leftovers, the despised animal parts, and the sad-looking vegetables. Bak choy is ever present because only half the batch has the perfect curves to be customer-worthy. On Tuesdays, the first working day of the week, there is always leftover chicken from the Sunday-only menu. Since family corresponds to what the restaurant serves its customers, when a new season arrives, or on special days like the Jewish Passover, the members of the family find new foods in their plates too.

Chef was peeling prawns at noon. After that he made a stock out of the shells and cooked sweet Italian sausages in it, along with shallots, green and red peppers, the outermost, imperfect layers of Brussels sprouts, and unwanted coriander stems from which I had plucked nice green leaves for garnishing. Everything went on top of a bowl of corn grits.

Chef was peeling prawns at noon. After that he made a stock out of the shells and cooked sweet Italian sausages in it, along with shallots, green and red peppers, the outermost, imperfect layers of Brussels sprouts, and unwanted coriander stems from which I had plucked nice green leaves for garnishing. All went on top of a bowl of corn grits.

14/3: Tortilla with mashed chorizo sausage, steamed potatoes, and kale stems that are too thick for Stir-Fried Side Greens.

Tortilla with mashed chorizo sausage, steamed potatoes, and kale stems too thick for “Stir-Fried Side Greens.”

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What 100 Years of American Menu Designs Reveal About U.S. History

Neil Tavern, 1945, courtesy of Cool Culinaria

Neil Tavern, 1945, courtesy of Cool Culinaria

If you read them correctly, restaurant menus tell you more than just what’s on offer from the kitchen. Look closely and you’ll spot unwitting details of the era in which they were made. And if you have access to a choice collection of them that spans decades, they’ll actually tell you the story of America’s history (and make you pretty hungry, too). Oftentimes, you don’t even need to look beyond the artful covers to form an idea of the bygone days…

Read the rest of my story for the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) here.

The Most Enjoyable Three-Hour Wait for Food

Slowly inching forward as the restaurant opened its doors.

Slowly inching forward as the restaurant opened its doors.

Is waiting in line for food a pain for you? Try waiting at Franklin Barbecue, which almost every media in America agrees makes one of the best briskets in Austin, Texas or even in the whole of United States. I’m not suggesting that if you haven’t joined the line for Franklin’s brisket, you don’t know what pain is. What I’m saying is, after spending three hours of your precious life out in the rain, snow, or heat, for food that tonnes of other places offer decent versions of, you may actually come out of it thinking, ‘that was pretty fun.’ The people, both inside and outside the door that separates you and your food, can make waiting bearable or even the highlight of a trip. Continue reading →

The Search for General Tso and the Chinese American Belonging

Image from The Search for General Tso

Image from The Search for General Tso

Why is Chinese food in America so different from what we see in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong? The film, The Search of General Tso, provides an insight to this phenomenon as it traces the history of a dish particularly popular with the Americans — General Tso Chicken. The film brings its audience to Hunan, China where the namesake is from, and to Taiwan to locate the creator of those sweet-spicy deep fried chicken. What at first looks like a superficial quest to ascertain the ownership of a dish turns out to be a bigger story about Chinese American history.

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A Deliveryman’s Ingenuity

NYC deliveryman bicycle

NYC’s deliverymen brave the heat, the rain, the potholes, the mad men behind the wheels, and, at this time of the year, the snow. Unless it is a blizzard like today, when the mayor bans all non-emergency vehicles including food delivery bicycles, these men have to put up with slick roads and wind chill. Many refurbish their bicycles to make their job as tolerable as possible, like fitting two furry pockets on the handlebars to keep the hands warm during the ride. The plastic bags, I believe, keep the pockets from getting wet by the rain or snow. Simple brilliance like this reminds me of how little some people have but also how having little inspires ingenuity.

