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Since we’re a week past Thanksgiving, I am still thankful my great grandfather came to this country in the 19th Century and glad for an earthquake.
The gold frenzy had people from all backgrounds, including whites, African Americans—both freed and enslaved—as well as Latin American and Chinese men seeking to make their fortunes. In 1849, Chinese began immigrating to the United States in order to become gold miners in various western states, including California and North and South Dakota.
My great grandfather, or so the family’s lore/hearsay goes, came to the US in the 1850s, probably to mine gold, or at least to seek a fortune. It did have an effect as my paternal grandfather likely got his citizenship after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, when records were in disarray with the destruction of City Hall.
When I in my dutiful manner escorted my mother on trips abroad, I would always take her to every location’s “Chinatown” as if that were more comfortable or at least less disorienting. Just as Chinatown got rebuilt after 1906 so our family’s first home’s building was built in 1911 on Nob Hill.
Today, there are more than 45,000 Chinese restaurants across the US, more than the number of McDonald's, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Wendy's outlets combined, according to an estimate by the Chinese American Restaurant Association.
Though he is the descendant of grandparents who immigrated to California from China's Guangdong province, Mr Chan did not eat Chinese food as a child. And when he first tried Chinese fare, he was not impressed at all.
"The food was not sophisticated," Mr Chan recalled of his first Chinese meals in the 1950s. "We would go to banquets, I'd eat soy sauce on rice, and nothing else."
Chinese food was first cooked in the US by Chinese immigrants who came dreaming of wealth during the California Gold Rush in the mid 19th Century. In 1849, the first documented Chinese restaurant, Canton Restaurant, opened its door in San Francisco.
The early Chinese immigrants in the US were mostly from Toisan, a rural Cantonese county in southern China. The coastal community had a tradition of sailing abroad but was experiencing bloody ethnic conflict and economic struggles, which prompted waves of immigration to America.
By the time Mr Chan had his first tastes of chop suey, there were relatively few Chinese Americans in the US - 0.08% of the total population - most of whom were descended from Toisan.
www.bbc.com/...
It was a century of Chinese food in America to the below postcard and I recall spending time at this restaurant because my family was friends with the owner, so much so that my mom had an affair with him that had on and off encounters over many decades. That and her pregnancy with my childhood dentist has always made my history colorful, if not salaciously dysfunctional.
In Orson Welles' 1947 classic Lady from Shanghai , Michael O'Hara (Welles) passes Shanghai Low as he flees through Chinatown
During O'Hara's desperate flight from justice along its main thoroughfare, Grant Avenue, director Welles jumps back and forth in a tightly edited multi-cut sequence lasting less than two minutes…
Then ... He looks back from the corner of Grant and Pine (map). One block north along Grant the pagoda-towered Sing Fat and Sing Chong Buildings face each other across California Street, also cleverly captured in the shop window. They were built just two years after the 1906 earthquake as a statement by the Chinese community that they had no intention of bowing to pressure from politicians to leave the stricken area.
reelsf.com/...
This Chicago arts group perhaps got their name from the above imagery.
I came across a little bit of revisionist history, more about the creation of a term “stir-fry” in English and not really anything about the actual cooking practice. This certainly was important in the prewar period as the Nazis even tried to institutionalize the one-pot meal or Eintopf
On the first Sunday of every month, they decreed, every German family should replace their traditional roast with a thriftier one-pot meal—an Eintopf, from the German ein Topf, or “one pot”—and set aside the savings for the charity drive. On those Sunday afternoons, collectors around the country knocked on doors to recuperate the money. Even families who didn’t want to cook were expected to join in: Restaurants were legally obligated to offer appropriately inexpensive Eintopf meals at a reduced rate on the designated Sundays.
[...]
To take part in Eintopfsonntag, Germans had to experience deprivation for the good of the collective—a common, unifying Nazi theme. In a 1935 speech, Hitler castigated those who did not take part or give as much as they could to the Wintershilfswerk: “You have never known hunger yourself or you would know what a burden hunger is,” he said. “Whoever does not participate is a characterless parasite of the German people.” Those who greedily refused a day’s abstinence were said to be “stealing” from the collective. As one regional report put it, “Just as faithful Christians unite in the holy sacrament of the Last Supper in service of their lord and master, so too does the National Socialist Germany celebrate this sacrificial meal as a solemn vow to the unshakeable people’s community.”
www.atlasobscura.com/...
