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Angela LeePlease see link for essay - Thanks!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1r5pMsE8R1dn_HAEew8KrPfekfFeHHZicwsyZokcROTI/edit?usp=sharing
Angela LeeI had looked at several recipe and food blog sites, and had come across this one called Chinese Food and History which is a blog from Professor Miranda Brown, who is a Chinese Studies professor at University of Michigan.
Since I am a world history teacher, I wanted to find a food history site that I could point my students to if we were to do some units and lessons on East Asian food history. This source would be one that I would feel comfortable sending my students. The site seems to have several collaborators who are all coming to their entries with a historical lens and context. Besides providing some good recipes in some of them, many of the entries also include a short history of the food, or the migration of people to an area that would give rise to new foodways as they incorporated the cultural and new food commodities to their recipes.
In particular, I am interested in migration history and how that might have influenced foodways throughout the world. I remember a food historian had shared with me about his travels to Peru and his discovery of Chifa cuisine, which is a mix of Peruvian and Chinese food. This entry about "Chifas in Argentina" caught my eye as I was browsing because it extended the story even further with Peruvian migration to Argentina, they brought their foods to another part of the South America.
The blog even highlights well known food historians like Jeffrey Pilcher, who wrote a post about the "Original Chinese American Food" and how it came with the Spanish Manilla Galleons as early as the 1600s , not necessarily with the Chinese laborers who came in the mid-1800s to find their riches in the gold rush or in building the railroads.
There are a lot of historical gems in this food history site for anyone who is interested!
Angela LeeI remember watching this early in the pandemic about Cecelia Chiang's, who is also called the "Mother of Northern Chinese Cooking in America."
Here is the trailer to "Soul of A Banquet" - I watched it on Kanopy, but not sure where else you can find the whole documentary.
Here is a short interview/bio about Chiang by the Chinese Historical Society of America.
Angela LeeFor someone who loves watching food and cooking shows, the media blast on Asian food in the last few years has been a welcome addition! I remember watching all of the Iron Chefs (the dubbed versions from Japan), and then following all seasons of Iron Chef America. Although it was seen as a parody, the fact that there were so many seasons of it made it an interesting enough show in its own right. A parody would have only lasted so long, and keyed in on some American sensibilities around food shows.
I love watching documentary food shows, and when I finally watched Jiro, I remembered that my friend, Jen Che, an award winning food blogger, had actually been to his restaurant, and this is her documentation of the experience: https://tinyurbankitchen.com/sukiyabashi-jiro/. She's a very interesting follow if you like reading food blogs, since she now lives in Hong Kong and visits many restaurants around Asia. As a Chinese American, she has an interesting perspective and focus.
That made me think of the other areas of media that this week's session did not cover as thoroughly, it's the preponderance of food blogs and recipe websites that have come out in recent years, and many have also become YouTube sensations (at least for a season).
Some of my go-to sites:
For Korean: https://www.maangchi.com/
https://www.koreanbapsang.com/
For Chinese: https://thewoksoflife.com/
https://www.chinasichuanfood.com/
https://mychinesehomekitchen.com/
https://www.pressurecookrecipes.com/
For Japanese: https://www.justonecookbook.com/
I also follow Kenji Lopes-Alt who used to write for Serious Eats. He doesn't just focus on Asian food, but has expertise on a broad spectrum of foods, but the recipes I look at (and the ramen recipe I've made) are all by him.
https://www.seriouseats.com/j-kenji-lopez-alt-5118720
Angela LeeWhat really caught my interest this week is to see how the process of globalization has led to some concrete results. I teach my students about syncretism, the mixing of two distinct cultures that gives rise to a new culture, and this process can be applied to some of these big multinational food corporations that have been able to take their brand and make it unique to the regions that they reach. In world history, this is a process that I hope that my students will be able to recognize in other incidences of diffusion in world history. For instance, if we take a look at Buddhism, and how it's been diffused from India to China to Japan and Korea, and all along the way, there is some cultural tweak that made it more accessible to the people of that region.
McDonalds, KFC, and other multinational food corporations has been able to take this to a much higher level in their marketing and tweaking of products, and convenience is an easy sell! The examples highlighted in the lecture this week are great examples of the process of globalization that has occurred across centuries along trade routes and all over the world. I'm also interested in the how some Asian corporations are trying to do something similar and marketing to a wider audience outside of Asia. Bibigo is one of those companies, and they are easily the most recognizable food product that I can find in my local Costco, and in some non-Asian grocery stores.
I'm also wondering how brands pick up on successful models too. When I have traveled in China through summer months, many of our local friends prefer going to Dico's for their fried chicken rather than KFC. Will these newer national brands also have plans to expand much outside their countries of origin? I don't think I prefered Dicos since I grew up with KFC, but I was struck with how much the marketing and products "copied" the ones from the larger companies like KFC. https://www.streetfoodguy.com/fine-dining-dicos/
Angela LeeFor Session 4, I was reminiscing about all the delicious bowls of ramen that I've had all over the world. I tried making the broth once, and that was a two-day ordeal, and once I was done, it was an amazing bowl of soup that I shared with my friends (we had a taste test of two different recipes) and we convinced one other friend to make ramen noodles from scratch. I vowed I would never complain about paying as much as I did for a bowl of ramen again - seriously!
The recipe was from Serious Eats - it's the first recipe for the Tonkotsu ramen broth.
