This was actually the classic Chinese seasoning mix of garlic or onions seasoned with soy sauce and sesame oil-a flavor mix most Americans enjoy today. They had decided that Chinese food tasted of “the repose of putrefied garlic upon a much-used blanket” and smelled of rancid oil. For them, a Chinese meal was something to write home about, but not something to repeat. To the Americans, the whole experience was impossibly alien: eating with chopsticks, the foreign dinner etiquette, the food cut up into small pieces, the mysterious ingredients, the multitude of courses, etc., etc. However, what they were served was high-class Cantonese banquet fare, in feasts comprising dozens of dishes, including such delicacies as birds’ nests, sharks’ fins, and sea cucumbers. They had heard that the Chinese liked to dine on dogs, cats, and rats, among other exotica. In Guangzhou, the Americans tried their first bites of Chinese food at the homes of local businessmen. the Europeans, whom they confined to Macau and Guangzhou. The Chinese had never heard of the United States, had only the vaguest idea of where it was located, and lumped Americans with the other “barbarians,” i.e. Relations between the two countries were at first tentative. The first Americans arrived in China in 1784 aboard the ship Empress of China, hoping to trade American ginseng for Chinese tea, porcelain, and other goods. When did Americans first encounter Chinese food? He also tells us what chop suey is, exactly, and where to find the best Chinese food in New York City. So how did it happen? Recently, Coe answered a few questions about Chinese cuisine’s remarkable American journey. "Boston was a hub of the sugar trade, which brought sugar up from the Caribbean to be processed into molasses in Boston, which was then sent to Europe, where it was distilled into rum," White says.Of course, it took a while-two centuries-for Chinese food to achieve ubiquity. The sauce gets its rich color and flavor from molasses - which was made in Boston. Oh, and one more thing: That dark, gloppy lobster sauce you'll only find at Boston's Chinese restaurants has a fascinating backstory as well. (Though White notes some would "go slumming" in Chinatown, unable to resist the lure of lo mein.) cities, Chinese immigrants and their food were both looked down upon. Meanwhile, respectable, middle and upper-class Bostonians generally stayed away from Chinese food. "These were nice, cheap portable meals for the working class," White says. The chow mein sandwich is a classic Bostonian treat.Ĭhow mein sandwiches and chop suey sandwiches followed, naturally. And so, unlike their counterparts in cities with big Chinese populations, Chinese restaurants in Boston couldn't stay in business by catering to Chinese patrons alone. More Chinese immigrants joined in subsequent years - but Boston's Chinese community never got as big as the Chinese communities in San Francisco or New York. About 200 Chinese laborers came in from the San Francisco area to work in Boston's leather industry. "The first Chinese arrivals in Boston were strikebreakers in the 1870s," White says. It turns out, Italians' influence on the Chinese food in Boston dates back much further than the 1950s. And we wanted to know more, so we called up White and asked her to explain a bit more: What's the deal with Boston Chinese food? We non-Bostonians here at The Salt found their discussion thoroughly intriguing. You can listen to the full conversation on WBUR's Radio Boston here. "If you're in the Boston area, you'll see the words Peking ravioli on menus." Joyce Chen opened her first Chinese restaurant in Cambridge, Mass., in 1958.Įd Maker/The Denver Post via Getty Imagesīack in 1958, when Joyce Chen - the celebrity chef and star of Joyce Chen Cooks on PBS - opened her first restaurant in Cambridge, Mass., she decided to call her dumplings "Peking ravioli" to appeal to her large Italian clientele, her son Stephen Chen tells WBUR's Meghna Chakrabarti.
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