For most Westerners, the term “Chinese food” does not denote the understated elegance of Huaiyang cuisine, the robust heat and heady fragrances of Hunan and Sichuan, or even the riot of color, texture and flavor that constitutes classical Cantonese gastronomy.
The average small-town Englishman, like myself, has had little or no experience of the range and diversity of authentic Chinese cuisine without taking a trip to China. Speak to us of baozi, mapo tofu or lotus seed cakes and we’d stare back in bafflement. Mention egg rolls, fortune cookies or prawn crackers, however, and we’re all ears. Peking duck? That’s the one that’s deep-fried, right?
The bastardization of Chinese cooking to suit what successive waves of immigrant chefs termed the “Western” (i.e. “barbarian”) palate is a common bugbear of Chinese food snobs. This particular breed of gastronome – overwhelmingly white males, in my experience – wouldn’t be seen bound to a gurney in a Chinese all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant, and visibly shudders when the term “fusion” is thrown around to justify serving French fries with kung pao chicken.
Not me. I have no shame about filling my face with sticky honey ribs, crispy shredded beef or any number of utterly inauthentic and coronary-inducing delights. Even today, when real, unadulterated Chinese cuisine can be found in cosmopolitan areas, driven partly by the sheer numbers of homesick Chinese immigrants but also by more educated and well-traveled urban palates, the MSG-happy, excessively-lit Westerner-beloved greasy spoons of my youth have endured. Even tiny villages in rural corners of the UK typically have two takeout joints – one Indian, one Chinese. Add a pub, and that’s all most people need.
In my hometown of York, the Chop Suey House, for example, opened in the 1970s and has essentially preserved its menu virtually unchanged ever since. They have resisted expansion at every turn – they don’t even deliver food – and front-of-house is a single white counter, a nondescript Chinese New Year wall calendar, strip lights, some faded seating and a slot machine. I make a point of returning at least once a year to order their sweet-and-sour chicken (where the deep-fried, battered chunks of juicy chicken breast are kept separate from the gooey, tart pink sauce) and barbecue spare ribs (enormous, slightly charred and delicately spiced). Sure, I can get a decent Chongqing-style hotpot in a medieval Grade-I listed building just down the road – but I can get a better one at half the price in Beijing. What the Chop Suey House serves up – from their chicken in cashew nuts to a “satay” that, oddly, contains neither the peanuts, the grilled meat nor any of the spicing of its Malaysian namesake – is simply unavailable anywhere else. Like Marmite, Cadbury eggs and sharp Cheddar, it’s what I grew up with.
I’ve spent a decade in China and yet this impostor cuisine, which owes more to the British penchant for deep-frying and an overuse of sugar than to China’s cultural heritage, has a powerful hold on my psyche. It’s also virtually unavailable in China proper, though a restaurant serving up “American Chinese food” opened up in Shanghai recently, largely to cater to returning overseas students who had developed a taste for lo mein and chop suey during their time Stateside.
Just like those adventurers who opened the very first Chinese restaurants in mining and railroad towns in America to retain that most primeval of connections to their lost homeland, I’m happy to eat local, but what I truly crave on a cold, miserable Beijing night is a little MSG-laced taste of home.