Hey, I'm Bruce Weinstein, and this is the podcast Cooking with Bruce and Mark.

And I'm Mark Scarborough. And we're approaching the holidays here in North America and in parts of Europe, so we're not going to talk about that.

You're not going to tell us what to do?

We're the only food podcast right now that's not all up into Thanksgiving, but we will get back up into Thanksgiving next time around, probably, I guess. Bruce writes these episodes, so I'm not sure, but I hope so. We were on beverages for the holidays a couple weeks ago, but now we're going to be instead on something that's lurking in your food that you may not know about. You don't have to be scared about it. You just have. to know about it. We're going to tell you that in the one minute cooking tip, then we're going to talk about Chinese food and particularly Chinese food in North America. I want to talk to you about kind of the ways it has changed in the last 25 years, what's happened to it. It's extremely interesting story about globalization and about an increasing awareness of the world around us. And finally, as always, we'll end with what's making us happy and food this week. So let's get started.

Our one minute cooking tip. Be careful of hidden caffeine in your food. Yeah, this is a kicker. Kombucha, everyone's drinking kombucha these days, often made from fermented teas, and therefore contains caffeine, so if you're like someone who says, I don't drink kombucha, Coffee or tea after three in the afternoon, but you have a big glass of kombucha, you're probably getting caffeine

and another hidden source of caffeine and this came as a big surprise to me are Protein bars protein bars up all sorts often include a heavy hit of For example, the Cliff chocolate chip cookie dough flavored protein bars that are very popular have 65 milligrams of caffeine in it. That's like getting an espresso shot. It

is. And even their standard chocolate chip protein bar has chocolate and chocolate has caffeine, right? I mean, I don't know. An ounce of dark chocolate's got 12 grams. That's not nothing.

That's not nothing. It's not a lot, but it's not nothing. And you should just be really aware of the caffeine level, particularly if you have cardiac or respiratory issues, you have allergies, any of these things, which speed up production of mucus and other things in the body and speed up heart rate, just know that caffeine lurks around the corner in a lot of things. I'm still always surprised. And now it's. We're going over one minute. I'm always surprised about the number of people who don't know that dark, soft drinks like Coca Cola and Dr. Pepper and those kind of things have caffeine in them. Oh,

and Mountain Dew and even those. I'm

always shocked by people who don't know those have caffeine in them.

And all they have to do is go to the store and look at the shelves where it's, Caffeine free Coke, caffeine free Dr. Pepper. I know, but you They wouldn't be selling that if there wasn't caffeine. But you say

that and somebody still doesn't really know. They're like, what, Dr. Pepper has caffeine? And you're like, well, then why do they sell caffeine free? And, um, just be careful. If you've got, especially, as I say, cardiac or pulmonary sensitivities, just be careful about how much caffeine you have. You don't have to freak out, but just be aware. of what you're eating. Okay, before we get to the next segment about Chinese food in North America on our podcast, uh, let me just say that we really appreciate your being a part of us and we would love it if you could write us a review on any podcast platform or just rate the podcast. We'd like to stay up to date. Unsponsored because we don't want to be at the behest of anyone. So you're doing that helps us stay in the analytics, which keeps the podcast fresh, which means that we can actually continue on without a sponsor. So thanks for doing that. Okay up next What has happened to Chinese food in the last 40 50 years in North America?

If you've listened to more than a few episodes of this podcast You know that I, Bruce, make a lot of Chinese food.

Right.

And I have interviewed quite a few Chinese chefs and Chinese cookbook authors. And I've always had a, not even a love hate, I've had a love, love, love relationship with Chinese food since I was a child.

And let me just, Mao, the writer, is going to add to that. offer a caveat before we launch into this larger discussion. And it's a caveat that you may be a little uncomfortable with. I mean, you may be impatient with my saying this, but I just want to say that saying the term Chinese food is a bit racialist because we should be saying food from China because there isn't such a thing as Chinese food. When You say that you're lumping many different culinary traditions under a label, in fact, a political label of a political landscape, China. And we have many ethnic groups, many different kinds of Chinese food produced, not only in China, but in North America, in Europe. So Chinese food has a little bit of a racist. edge to it. And don't be impatient with me for saying that. I think it's really important to be sensitive to that and say, we're using a kind of shorthand term. I just used it a minute ago in what I was saying. We're using a shorthand term, but it's not necessarily a great short term. It used to be. And this is the big change. Once upon a time when we were little. Chinese food meant something and it meant a kind of conglomeration of American Chinese food.

