Who are you Calling Authentic

A couple of weeks ago, I had a primal desire for hot food and cold beer: this time my obsession was egg rolls. Having easy access to 1000s of cookbooks at work, 100s on Asian foods, my plan was to check a few recipes, synthesize the results before I went home to deep-fry away. Surprisingly, there was a scarcity of egg roll, spring roll and lumpia recipes. Or maybe it was understandable, street food is not always well documented – when is the last time you looked up how to make a burrito? Then a big, serious book dedicated to the history of Chinese cuisine told me that egg rolls are an Americanized bastard food or a bastardized American food – I forget which one but the portent was that this food was somehow impure and not worthy of attention.

Why try to make that a bad thing? Food is adaptive, which is a polite way of saying bastardized. Chinese-American Food – Fried Rice, Egg Foo Young, General Tso aren’t the type of things you are going to find in non-tourist Canton/Guangdong or Sichuan restaurants nor is Iron Chef China going to serve egg rolls in kitchen stadium and I don’t remember any of those items in Eat, Drink, Man, Woman but I have to take exception to the concept of authentic.

French Fries aren’t French either but that doesn’t make them less good. Right now, in China the 1000s of years old tradition of fan-tsai (rice/grain and vegetable) is rapidly changing with the influx of wealth. Traditionally, the Chinese diet was based on 60-80 carbohydrate, mostly rice but wheat and wheat noodles are common in the north. This is changing and evolving - more money means more meat, more alcohol and surprisingly more ice cream – it is a very western thing for young people to eat. There is also a good niche market for supplements to help digest dairy’s lactose, which most Asian adults are intolerant to.

Does that mean food served in Beijing, by classically trained Chinese chefs is inauthentic because it is different than it was just 20 years ago? Just as cuisine is evolving in China, the food Chinese immigrants consumed in the US would have reflected what was available to cooks. The thing to remember, these wouldn't have been people who ate out all the time or own cookbooks - most US immigrant populations aren't who you would consider society’s winners. Generally weren’t the people who decided leave; go to a country where they had no language skills to work back breaking jobs with few to no rights did so because staying was worse. The food of the largely, illiterate, malnourished masses who came from a background where cooking fuel was scarce, kitchen space non-existent and calories even rarer would have been eating differently than the Emperor and his court were. So what is authentic? The food most people ate everyday or the historical records we have access to?

Chinese immigration cannot be glossed over by the shiny happy Ellis Island give us your poor, your huddled masses narrative. Laws, US laws, on the books until the 1940s, restricted landownership, paths to citizenship and restricted the number of Chinese women allowed to enter the States, so this particular population was largely male – And what would men, who labor under adverse physical conditions want when they are hungry – I don’t know, maybe something, affordable, dense, portable and calorie rich like an egg roll – or you know maybe they turned their noses up at it because it wasn’t authentic.

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