American Chinese cuisine
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American Chinese cuisine refers to the style of food served by Chinese restaurants in the United States. This type of cooking typically caters to Western tastes, and differs significantly from the cuisine of China. Some restaurants advertise their status by writing "Western food" on their signs[citation needed] in Chinese or by using the term Chinese American in their signage. It alerts those who seek more traditional dishes, while still attracting those who are either unable to read Chinese or are looking for westernized fare. Canadian Chinese cuisine is quite similar to American Chinese cuisine.
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[edit] History
In the 19th century, Chinese restaurateurs developed American Chinese cuisine when they modified their food for American tastes. First catering to railroad workers, they opened restaurants in towns where Chinese food was completely unknown. These restaurant workers adapted to using local ingredients and catered to their customer's tastes. Dishes on the menu were often given numbers, and often a roll and butter was offered on the side.
In the process, chefs would invent numerous dishes such as chop suey and General Tso's Chicken. As a result, they developed a style of Chinese food not found in China. Restaurants (along with Chinese laundries which have since all but vanished) provided an ethnic niche for small businesses at a time when Chinese were often excluded from most jobs in the wage economy by discrimination or lack of language fluency. Wages tend to be low, and hours long as much of the labor is provided by immigrants or family members, but part of the attraction of Chinese restaurants is the quality and low cost of the food. In modern times, some professional Asians invest their savings into running restaurants.
Traditional "chop suey houses" catering primarily to non-Asian customers have become increasingly rare. More recent Chinese immigrants, who often prefer traditional cuisine, run most contemporary Chinese restaurants in the United States, and American tastes have changed accordingly.
Currently there are three types of American Chinese restaurants that exist in most areas.
- Sit-down dining: These are restaurants that cater to customers who sit down in a dining room and order from a menu. They tend to serve more traditional dishes. Most of the lower-end restaurants have been replaced by buffets.
- Take-out: These restaurants cater primarily to call-in and take-out orders. They sometimes feature small dining rooms. These restaurants serve the traditional American Chinese dishes seen in this article. Nearly all of them feature deliveries to customers' homes. The folding waxed cardboard take out box (which had a wire handle before the age of the microwave) has become a fixture of American culture along with the pizza box.
- Buffets. These restaurants have increased in popularity in recent years. They are far from traditional cuisine and often advertise as Chinese-American or Chinese-Seafood. Most feature the dishes seen here and even more Americanized dishes along with anything else cheaply prepared that can do well on a heated buffet. Pizza, french fries, chicken nuggets, pre-packaged sushi and even a dessert bar with soft-serve ice cream are common at these buffets.
[edit] American Chinese vs. Traditional Chinese cuisine
American Chinese food typically treats vegetables as garnish while authentic styles emphasize vegetables. This can be seen in the use of carrots and tomatoes. Authentic Chinese cuisine makes frequent use of Asian leafy vegetables like bok choy and gai-lan and puts a greater emphasis on fresh meat and live seafood. As a result, American Chinese food is usually less pungent than authentic cuisine.
American Chinese food tends to be cooked very quickly with lots of oil and salt. Many dishes are quickly and easily prepared, and require inexpensive ingredients. Stir-frying, pan-frying, and deep-frying tend to be the most common cooking techniques which are all easily done using a wok. The food also has a reputation for high levels of MSG to enhance the flavor. The symptoms of MSG sensitivity have been dubbed "Chinese restaurant syndrome" or "Chinese food syndrome." While there is heated scientific debate over whether or not MSG is harmful, market forces and customer demand have encouraged many restaurants to offer "MSG Free" or "No MSG" menus.
Most American Chinese establishments cater to non-Chinese customers with menus written in English or containing pictures. If separate Chinese menus are available, they typically feature delicacies like liver or chicken feet that might deter Western customers.
[edit] Chinese American dishes
Some dishes that often show up as American Chinese on menus include:
- General Tso's Chicken - dark-meat tidbits of chicken that are deep-fried and seasoned with ginger, garlic, sesame oil, scallions, and hot chili peppers, and often served with steamed broccoli
- Sesame Chicken - deep fried, normally dark meat chicken with a sweet, mildly spicy sauce.
- Chinese chicken salad — Salad, in the form of uncooked leafy greens, does not exist in traditional Chinese cuisine for sanitary reasons, since manure and human feces were China's primary fertilizer through most of its history.[citation needed] It usually contains crispy noodle (fried wonton skin) and sesame dressing. Some restaurants serve the salad with mandarin orange.
- Chop suey — connotes "leftovers" in Chinese. It is usually a mix of vegetables and meat in a brown sauce.
- Chow mein — literally means 'stir-fried noodles.' Chow mein consists of fried noodles with bits of meat and vegetables. It can come with chicken, beef, pork or shrimp.
- Chow mein sandwich — Sandwich of chow mein and gravy.
- Crab rangoon — Fried wonton skins stuffed with artificial crab meat and cream cheese. Rangoon is the name of the former capital of Burma.