Is this account a revisionist history… were not Chinese in the US always cooking with woks? Sadly the below article implies that that “stir-fry” seems to be a post-war phenomena and that there is some new canonical history for something more global in origin. As if the one-pot meal didn’t have common origins in poverty and familial cooking, and the below author’s hope that as a term, “stir-fry” will in English, displace its origins as wok cooking, because of branding mania and assimilation pressures. As though “Chao” or “Chow” wasn’t already part of the lexicon for at least the prior half-century, particularly as Chow Mein for authors like Upton Sinclair.
It was May 1945 when what would become one of America’s most ubiquitous home-cooking techniques first entered the English lexicon. In her cookbook, How to Cook and Eat in Chinese, 55-year-old Chinese immigrant Chao Yang Buwei described a process common in her homeland, wherein cooks would cut meat and vegetables into small bites and tumble them rapidly together over heat. The Mandarin term for the technique, ch’ao, “with its aspiration, low-rising tone and all, cannot be accurately translated into English,” Chao lamented. For short, she decided, “We shall call it ‘stir-fry.’”
The term soon burrowed its way into the American vernacular and has since taken on a life of its own. Nowadays, stir-frying isn’t just a method—“stir-fry” has become its own category of recipes. Yet most home cooks have never heard of Chao, despite her lasting impression on the way Americans talk about food.
Chao came to cooking unexpectedly. A doctor by profession, she gave up her medical career to move to the United States in 1921 after her husband, the famed linguist Chao Yuenren, was offered a job at Harvard. Bored at home and speaking little English, she turned to cooking dishes that reminded her of China: fleecy rice boiled as soft as it was in Zhangzhou; soups with mushrooms and pork flavored with soy sauce.
[...]
The cookbook’s publicity campaign championed it as a document of hope. It emerged just two years after the United States repealed parts of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, an ugly law that had put a cap on Chinese immigration. To those promoting her cookbook, Chao may have seemed like an ideal cultural ambassador. In historian Madeline Y. Hsu’s 2015 book, The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority, she posits that Chao and her husband looked like “model American citizens.”
www.motherjones.com/...
OTOH the vid below with Gordon Ramsey is amusing if only because he keeps yelling camera direction: “pan down” at his daughters while doing a pandemic stir-fry in 10 minutes.
In his 1988 book The Food of China, E.N. Anderson writes about the possible origin of the Wok.[5]
“Chow” has also some interesting entymological origins that connect the technique to the wok-based meal even if it’s a pidgin English term used to describe anything that came from East Asia during the late 18th century. Chow Mein and Chop Suey have similar but easily differentiated origins.
The words chow mein mean 'stir-fried noodles', also loosely translating to "fried noodle" in English, chow meaning 'stir-fried' (or "sautéed") and mein meaning 'noodles'. The pronunciation chow mein is an English corruption of the Toisanese pronunciation chāu-mèn. The Toisan dialect was spoken by migrants to North America from Toisan.
Food historians and cultural anthropologists have noted that chow mein and other dishes served in Chinese American restaurants located away from areas without any significant Asian American population tend to be very different from what is served in China and are heavily modified to fit the taste preference of the local dominant population.[20][21] As an example, the chow mein gravy favored in the Fall River area more closely resembles that used in local New England cooking than that used in traditional Chinese cooking. The founder of the food manufacturer Chun King and the creator of canned chow mein admits to using Italian spices to make his product more acceptable to Americans whose ancestors came from Europe.[22]
Chow mein was mentioned as early as 1920, in the novel Main Street by Sinclair Lewis.[23][24]
en.wikipedia.org/…
The wok has a long history in China.[3] It is thought to have been introduced during the Han dynasty of China, where it was first used to dry grains.[4] It was during the Ming dynasty of China that the wok became popularly used for stir frying.[4]
Wok is a Cantonese word; the Mandarin is Guō. The wok appears to be a rather recent acquisition as Chinese kitchen furniture goes; it has been around for only two thousand years. The first woks are little pottery models on the pottery stove models in Han Dynasty tombs. Since the same sort of pan is universal in India and Southeast Asia, where it is known as a Kuali in several languages, I strongly suspect borrowing [of the word] (probably from India via Central Asia)--kuo must have evolved from some word close to Kuali.
en.wikipedia.org/…
Where Was The Wok Invented?