Now, when I was a kid, one of my favorite activities when my parents said we were going to go down to Chinatown and have dinner. Made me so happy and so excited because yes, there was a decent Chinese food restaurant near us in Queens where I grew up outside of Manhattan Kings on Horace Harding Expressway by Springfield Boulevard and the food all came on those little stainless steel stands with the lids. And on the table was hot mustard and duck sauce and a little fried crispy things. My mother wouldn't let me touch the hot mustard. She always was afraid I was going to get into the hot mustard. Oh my goodness, we ordered the ribs and dipped them in that hot mustard. But every now and then, my parents would say, let's drive into the city and go to Chinatown. And it was always delicious. Now a battle, because my parents loved Cantonese style Chinese food. Shrimp and lobster sauce. They liked shrimp and lobster sauce. My father loved chicken chow mein. Oh, there you go. They liked things, you know, chicken almond ding. They li Oh! Mm hmm. Ooh!

Ooh! That's what it was called. Racist. That's what it was called. Oh, Chicken Almond Ding. That's as bad as The King and I. That is terrible. Okay, do go on. Well,

it's not as bad as some things, but it's pretty bad.

Uh, yeah. Okay, do go on.

I wanted to go to the Sichuan restaurants that were down the street, and I wanted the spicy things, and I wanted the stir fries with beef and chilies, and they were like, Nope. So I got lots and lots and lots of Cantonese food when I was a kid. What was your Chinese food experience like? Well, I think I had

the very typical North American experience. I grew up in Dallas, Texas, and we went down to this place, Yee's, which was down on Lemon Avenue a million years ago, if you know Dallas. And Yee's was the typical egg foo young, um, uh, you know, sweet and sour pork with the pineapple or the maraschino cherries. Yee's. Um, which I listen as a kid, I loved, I thought getting sweet and sour pork in the no sour, all sweet sauce with the maraschino cherries was so sophisticated. It looked sophisticated. Did they serve it in

a pineapple

half? No, they served it in those, uh, those silver pedestal things with the domes and they would put it all down and lift it. the domes all at once. And I should say that in typical fashion, and I think this was a more U. S. Canadian rather than New York fashion, we each ordered a dish and ate our dish. We did not share Chinese food. I know.

When Mark first told me that, that's what they did. I was dumbfounded.

And I should tell you that, uh, of course I was ever the adventurous kid. And the fact first time I ordered Mushu pork, my parents freaked out because they didn't know what it was. And they were like, why are you ordering? And then it came with the pancakes and all this stuff. And I thought I was just, Oh, I was, I mean, I might as well have been Josh like war. I was the height of sophistication, you

know, but it was, it was exotic and it was different and it was sophisticated.

It's that exotic thing that has the racialist air to it. It does. I know. It's

gross. I continued to have this love affair with Chinese food. I lived in Brooklyn in the early eighties before Brooklyn gentrified in a neighborhood that I was terrified to live in. I would run from the garage where I parked my car to my apartment hoping like I didn't get stabbed to death. I mean, it was not a fun place and there was one Chinese takeout place and it was called Sky star, but the s was burned out from the sign, so it was sky, tar and when you could to order fruit from sky tar. It was, you know, it, it was not very, um, what I would call contemporary, authentic. It wasn't trying to do anything, so I decided. I had to do this myself. I had to learn. Didn't you, wait,

so just for people who didn't grow up in this time and in New York, so you had to order through Plexiglas, right? In

this neighborhood, it was so bad that they had a giant Plexiglas turntable, and you spoke through holes in it, and then you would put your Not the

holes in the turntable, the holes in the Plexiglas wall. Yep, so

you could talk to them. And then you'd put your money on the turntable, they would turn it, so now the money's on the inside. Then they would put the bag of food and turn it back to you. Wow. Wow. Because otherwise they were afraid. It was not a safe neighborhood.

And let me say that Yee's, where I went in Dallas, included a doorman who opened the front door for you. So it was a very different experience. What ethnicity was that doorman? I don't

know.

I don't know. But, um, it, it was up for us. Chinese food was an up experience. Well,

it was up because we got to go out. But then I think I was about eight. 18, when I decided I had to learn how to cook Chinese food, I had already started going to chef school. I was back at home and I wanted to learn and there was a guy, famous, famous Chinese chef, Norman Weinstein.