Angela LeeI was in Singapore for the summer of 2017, but never got to try Hawker Chan's stall. That's still a regret I have, but the lines were always crazy long.
Angela LeeThis helps answer the main question I raised about how Chinese food doesn't seem like it would be a natural fit with those who needed kosher food.
Thank you!
Angela LeeHi everyone! I've been collecting the resources shared from each week's sessions and our live discussion in this Wakelet:
Angela LeeHere's an article that I had tagged awhile back about why Jews eat Chinese food on Christmas, that also was a thread in this week's session. While I was growing up, this was always confusing to me, because I thought that Jews would not eat pork, and Chinese restaurants, from what I saw, were not "kosher." I think this follows the adaptability of Chinese food to the diet of those who consumed it, similar to how Chinese cuisine adapted to the American palate.
https://forward.com/culture/43
Angela LeeThis was an intriguing session for me to think about - I grew up and around the Chinese restaurant scene in Boston, MA since my mother worked in the Chinese restaurant business for about a dozen years during my childhood/middle school years. We would eat leftovers from the restaurant, but my mother often "doctored" them up to make them less "Americanized." What the restaurant workers ate, for the most part, was not what they served their patrons, but it was more what would be eaten in home, which did not reflect the sugary, sticky, fried foods like General Tso's chicken. So this issue about authenticity continued to be raised for me because I was always looking for the most "authentic" cuisines every where I travel, but as I got older, into early adulthood, and as I became a teacher of world history, I see that the syncretism of food makes "authenticity" an issue that really doesn't have an answer. So are California rolls not authentically Japanese, even though they were developed by Japanese immigrants who were trying to find a replacement for the fresh fish they were not able to access in the United States? Are they more authentically Japanese American then? I am not sure that the question of "authenticity" is a helpful one.
Based on Mintz's article, there is no food in the world that is authentically from its region since the diffusion of food commodities over the globe and over hundreds of years make it difficult to find any dishes that are purely from that region alone. In my classes, I like following food commodities, because it shows the global nature of trade, and how cultures intertwined and mixed to create new culture. I remember eating in a restaurant in Sichuan, which is known for its spicy foods and use of chili peppers, but on the wall there was a sign about how the chili peppers had originally come from the Americas. So, that means Sichuan cuisine did not really develop their characteristically spicy flavors until the 1500s, so Sichuan cuisine (and by extension Hunan cuisine) are relative "newcomers" on the food scene. These clips and anecdotes can easily be brought into my class to highlight the nature of food, cuisine and culture.
I was surprised to hear that the total number of Chinese restaurants outpace all of those of the major fast-food chains combined, and was thinking about the organic nature of food, and how restaurants can really cater to the tastes of their clientele and what food supplies they can access. The numerous examples of Chinese restaurants adapting to the places where they have settled is quite intriguing, like the fusion of Mexican Chinese or Peruvian Chinese - has this happened with other cuisines in the world? So for instance, I've heard that Italian food, like pizza, looks and tastes very different than they do in Italian restaurants in the United States. What about Tex-Mex? Cajun Vietnamese? Is this a common occurrence of cuisines around the world to mix cultures and create something new that attracts multiple palates?
Angela LeeI came across this link of a podcast that I listen to, "Eat My Globe," and they focus on the history of SPAM, spanning across history to discuss the focus on canning to preserve food in the first half, and the invention of SPAM and its ubiquity after WWII. There is a short reference to the Philippines, but I had forgotten about the importance of Spam in Guam.
https://www.eatmyglobe.com/spam
I am really having a hankering for spam musubi...
Angela LeeYes, I didn't think about it in that way until the part about China rejecting MSG/Ajinomoto because they saw it as symbolic of Japanese imperialism.
Angela LeeOne of my key takeaways that I could explore in my world history classes are the symbolism that foods can play on the receiving society. The two food commodities that were highlighted this week, MSG and Spam, could both be seen as symbolic of imperialism - from the Chinese perspective and resistance to use of MSG because they saw it as symbolizing Japanese imperialistic ambitions. Indeed, as Japanese colonized, in some areas, they went through the process of assimilation and integrating their traditions into the colonized regions, like Taiwan and Korea. In Taiwan, they had imposed the Japanese language and other cultural traditions and practices, which included foods and food preparation from Japan. I'm wondering if Korea had the same issues with MSG initially as well since the Japanese colonized the peninsula in 1910.
My mother, from Taiwan, was a big user of MSG, and I always remember the container of Ac'cent that was prominent in her collection of seasoning and spices. Since she worked in the Chinese restaurant business, it was used frequently to enhance foods, and we could always tell if there was added MSG in some of the foods. I had read and learned about the backlash against MSG as a ethnic, racial backlash too, and wonder, especially in the 1960s and 70s, if this was because a larger number of immigrants from East Asia came when the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act opened up the quotas from Asian countries.
The other food commodity is Spam, and I really learned more about Spam from the Hawaiian perspective. Even though it's a pretty integrated part of their food culture (I love spam musubi!), some Hawaiians I know had ambivalent feelings toward spam, since it associated with the US military. Does it have the same imperialistic taint for the Koreans too?
I would like to be able to incorporate this as part of my lessons when I teach about imperialism, and include food commodities and dining practices as part of the imperializing process.
Angela LeeFor some reason, this popped into my email last week, but it's a perfect little video to add onto our discussion about MSG. Ted-Ed videos are pretty short (this one is 5:30), so they can be used in class. https://youtu.be/EKgEj5asL3o
