Cuisines Don’t Travel, but We Do.
Clem Onojeghuo - Unsplash
There’s a strange phenomenon to do with food that happens the second you cross the border from your own country into another. Somehow your native food immediately descends into something hellish. The flavours evaporate into thin air, the texture is all wrong, there are common ingredients missing.
British food, not exactly renowned for it culinary delights, becomes an abomination abroad, served up in Brit-pubs blasting out Sky Sports, the sticky floors imported directly from some backstreet of Cardiff. But what am I doing looking for British food anyway? We travel to immerse ourselves in the food and culture of a new place. Milan for fresh pasta, Valencia for paella, Marseille for bouillabaisse. I tend to agree. Except, traveling on vacation and living abroad are two very different worlds.
I live in Beijing, and as much as I love Chinese food, I also like to eat other cuisines a few times a week. But eating non-Chinese food out in Beijing is usually so very disappointing: flaccid pizza with strawberry topping or durian and sweet cheese. Salad is a few mixed leaves thrown in a bowl; steak is chewy, un-aged and served unrested; burritos are slathered in mayonnaise; cakes are make with squirty creamy, and a haunting memory from a few years ago: a sweet donut stuffed with brown crab meat.
Before I moved to China a lot of my friends and family asked me ‘do you like Chinese food?’ ‘Not at all,’ I replied. They looked perplexed: ’How are you going to survive?’ I shrugged it off - the food we were talking about was the greasy, deep fried, sweet, MSG-pumped, thick-sauced Chinese food of Western Chinese takeaways. My local Chinese sold the oh-so-familiar deep-fried ‘sweet and sour chicken’, crispy spring rolls and egg-fried rice complete with an oil sheen. Some of the dishes had Chinese sounding names and the menu was filled with Chinese characters. Although I didn’t know any better, I was sure this was not it, there must be more to a culture with more than ten dynasties in a place bigger than the US. I was putting my faith in the China to come through for me on the food front (I was not disappointed).
Today I have a strange fascination with those British and American-Chinese restaurants. What are they? Where did the menu even come from? Much has been written about how Chinese chefs moved to the West, discovered their food was not loved, and then adapted the dishes for Western palettes used to sweeter things. Perhaps this is true, but the surprise to me is how old Chinese food in the West is. As far back as 1865 there were Chinese restaurants in the US, serving up simple food for Chinese migrants. The occasional curious American might venture in trying stir-fried dishes that became known as ‘Chop Suey’ (an Anglicised version of the Taishan dialect tsap seoi).
The original restaurants were not trying to cater to Western clientele and the kitchen staff were unlikely to even be chefs. There was no carefully designed restaurant business plan. And so often what came out of early Chinatowns was a mish-mash of flavours, ingredients and cooking styles. Combine this with the mix of Chinese languages spoken, and we can see how messy everything becomes - Cantonese, Taishanese and other dialects all conversing and writing menus that eventually became Anglicised. It’s not a simple task to follow the dish from a Chinese restaurant in London’s Chinatown back to a village chef in China.
Even in 1945, Dr Chao Buwei Yang in her book How to Eat and Cook Chinese was concerned about the state of affairs in Chinese restaurants across the US: “the widespread use of taste-powder [MSG] in recent years has resulted in a lowering of the standard of right cooking and a levelling of all dishes to one flavour.” MSG was becoming too widespread and ruining the diversity of her cuisine. And that was my issue with British-Chinese food sixty years later. It all basically tastes the same. She goes on to ask: “do you get real Chinese food in the Chinese restaurants outside of China?” It seems a perpetually pertinent question we’ve been asking for the last 75 years and continue to ask in 2023.