So, so bad, so bad, go on. No

relation to me. And he actually taught classes at the new school in Manhattan, and he did cooking classes. And I went and took a Sichuan class from him, and he taught me how to make cold sliced pork and garlic sauce. And he told me how to That's getting more

fancy.

He told me how to make tangerine beef. Oh. And one day, he brought it home. whole duck and we did a deep fried duck and he made all these dipping sauces and the point of this story is that because of that deep fried duck and him showing us how to eat the web feet and the head and everything else, I became a vegetarian. And that lasted three hours.

Yeah, that's not my experience with Chinese food, but you can see right there that Chinese food is starting to not become Chinese food It's starting to become what it is Which is a collection of dishes from again from various ethnic and regional groups and you can already hear it cold slice work in garlic sauce. It's starting to move away from this, uh, for lack of a better word, panda express kind of Chinese food, where it's an amalgamation of basically sweet, deep fried food. And I think that that's really important to see. In fact, by the time I met Bruce in 96. I have been to China. I traveled around rural China even, and I had seen a lot of Chinese cooking. And um, when we met, I was much more conversant in Chinese food. I think I was more conversant even than Bruce who had taken classes on it, because I was I introduced him to dim sum, and I introduced him to congee, and I showed you what these things were. If you don't know about congee, it's a rice porridge. You overcook the rice until it's very, very soft and almost mushy, and add lots of broth or water to it. So it's like a rice porridge, and then you add savory things to it, like pepper. Peanuts and scallions, this kind of thing is often served for breakfast. I love congee with an egg in it. I

love it. It could be served with protein too. Fish can be put into it. Shrimp can be put into it. And there was a restaurant Mark and I found on Mott Street in New York and they had the most delicious congee and they had All the roast meats hanging in the window and we would go down there. Oh, probably every weekend, just eat congee and

chopped up roast pork. But I will say that what I now know about Chinese food, because again, this has been a long educational process away from sweet and sour pork. And what I know about it now is that even back then, when I moved in with you in the mid nineties in New York City, Chinatown still catered a great deal to the white patronage and the Chinese food that would be served in Chinatown. Now, I'm sure that Chinese people got a separate menu and all that kind of stuff, but that was served to us on our menu was very much almost the standard stuff, but maybe elevated just a tad. I mean, the first time I took Bruce to dim sum, I'm going to tell a story that we sat down at this big table at this huge dim sum parlor in New York city, which I lied found and I was like, Oh, we have to try it. And he's like, what is dim sum? The New Yorker? What is dim sum? I'm like. Trust me. You want to do this. So we went and we had the whole thing with the rolling carts and all, but we sat at the table and there were, you know, 12 seats at a round table and there's just the two of us and there's like other families at this big table because you're just catching food off the carts as they go by. And Bruce reached across the table and grabbed one of their teapots and poured tea in his.

Oh, God, that's their tea, but I know that Chinese food is often a communal activity. This

is where your upbringing led you astray. It is not everything on the table is yours. That was their tea in

there. I wasn't going to reach for their food, but I thought the tea was fair game. Oh my gosh. Um, okay. But the thing was, They got different tea than we did. Yes, they did. They had beautiful black Oolong tea and they gave, they gave the two white boys here jasmine tea. They did. And you

had that, this is one of the first times we kind of started to understand that there was something different for Chinese people in a lot of North American Chinese restaurants. And we kind of started to notice this. Now we're talking toward the late nineties. And then all of a sudden this revelation happened and it happened in a restaurant that was weirdly just right across the street from where we live, where

were we lucky?

I know it's really weird. And so this restaurant advertised itself as a restaurant that. only had one menu and that was its gimmick and it was a good gimmick. In other words, only one menu for Chinese people and non Chinese people. Cause

it was finally like this hidden secret. Cause in New York, as Mark said, it, people who, you know, looked like they were from China or were culturally Chinese were handed a different menu, right? Or

often ordered without,

or ordered without a menu. So there were two sets of cooking going on in the kitchen. And there was the Chinese food for the white audience. And then there was a Chinese food for the Asian audience. Again, you can't even

now call that Chinese food. There was a regional set of dishes for ethnic Chinese.

And this restaurant decided it was Grand Sichuan International. It was. And they decided there will be one menu. And it was very funny. When they came out with this one menu, Oh, they got a lot of press. The New York Times wrote about them. The New York Magazine. Everybody was writing about this revolution.

