But over the past decade, as large communities of people from India, Peru, Korea, Trinidad and Guyana have formed in New York and elsewhere, ideas of what Chinese food can be have expanded.
“I call them second-generation Chinese restaurants,” said Cheuk Kwan, who has directed a documentary film about the spread of Chinese restaurants around the world.
Dishes like chili-spiked, deep-fried chicken lollipops, which are a Chinese-Indian specialty, and lo mein topped with chunks of peppery jerk chicken are what Chinese food is now to many.
New York City’s first hyphenated version of the cuisine - after Chinese-American, of course - was Chinese-Cuban, which arrived in the 1960’s, when thousands of Cubans of Chinese descent came to New York after Fidel Castro’s rise to power.
Seafood soups, fried rice with pork, scallions and tiny shrimp, and chicharrones de pollo - chicken cut into small pieces and deep-fried in the Cantonese style - were and are standbys.
Over the years, as more Americans have visited China and more Chinese have immigrated to the United States, more authentic versions of Chinese food have come to town on a gust of hot chilies, Sichuan peppercorns and bean paste. Restaurants serving the cuisines of Taiwan, Shanghai and Fujian have opened in the city’s burgeoning Chinatowns - Flushing in Queens and Sunset Park and Homecrest in Brooklyn.
When New York’s young Korean-Americans go out for Chinese food, they often eat ja jiang mien, boiled noodles in a rich meat sauce, mixed with Korean brown bean paste and studded with Chinese fermented black beans.
In Elmhurst, Queens, La Union, a Peruvian chifa (slang for Chinese restaurant), serves platters of chancho, a Hispanic rendering of char siu, Chinese for roast pork.
The roots of these hybrid Chinese cuisines around the world are the same as those of Chinese food in America. Millions of Chinese men, most of them from the province Guangdong (formerly known in English as Canton), left China in the late 19th and early 20th century. Only men were allowed to leave the country, often by becoming indentured workers to companies in need of cheap labor in the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and South America.
Professional cooks were usually not among the emigrants, so the earliest Chinese restaurants outside China were started by men with little knowledge of cooking and a desperate need to improvise with local ingredients. The dishes they came up with, like chop suey, have long since been dismissed as “not Chinese” by scholars of the culture.
But Chinese food has never been quite what outsiders think it is.
“The term Chinese food represents an area four times larger than Western Europe and the eating habits of more than a billion people,” Mr. Kwan said. “You could say that there is really no such thing as Chinese food.”
Eugene Anderson, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Riverside, and author of “The Food of China,” disagreed. “Chinese food is defined by a flavor principle of soy sauce, ginger, garlic and green onions” and methods including stir-frying and steaming, he said. “Once you get too far away from those rules, it is no longer Chinese.”
One of the things that always strikes me in China is how remarkably well so many people eat. It’s ironic that so many westerners think of Chinese food as being unhealthy - all those negative images of deep-fried food in gloopy sauces laden with MSG. Restaurant food is often richer, with more meat and fish, more oil and fewer vegetables, but home cooking tends to be centred on grains and vegetables, with small amounts of meat here and there.
As anyone who has been to a Chinese restaurant knows, chopsticks are the traditional implements for eating Chinese dishes. But far from being difficult and inefficient, they’re actually very versatile. They require a moderate amount of technique and practice, but in short order anyone can learn to use them well.
climate, the two regions also share many ingredients – rice is a major staple in both diets, and chili peppers are an important part of most dishes. The two styles of regional cuisine are similar enough that many restaurants and cookbooks lump them together under ‘Western Chinese cooking’ or simple refer to both as Szechwan cuisine.
Hunan cuisine is noted for its use of chili peppers, garlic and shallots, and for the use of sauces to accent the flavors in the ingredients of a dish. It is not uncommon for a Hunan dish to play on the contrasts of flavors – hot and sour, sweet and sour, sweet and hot – pungent, spicy and deliciously sweet all at once. Hunan chefs are noted for their ability to create a symphony of taste with their ingredients. A classic example is Hunan spicy beef with vegetables, where the beef is first marinated overnight in a citrus and ginger mixture, then washed and rubbed with chili paste before being simmered in a pungent brown sauce. The end result is a meat that is meltingly tender on the tongue and changes flavor even as you enjoy it.
