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, but those exposed only to this variety may not realize that it differs significantly from the cuisine of China. Some restaurants advertise their status by writing "Western food" on their signs 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.
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, in the process inventing numerous dishes such as chop suey. As a result, they developed a style of Chinese food not found in China.These traditional "chop suey houses" 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.
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 Chinese menus are available, they typically feature ethnocentric delicacies, like liver or chicken feet, that might deter Western customers.
Chinese American dishes
Some dishes that often show up as American Chinese on menus include:- 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. 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 former name of a the capital of Burma, thus even the name is not authentically Chinese.
- Egg foo young, also known as egg foo yung or egg foo yaung.
- 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.
- Lo mein — The term means "stirred noodles;" these noodles are frequently made with eggs and flour, making them more chewy than simply using water
- Shrimp toast — Triangles of bread, coated with egg, shrimp, and water chestnuts, and then deep-fried or baked.
- Mongolian beef - Usually beef stir fried with scallions
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 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. 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.
- 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 a few wontons in a pork or chicken soup 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 (luoba), and onion, chiong. Luoba, in Chinese, refers to the daikon, a pungent white radish. The orange western carrot is known as "red luoba" (or more properly hong luoba, hong being the Mandarin word for "red"). When the word for onion, chiong, is used, it is understood that one is referring to "green onions" (otherwise known to westerners as scallions). The many-layered onion common to westerners is called yong chiong. This translates as "foreign onion" or "yankee onion." It should now be evident that the western broccoli, carrot, and onion are not indigenious to China and authentic Chinese cuisine. Hence, if a dish contains any of those ingredients, it has most likely been westernized.
Regional variations on American Chinese cuisine
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 mangoes 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 restauraunts such as seafood restaurants, Hong Kong-style diners and cafes, dim sum teahouses, and hot pot restaurants. Many Chinatown areas also feature Chinese bakeries, boba milk tea shops, roasted meat, vegetarian cuisine, and specialized desert 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 黃毛鶏 (Cantonese Yale: wòhng mouh gāai, Pinyin: huángmáo jī, literally yellow-hair 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 (}; }), 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.
Hawaii
Owing to the different history of the Chinese in Hawaii, Hawaiian Chinese food developed a bit differently from the continental United States. Owing to the diversity of ethnicities in Hawaii, 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. Some names of foods are different like Manapua from Hawaiian meaning chewed up pork for the dim sum bao, not just the pork variety. As is typical in Hawaii, Chinese food in Hawaii is also noted for its use of SPAM, much to the puzzlement of outsiders.American Chinese fast food chains
- [Asian Chao]
- [Leeann Chin] — Locations in Minnesota and Wisconsin
- [Magic Wok] — Locations in the Toledo, OH area.
- [Mark Pi's Express] — Located in Arizona, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Nevada, and Ohio.
- [Mr. Chau's Chinese Fast Food] — Locations in the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley.
- Panda Express — Nationwide in the USA.
- [Pei Wei] — Nationwide — From the creators of P.F. Chang's.
- [P.F. Chang's China Bistro] Nationwide, highly Westernized food
- [Pick Up Stix] — Located throughout California, Arizona, and Nevada.
- [Tasty Goody] — Locations in Southern California.
Museum exhibits
- [Museum of Chinese in the Americas] — "Have You Eaten Yet?: The Chinese Restaurant in America" running from Sept 2004 to June 2005
See also
External links
- [Chinese Restaurant Project] — Indigo Som's project to document Chinese-American restaurants
- [The Eater's Guide to Chinese Characters] - Jim McCawley, a linguistics professor at the University of Chicago, wrote a field guide for Westerners who want authentic Chinese cuisine.
- [Chopstix] — From the UK but covers the USA
- [About.com] — From the USA
- [Chinese Restaurants] Chinese Restaurants in the U.S.
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