And the dishes were so odd. to most New Yorkers, even that they came and sat down on your table, a giant three ring binder that explained every dish. There was a photograph

and a couple of sentences is not a couple of paragraphs of what the dish was

and how it was made, you know, because literally don't gross out and turn our podcast off. But literally they were serving like sliced sea cucumber. They were selling all kinds of entrails and. Inards and organs and intestines and tendons

even more shocking than that was they had a section on the menu for chicken dishes and live chicken dishes when you ordered a dish they would they had chickens in the basement and they would cook kill a chicken to make that dish for you.

And it was, it said something like, like a lot, like it was like a 45 minute process for a live kill dish. Um, and all of this says that Chinese food was becoming not Chinese food. It was becoming what I keep saying, a beautiful and varied amalgam of regional and personal cooking taste. The cross, uh, broad spectrum. And that is the biggest change. And while, you know, listen, you may have been impatient with me with my little diatribe about not calling it Chinese food, but it's important because this is what's happened. And now we've reached this place where where you can, in fact, discover various personal regional dishes. And I don't, I want always to avoid the authenticity trap because I think there are as many Szechuan grandmothers who make red cooking pork as many different ways as there are grandmothers making red cooking pork. But now you can find. out about these kind of really intense breezes and stir fries. So for example, Bruce made his sister and brother in law were here and Bruce made some incredible dishes for them one night while they were

here. And let's say they live in the Bay area, so they can get really good Chinese food in a restaurant, but. She, my sister just wanted me to make it because

Let me say that, wait, before you, before you get to your dishes, sorry, let me interrupt and say that she reminds me again about the diversification and regionalization and personalization of Chinese food. When Bruce and I visit his sister and brother in law in the Bay Area, we often go to this halal Chinese restaurant and it is food from a particular region of China that is Islamic. And so, for example, there's not going to be any pork in this restaurant at all because it's halal Chinese food and it's not terribly spicy. It's very sour. There's a lot of sour, fermented

pickled things. Yep.

Yep. And a lot of soured pickled things in the dish. We make a trek all the way down to San Jose to eat this halal Chinese food. It's delicious.

So I made two dishes for Julie when she and her husband were here. And the first one, I don't know the Chinese name of, I'm not even going to pretend that I know what it is. I know that this dish is an, old fashioned comfort food dish. I've seen online videos of older Chinese people talking about having this when they were kids, when they were sick, their mothers would make it for them as comfort food. You take very fatty ground pork at your base and you mix into that actually some water and some rice wine and some stock. You want it to actually be a wet mixture. You season it with oyster sauce and water. with a white pepper and then the key ingredient is depending upon where your grandmother was from, she would have either put in preserved chopped cabbage or preserved mustard greens. I decided to use both. Why not? And I put both in. Then you flatten that into a pie plate. You put that into a bamboo steamer and you steam it.

So good. And

you end up with this sort of floating burger patty of meat floating. Isn't it really?

Salty sauce,

salty, fatty, delicious sauce. And you pour that sauce over the rice. And

you like chunk it up almost like pie wedges or just with a spoon. And then you want all the sauce on your rice.

So comforting. And then the other thing I made is, uh, sometimes called fish and sour mustard soup. And it's really,

favorite thing.

A simple dish. Actually, if you think about it, um, I just stir fried some ginger and scallions and garlic and some fermented red chilies, which yes, of course I fermented myself. And then you put in a fish broth and you put in some sliced thin white fish. I used sea perch.

Thank you, Costco. Costco has amazing sea perch.

And the key ingredient is is the soured pickled mustard greens. And you buy those in pouches, you drain off the brine, you chop it up, you let that all come to a little simmer, and then you put fresh green Sichuan peppercorns, which you can find in a freezer section of an Asian market. And it's just so good. And

Sichuan, green Sichuan,

Chili oil. Well, yeah, I added that on top too, because we like sizzling oil over the top of the whole. I poured it over the hop just to bring out all those flavors. It was so it's

