Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States by Andrew Coe

Author:Andrew Coe [Coe, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Cooking, Regional & Ethnic, American, General, History, United States, Social History, Americas (North; Central; South; West Indies), Social Science, Agriculture & Food
ISBN: 9780199758517
Google: 7Xqp1BplsSsC
Amazon: 0195331079
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2009-06-24T04:00:00+00:00

This one of the earliest accounts we have of the mixed stir-fry, one of the Pearl River Delta’s village specialties, that would have an outsized influence on the American perception of Chinese food.

During the 1860s and 1870s, New York journalists predicted the imminent arrival of hordes of Chinese immigrants from the West, and these prophecies became more frequent as work on the railroads ended and anti-Chinese violence spread. In reality, those hordes never materialized, and Chinese immigrants continued to flow in, as they always had, gradually. The journalists, following the lead of the San Francisco newspapers, descended on the city’s nascent Chinatown to nose out any signs of gambling, poor sanitation, and particularly opium use. In 1880, a Times reporter visited Mott Street’s little Chinese community expecting to find “dragons’ wings scattered over the floor, and ends of serpents’ tails disappearing under the bed” but admitted: “none of these things are there.” He had to enlist a police officer to take him behind a combined restaurant and gambling parlor to find one tiny opium den where he could indulge his fantasies of Oriental depravity.4 Generally, however, these writers couldn’t muster as much moral condemnation of Chinese vice as had Bayard Taylor. With more curiosity than outrage, they explored the rules and odds of the Chinese gambling games and sampled a few puffs of opium to learn how it was smoked.

This relative lack of hysteria may have been due to the fact that the thousand or so Chinese in New York were only a drop in the bucket compared to the size of other immigrant groups. In May 1880, the Times noted that since the beginning of the year more than one hundred thousand immigrants had passed through the processing facility at Castle Garden on Manhattan’s southern tip.5 The majority were German, English, Irish, French, and Scandinavian. The masses of Italians and East European Jews began to arrive a few years later. Most paused only long enough to collect their baggage before they were whisked off to other parts of the country, but thousands stayed and settled in the crowded immigrant districts of the Lower East and West Sides. The Chinese were certainly the most exotic new immigrants, but they were unlikely to be seen as an economic threat when compared to the flood of Europeans.

Like their compatriots in California, New York City’s Chinese residents soon began to remake their environment to suit their culinary needs. By 1878, a pair of Chinese farmers named Ah Wah and Ah Ling were growing Asian vegetables on a three-acre plot in the Tremont section of the Bronx. (Within a few years they were joined by another farmer in the Bronx and then Chinese farms in Astoria, Queens.) Store owners like Wo Kee sold imported specialties like pickled, salted, and dried vegetables as well as the usual array of Chinese dried seafood. In 1880, an agent of the Ichthyophagus Club scouting Chinatown for piscatory oddities for its annual dinner found sharks’ fins, dried oysters, salted octopus and squid, sea cucumbers, and birds’ nests.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.