- Fortune cookie — Invented at the Japanese Tea Garden restaurant in San Francisco, fortune cookies became sweetened and found their way to American Chinese restaurants. Fortune cookies have become so popular that even some authentic Chinese restaurants serve them at the end of the meal and may feature Chinese translations of the English fortunes.
- Mongolian beef - Usually beef stir-fried with scallions, often served in a brown sauce.
- Chicken Fingers - Boneless thick strips of normally white meat Chicken, put in a batter and deep fried.
[edit] Americanized versions of traditional Chinese dishes
- Batter-fried meat — Meat that has been deep fried in bread or flour, such as sesame chicken, lemon chicken, orange chicken, sweet and sour pork, and General Tso's chicken, is often heavily emphasized in American-style Chinese dishes. Battered meat occasionally appears in Hunanese dishes, but it generally uses lighter sauces with less sugar and corn syrup.
- The chicken ball uses a large amount of leavening and flour in its preparation and battering process which causes them to be more similar to doughy "hush puppies" than actual batter-fried meat.
- Egg drop soup- A soup of chicken broth with scrambled egg ribbons. Often served with fried noodles.
- Egg foo young, also known as egg foo yung or egg foo yaung. This is a Chinese-style omelet with vegetables and meat. Usually served with a brown sauce.
- Egg roll - While authentic Chinese spring rolls have a thin crispy skin with mushrooms, bamboo, and other vegetables inside, the Americanized version uses a thick, fried skin stuffed with cabbage and sometimes bits of meat or seafood (such as prawns or shrimp). In other areas, bean sprouts form the basis of most of the filling.
- Fried rice — Fried rice dishes are popular offerings in American Chinese food due to the speed and ease of preparation and their appeal to Western tastes. Fried rice is generally prepared with rice cooled overnight, allowing restaurants to put unserved leftover rice to good use.
- Kung Pao chicken - The authentic Sichuan dish is very spicy, so the American versions tend to be toned down.
- Lo mein — The term means "stirred noodles"; these noodles are frequently made with eggs and flour, making them chewier than simply using water. Thick, spaghetti shaped noodles are pan fried with vegetables and meat. Sometimes this dish is referred to as "chow mein" (which literally means "fried noodles") in restaurants outside of the New York metro area.
- Moo shu pork — The Chinese version uses more authentic ingredients (including wood ear fungi and daylily buds) and thin flour pancakes while the American version uses more Western vegetables and thicker pancakes. This dish is quite popular in Chinese restaurants in the US, while not that terribly popular in China.
- Wonton soup — In most American Chinese restaurants, only wonton dumplings in broth are served, while authentic Chinese versions may come with noodles. The true Cantonese Wonton Soup is a full meal in itself consisting of thin egg noodles and typically 5 pork and prawn wontons in a pork or chicken soup broth or noodle broth.
- Chicken cashew - see Regional variations.
- Beef with broccoli - This dish exists in traditional Chinese form, but using gailan (Chinese broccoli) rather than Western broccoli. Occasionally Western broccoli is also referred to as gailan (in Chinese) for a lack of alternative word. Among Chinese speakers, however, it is typically understood that one is referring to the leafy vegetable unless otherwise specified. This is also the case with the words for carrot (luobo) and onion (cong). Luobo, in Chinese, refers to the daikon, a pungent white radish. The orange western carrot is known as "foreign luobo" (or more properly hu luobo, hu being an archaic term for "foreign"). When the word for onion, cong, is used, it is understood that one is referring to "green onions" (otherwise known to Westerners as scallions or spring onions). The many-layered onion common to Westerners is called yang cong. This translates as "western onion". It should now be evident that the Western broccoli, carrot, and onion are not indigenous to China and authentic Chinese cuisine. Hence, if a dish contains any of those ingredients, it has most likely been westernized.
The tomato, being a New World plant, is also fairly new to China and Chinese cuisine. Tomato-based sauces can be found in some American Chinese dishes such as the popular "Beef and tomato".
[edit] The Traditional Take-out Menu
Most American Chinese restaurants get their supplies from a few companies leading to a similarity in the menus of separate restaurants. While sit-down and Buffet restaurants are more varied, most menus have the following sections:
- Appetizers- usually including ribs, Teriyaki chicken, Pu pu platter, and egg rolls. Typically dishes that are not soup and are not served with rice.
- Soups- including egg drop and hot and sour.
- Fried Rice, Chow Mein, Chop Suey, Lo Mein, Egg Foo Young, Mu Shu and Sweet and Sour- These dishes are served with rice, typically by the pint or quart. They are normally divided into vegetable, roast pork, chicken, beef, shrimp, occasionally lobster, and 'house special' or "combination" usually the first four ingredients together.
- Roast or B.B.Q. Pork- Usually the smallest section (due to pork being less popular than beef and chicken today), mostly "with" dishes (Roast pork with mushrooms et. al.)