The wok is believed to have first been invented in China, over 2000 years ago during the Han dynasty. Derived from the Cantonese word meaning ‘Cooking Pot’, the early models of the wok were made of cast iron metals, allowing them to be more durable and long lasting.
What Was The Wok First Used For?
Historians and food experts have a number of theories as to why the wok was invented. Some say that due to the shortage of food back in the Han dynasty, the wok allowed for a wide variety of meals to be cooked using the same ingredients due to its versatility.
There is also a theory that due to tribes travelling across the country many years ago and having to carry all their belongings with them, they needed a utensil that was not only portable but also able to quickly cook large amounts of food to feed the tribe.
A third theory is that due to a shortage of fuel and oil in the Han dynasty, the wok allowed for people to cook meals using very little oil. You may have already noticed that you only need a small amount of vegetable oil when using a wok at home to cook your ingredients!
schoolofwok.co.uk/…
Likely Chinese food was a better option than frontier fare.
Over time, because the majority of food in California had to be imported, it became notoriously expensive. In just a few short months, the price of food tripled. Many miners arrived with only the clothes on their backs and a lack of basic supplies, which meant merchants were at a major advantage and could charge outrageously high prices for their goods. Simple items like eggs and slices of bread were sold for a dollar a piece in 1849, an astronomical price even now, over 150 years later. Because of the high price of food, several firsthand accounts of gold rush life depict times of near-starvation. Nutrition, unfortunately, was not high on a miner’s list of priorities. Fruits and vegetables were scarce and as a result many miners suffered from scurvy. Forty-niners also hated to tear themselves away from their search for gold and turned to quick meals that could be cooked over hot ashes. Flour, a common and often costly staple, was stretched by combining it with sour milk and cornmeal to be eaten as mush.
During times of plenty when gold made miners rich overnight, they would sometimes indulge in a dish called Hangtown Fry. The strange concoction originated in Hangtown (now known as Placerville), which served as a supply base to California’s mining region. In the beginning of the Gold Rush the area was referred to as Old Dry Diggins, named after the miner’s practice of carrying dry soil to running water for washing gold. The name was changed to Hangtown after several men were hanged from a white oak tree in town for robbery, murder and other mining-related crimes. According to a story found in the Mountain Democrat newspaper, Hangtown Fry originated in the saloon of the El Dorado Hotel when a miner requested the finest and most expensive meal in the house. The cook presented the man with an omelet made with bacon and oysters, both costly imported ingredients, and thus the Hangtown Fry was born. It seems a perfect reflection of Gold Rush cuisine made from the finest ingredients yet not at all elegant, the dish includes a mish-mosh of various regional ingredients held together by symbolic golden eggs. Try this recipe from PBS Food for a taste of Gold Rush history in your very own kitchen.
www.pbs.org/...
Speaking of sauté cookware, Kamala used her own money and shopped at E.Dehillerin, in Paris. Because like tan suits RWNJs hate the uppity doing souvenir shopping at the same place Julia Child bought her equipment. Darn the Professional-Managerial Class.
From the November 26, 2021, edition of Fox News’ America’s Newsroom
JULIE BANDERAS (GUEST CO-ANCHOR): Vice President Harris taking heat in some quarters for spending more than $500 on cookware during her recent Paris trip, while Americans struggle with rising inflation and economic uncertainty. Well, among the VP's purchases, a $375 serving dish, and a frying pan that costs around $160. I do not cook. I don't know about you, Benjamin, so I make no sense of spending money on cookware. But again, I don't cook, so I'm not really an expert on this. How about yourself?
BENJAMIN HALL (GUEST CO-ANCHOR): That's a lot of money, that’s a lot of money—
BANDERAS: Is it?
HALL: For a pot, and I think if she is going to buy a pot that expensive, maybe buy it in America rather than in France. Spend the money over here.
BANDERAS: That’s true, yeah. I don’t know, I have no reason to buy cookware. But I suppose I would probably spend that money on something else like, I don’t know, wine.
HALL: Who does the cooking?
BANDERAS: Not me. My husband does all the cooking, or my mother — just anyone else but me. All right, moving on.
www.mediamatters.org/...