it's an amazing dish. And again, this is what has happened is that we have all become now because of globalization, whatever you think about that politically, but because of globalization and because of the access to ingredients on a global scale, we've become globalized. All much more conversant in these things. So let me say, when we round out this discussion about where Chinese food has come from, let me encourage you to find local small Chinese businesses and frequent them. And you can do this with really easy Google searches, Yelp searches, TripAdvisor searches in your area. And the reason I say this is twofold. One, To get away from Panda Express, of course, and broaden your understanding of Chinese food, which is really a fun thing to do. And two, a lot of these places that you'll frequent are small entrepreneurs, and we all want to support small entrepreneurs and small businesses, and we all want to help them. them survive. So you're not only helping, uh, broaden your own palette, you're kind of helping the U. S. economy by supporting a small entrepreneur. And it will make a difference in what you consider, quote, unquote, Chinese food to this new and exciting and vast world of regional, cultural, and geographic dishes in China. Before we get to the last part of this podcast, let me say that Bruce and I have a TikTok channel and, uh, you should check it out. It's cooking with Bruce and Mark on TikTok. You can find cooking with Bruce and Mark on Instagram and you can find us of course in our Facebook group as Bruce always tells you, but the TikTok channel is got. All the videos lately that are going up and, uh, that's kind of fun. We're, we've been on a chocolate cookie jag for a while now. Um, Bruce, I've been making Bruce dairy free chocolate chip cookies and he's been making me full butter, chocolate cookies of all different kinds. I even overcame my fear of a pastry bag recently.

And you made the most delicious almond horns for me.

I did. They were good. So, um, you might want to check that out on Tik TOK. And, uh, see what we're up to, because it's a great thing to subscribe to just to get constant videos about food, which is, you know, we love, all right, as is traditional, the last segment of this podcast, what's making us happy in food this week?

Korean rice cake carbonara.

Oh gosh. Okay. Well, this is something you can find on TikTok, but okay, go on, you can find on our TikTok channel. So

the Korean rice cakes that are tubular, you know, the tubular rice cakes, not the flat ones, the Becky, and I know that's not. correct accent of pronunciation, but so I basically used that instead of pasta to make a carbonara with egg yolks and parmesan cheese and bacon and man, it was filling and it was filling. But as we ate it, I kept saying something is wrong. It's like there was this cross cultural problem happening. The flavor was totally carbonara and Italian and the texture was totally Korean rice cake. So

the difference in us.

And I didn't know what to do with it as I ate it, except enjoy it.

It's, it's, you're the chef and you're much more into like, well, but this goes with this and this goes with this. And I'm just the wild guy. And I make crazy recipes and I make stuff up and I don't care about categories. And I just mush it all together and put gochujang on frosted flakes. And I'm happy. And so I'm, this is just crazy experiment. food because I don't haven't been trained and I don't have any notion of what the rules are. And so because I don't have any training, I'm just the writer of our books. To me, it was fabulous. It was deeply chewy rice bits and, um, rice logs, rice cylinders. Then, you know, with the just traditional carbonara with parmesan and, uh, eggs and bacon. No,

but that texture. I expected chilies and he did use

bacon and not one Charlie. And I think that actually the bacon worked better because it's a stronger flavor. It's more, you know, he just used, uh, U. S. As they call it, streaky bacon, thin bacon strips that we all know in the U. S. And actually gave it a better Huge smoke hit and a huge salt here, which actually made it a little better against all those rice cakes So it it was really good. I loved it What's making me happy in food this week? Is that we got to go to a friend's house this last weekend and eat ossobucco And if you know me, you know how much I love ossobucco and he did a big bang up job on this awesome book. Oh, and he made it with a citrus. So it had orange zest in the awesome book. Oh, and parsley and garlic. It was tomato. Yeah, it was tomato based, but the oranges were just what was the thing. And then he made a gremolata, the dry herb garlic topping with orange. And he put, he didn't let me get there yet. He put it with orange zest in it. And it's, it was just so. Unbelievable, comforting. We sat at that table for hours, uh, hours, and I think, uh, there were six of us, and I think five bottles of wine got drunk in the end by the time the evening was over, but it was almost worth what happened to me the next day. I'm too old to drink like that anymore, but, uh, it was almost worth it, but the food was absolutely spectacular. It was. I was actually very happy that somebody cooked for me and cooked so carefully for me, and, um, it was fantastic. So, uh, cook for your friends. You can make this. them happy. Okay, that's the episode of Cooking with Bruce and Mark this week. We appreciate your time with us and listening to us bang on about Chinese food, whatever that means in North America, and how we've seen it change over the years. And actually, it's an exciting change, and I look forward to other exciting changes. I look forward to finding out the intricacies of Indonesian fare in the months ahead as Bruce starts to explore Indonesian cuisine. Until I look forward to that so much because it's just fun to explore food in various ways.

And every week we tell you what's making us happy in food here on Cooking with Bruce and Mark. So go to our Facebook group, also called Cooking with Bruce and Mark, and every week I post a question. What's making you happy in food this week? Please answer it because we want to know what is making you happy in food this week here on Cooking with Bruce

and