- Chicken-Moo Goo Gai Pan, Kung Po, and most of the "with" dishes (Such as chicken with cashew nuts)
- Beef- Beef with Broccoli, Pepper Steak, and "with " dishes
- Seafood- Basically shrimp with the occasional scallop or lobster dish.
- Special Diet Plates and Vegetable and Tofu- Vegetarian and low calorie dishes
- Combination platters- More expensive than the previous dishes, these come with fried rice and usually an egg roll. Usually you'll find General Tso's and Sesame chicken here plus the most popular of the other dishes.
- Chef's Specialties- the most expensive dishes, if the restaurant has pictures of food, it is usually these meals. Big meals with white rice that normally include multiple meats and vegetables.
The back of the menu often has Lunch Specials which are normally a smaller version of the combination platters offered only at lunch for less money.
[edit] Regional variations on American Chinese cuisine
[edit] San Francisco
Since the early 1990s, many American Chinese restaurants influenced by the cuisine of California have opened in San Francisco and the Bay Area. The trademark dishes of American Chinese cuisine remain on the menu, but there is more emphasis on fresh vegetables, and the selection is vegetarian-friendly.
This new cuisine has exotic ingredients like mangos and portobello mushrooms. Other cuisines influence the menu: some restaurants substitute grilled flour tortillas for the rice pancakes in mu shu dishes; brown rice is often offered as an optional alternative to white rice.
In addition, many restaurants serving more traditional Chinese cuisines exist, due to the high numbers and proportion of ethnic Chinese in San Francisco and the Bay Area. Restaurants specializing in Cantonese, Szechuan, Hunan, Mandarin, Taiwanese, and Hong Kong traditions are widely available, as are more specialized restaurants such as seafood restaurants, Hong Kong-style diners and cafes (also known as Cha chaan teng (茶餐廳)), dim sum teahouses, and hot pot restaurants. Many Chinatown areas also feature Chinese bakeries, boba milk tea shops, roasted meat, vegetarian cuisine, and specialized dessert shops. Chop suey is not widely available in San Francisco, and the city's chow mein is different from Midwestern chow mein.
Authentic restaurants with Chinese-language menus may offer 黃毛雞 (Cantonese Yale: wòhng mouh gāai, Pinyin: huángmáo jī, literally yellow-feather chicken), essentially a free-range chicken, as opposed to typical American mass-farmed chicken. Yellow-hair chicken is valued for its flavor, but needs to be cooked properly to be tender due to its lower fat and higher muscle content. This dish usually does not appear on the English-language menu.
Dau Miu (Chinese: 豆苗; pinyin: dòumiáo), literally Bean Grass but actually snow pea vines, is a Chinese vegetable that has become popular since the early 1990s, and now not only appears on English-language menus, usually as "pea shoots", but is often served by upscale non-Asian restaurants as well. Originally it was only available during a few months of the year, but it is now grown in greenhouses and is available year-round.
[edit] Hawaii
Hawaiian-Chinese food developed a bit differently from the continental United States. Owing to the diversity of ethnicities in Hawaii and the history of the Chinese influence in Hawaii, resident Chinese cuisine forms a component of the cuisine of Hawaii, which is a fusion of different culinary traditions. Some Chinese dishes are typically served as part of plate lunches in Hawaii. The names of foods are different as well, such as Manapua, from Hawaiian meaning "chewed up pork" for dim sum bao, though the meat is not necessarily pork. Chinese food in Hawaii is also noted for its use of SPAM, much to the puzzlement of outsiders.
[edit] American Chinese fast food chains
- Asian Chao
- Leeann Chin — Locations in Minnesota and Wisconsin
- Magic Wok — Locations in the Toledo, Ohio, area.
- Wok n Roll — Locations in the New Jersey, New York and UK.
- Manchu Wok — Locations nationwide in the USA and Canada, as well as in Guam, Korea, and Japan.
- Mark Pi's Express — Located in Arizona, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Nevada, and Ohio. Now popularizing American Chinese in New Delhi, India.
- Mr. Chau's Chinese Fast Food — Locations in the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley.
- Panda Express — Nationwide in the USA.
- Pei Wei Asian Diner — West and Southwest US — From the creators of P.F. Chang's.
- P.F. Chang's China Bistro Nationwide, highly Westernized food (not fast food).
- Pick Up Stix — Located throughout California, Arizona, and Nevada.
- Tasty Goody — Locations in Southern California.
[edit] Museum exhibits
- Museum of Chinese in the Americas — "Have You Eaten Yet?: The Chinese Restaurant in America" running from Sept. 2004 to June 2005
[edit] See also
- Chinese cuisine
- American cuisine
- Canadian Chinese cuisine
- List of Chinese dishes
- Oyster pail
[edit] External links
- Chinese Restaurant Project — Indigo Som's project to document Chinese-American restaurants
- Chinese Restaurants Chinese Restaurants in the U.S.
- Chinese and Chinatown Food Search thousand of Chinese Restaurants in U.S. and Canada.