Milton Glaser’s Chinese Grocery Poster

(image from School of Visual Art's Container List)

(image from School of Visual Art’s Container List)

The items found in New York City’s Chinese groceries today, I can imagine, are baffling to Chinese and non-Chinese alike. What is one to do with a whole packet of duck tongues, black fungus, and dried bean curd sticks? (Answer: braise it, stir-fry it, and stew it, respectively) The very same items in the 1970s, a time when Chinese and all things about them were very much considered exotic, would have been deemed mysterious, or even dangerous, and required a caption to go along for the uninitiated. Perhaps seeing a need there, Milton Glaser, the man behind the overly adapted I love New York logo, created a chart-like poster to guide one through a Chinatown grocery. It explained items like preserved celery cabbage, thousand-year eggs, and even provided instructions for calculating with an abacus.

Commissioned by the International Design Conference, the poster was created in 1972—the same year Nixon went to China after decades of hostility and distrust between the two nations. Then Chinese Prime Minister Zhou En Lai hosted a meal in Nixon’s honour and the live broadcast sparked off an explosion of interest in Chinese food. Prior to that, during the Cold War, communist and Chinese were synonymous to the Americans and so was their hatred towards them. Therefore, only in 1972 and the subsequent years would Glaser’s poster be of use to the mainstream Americans.

How the Exclusion Period drove Chinese American Men into Domestic Kitchens

At the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS) Annual Meeting & Conference this month, I presented a paper on the feminization of the early 20th century Chinese men in America, and how it led them to accept the traditionally feminine task of domestic cooking. The following is an adaptation of my five minutes speech. I have added more information for a more complete picture of my research.

I have always wondered why in my family, it is my father and my grandfather who cook. Now, we are not Americans, we are Singaporean Chinese, but like the story of many Chinese in the United States, my grandfather and his kinsmen from South China sought jobs in a foreign land. Women didn’t tag along, so the men cooked for themselves.

I wondered if this was the case for the American Chinese. Indeed, this was what sociologist Rose Hum Lee observed in her 1956 study on the marital relations of Chinese families in San Francisco. She noted that the husbands brought home groceries and taught their wives cooking. This was unthinkable in a patriarchal Chinese society.

Well, the men in America were no typical Chinese. They came to the United States in their youth and reached adulthood without too much womanly concern for their welfare, until the US government loosened its grip on Chinese immigration in 1947. Prior to that, the Chinese were the most hated community in the United States, because of reasons illustrated in the following picture. They were perceived as economic enemies who monopolized the industries, leaving the white men jobless. The results were institutionalized discriminations that I argue attributed to the egalitarian division of labor in Chinese’s marital homes as observed by Lee.

A grotesque octopus monster (left) working tirelessly in every industry, leaving the white men (right) jobless. (The Wasp, March 3, 1882 illustration from Yellow Peril!)

A grotesque octopus monster (left) working tirelessly in every industry, leaving the white men (right) jobless. (The Wasp, March 3, 1882 illustration from Yellow Peril!)

In 1882, United States enacted the Exclusion Act to restrict Chinese immigration to the United States. Prior to that, the Chinese community was already a predominantly male society because Chinese female immigrants were thought to be prostitutes, and therefore denied entry. Married Chinese men had little chance to reunite with their wives, while the bachelors could not start a family. Because these men could not demonstrate heterosexual norms, there were doubts on their sexuality. The early Chinese immigrants in the United States sustained the image of lesser men.

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Boston University’s new Chinese dishes baffle Chinese students

Boston University announced last month that it would add 15 new Chinese dishes to its residential dining menus. But the dishes did not impress the very people the dining services were courting.

In the comments section of the announcement published on BU Today, a news and information website managed by the university’s marketing and communications office, a student named Phyllis wrote, “I am from Beijing, China. The sad thing about this news is that none of the new added food item I have eaten or even heard of when I was in China… It is still American-Chinese food.”

Adding new Chinese dishes was part of BU’s effort to retain the Chinese students in campus housing after the mandatory stay period in freshman year. While 75 percent of American and non-Chinese students return to campus housing in their sophomore year, less than half of Chinese students do so, according to BU Today.

Other BU students from China and Taiwan expressed a similar sentiment. Most found dishes like “Sichuan chili chicken and eggplant, sticky rice”, “pho chicken bowl, ramen noodles” and “soy caramel beef lettuce wrap, glass noodle salad” perplexing. “Caramel beef?” said Jiaan Yu, a sophomore from Nanjing. She frowned and pulled back her head as she read the list of dishes. “Seriously these are Chinese food?”

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