Chinese Food: Best Food?

Today on SYSK, the fellas get down to business with plenty of mouth-watering information on what Chuck dubs "the best food."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck and it's just us. But that's okay because we
can keep all the Chinese food to ourselves. I'll have
to share with Jerry. And this is stuff you should know.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
That's right. A lot of caveats on this, can I
list off a few?

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Sure? All right?

Speaker 1 (00:30):
First of all, this is going to be a very
broad overview of a cuisine that we could probably do
like a ten part at least episode series on.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
I would say eleven, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (00:41):
Maybe eleven. So just you know, have your expectations set
going into this one. When you talk about Chinese food,
there's a lot there. We are going to do our
best to pronounce things correctly. I looked up a lot
of stuff and I'm doing my best. But some of
this stuff is hard for my dumb American mouth, and
a lot of this is going to be I mean,

(01:02):
it's mainly about sort of you know, Chinese food, although
we're going to talk about origins and stuff like that,
origin stories. It's mainly like what Chinese food has become
here in the States. Although we'll talk a little bit
about other countries later, but it's through our lens.

Speaker 2 (01:17):
Yeah, there you go. That was great Vat City right.

Speaker 1 (01:21):
There, Caaveat City, David Bowie, great song.

Speaker 2 (01:24):
So you said something that we were going to largely
focus on American Chinese cuisine, and Laura helped us with this,
and she makes a really good point that Chinese food
is not just one thing. Yeah. And the reason why
it's not just one thing, or one of the reasons
why is because it's been exported all over the globe.
Anywhere that Chinese people traveled, usually for work to immigrate,

(01:47):
they brought their food with them and introduced it to
wherever they were, and then over time, the local flavors
and tastes and ingredients from that place melded with the
Chinese food, and a new type of chines Use food
was born. And America is no exception to that. So
we have American Chinese food. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:05):
And do you know what I love about that? This
whole story is like everywhere Chinese people went, they were like,
get a load of this, yeah, and everyone was like,
oh my god, that's amazing. Yeah, and it took yeah
big time. I mean, I I have no examples of
places where Chinese immigrants had brought their food and people
are like, nah, no, thanks right.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
The only one I could find was Belize.

Speaker 1 (02:28):
Oh, I know you're kidding. I'm not going to fall
for it. And the reason why is because, I mean,
I can live on many, many, many cuisines from Asia.
I love Japanese food, I love Thai, I love Vietnamese,
I loved Filipino, like Korean food. I love it all.
But at the end of the day, good old fashioned

(02:50):
like Chinese takeout is just one of my favorite all
time things since I was a kid.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
Very nice. Yeah, that's what I grew up on too.
It wasn't until I was an adult that I was like,
there's other kinds of Asian food out.

Speaker 1 (03:03):
Yeah, because that's kind of what you and if you
grew up in the seventies and eighties, that was sort
of the first, you know, probably one of the first,
you know, cuisines from another country you ever ate.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
Yeah, for sure, you know.

Speaker 1 (03:14):
Maybe Mexican food wasn't that big back then. That's only
become more popular, I think in the eighties and nineties.

Speaker 2 (03:20):
Even even still as a kid, the Mexican food I
was exposed to is chi cheese for God's Sake.

Speaker 1 (03:28):
Or Del Taco.

Speaker 2 (03:29):
We didn't even have that. That was really But I
think maybe even before Chinese food, I was exposed to
Japanese hibachi because there was this nice restaurant in Toledo
called in Japanese. Yeah, and we would go to that,
and I think I might have had that before Chinese food.
But regardless, I love Chinese food too. I would say

(03:50):
my top two are Japanese followed by Indian, but Chinese
is definitely up there in top five or so.

Speaker 1 (03:55):
Yeah. I mean, I'm a simple guy, like pork, fried
rice and an egg roll. And I'm just now realizing
we're not even going to talk about egg rolls in
this and I'm panicking all of a sudden.

Speaker 2 (04:03):
Yeah, that didn't strike me until you just said that too,
And although my voice doesn't betray that, I'm definitely scared
right now as well.

Speaker 1 (04:11):
All Right, you know, hey, let's do let's do a
shorty on eggrolls. Maybe we'll pair it.

Speaker 2 (04:16):
With this good idea. All right, So we said that
Chinese food is not just one thing because it's been
exported globally, but even in China, Chinese food is not
just one thing. And they divide Chinese cuisine into eight
different regions. Why did you tell them what the regions are, Chuck.

Speaker 1 (04:34):
I'm just realizing I didn't look up a couple of these,
so maybe you did. But the regions as agreed upon
right now are and they have different names for each one.
So the first grouping is Sichuan, sa Chuan or I
didn't look up c h U a n.

Speaker 2 (04:52):
I mean, you're braver than me. I was just gonna
say the first ones that are they're mostly known by
in the US.

Speaker 1 (04:57):
Oh, we can do that, then that's much easier. So
let's go with Sechuan, Cantonese, Hunan, which is also Jong.
Let me see here, we have Shangdong, we have jung Su,
we have oh, I did look that one up Jong.

Speaker 2 (05:16):
Very nice. Fujian I've always heard as Fujian, but that
sounds kind of like an American version.

Speaker 1 (05:23):
Well I heard it pronounces if it had a y,
And they're almost like few okay, uh few Fujian okay.
And then what's the last one there on? Wi?

Speaker 2 (05:35):
Yes, And some people added at least a ninth one
with sean Ji, and they're all a little different there.
They bear a lot of similarities. A lot of them
love sweet and sour, A lot of them are heavy
on the salt or umami, some like sauces. But one
of the big differences, or some of the big differences
is like where this area is located. Some of them

(05:56):
are coastal, so they incorporate a lot of seafood. Some
of them are colder, so there's like a lot of
soups and heavy noodles and like really really heavy flavors.
And then others are like, hey, we love panting around
the wilderness and catching deer, so they incorporate like local
wildlife into it. And usually what I've seen is when

(06:18):
when there's a lot of wildlife involved or game involved
in the recipes, they tend to let that flavor stand
on its own. It's not like heavy with sauces. That
kind of cuisine isn't.

Speaker 1 (06:30):
Yeah, And they how they achieve spices kind of different
depending where you are too. Sometimes it's those numbing Chinese peppercorns.
You can't do those, No. Yeah, I've learned to eat
a lot of spicy food over the last like five
or six years and increase my spice level, but there's
something about the numbing peppercorn that's I have a hard

(06:50):
time with it.

Speaker 2 (06:51):
Yeah, I think that's natural.

Speaker 1 (06:53):
It's tough, but I can. You know, it depends on
the cuisine other sort, like the chilies that they use,
I can. I can handle that pretty well. Well. It's hot,
but I like it. And sometimes it's just the chili flakes.

Speaker 2 (07:04):
Yeah, the little red chilis they'll sometimes serve hole with
the disc Yes, I can handle those two for sure. Cornible, Yeah,
it's tough. Yeah. And what I mean by handling those
little red chili peppers is that I eat around them.

Speaker 1 (07:20):
Same here.

Speaker 2 (07:22):
So the cuisine that most people in the United States
are familiar with is Cantonese. That's definitely like the first
kind of Chinese food that Americans adopted, and that has
a lot to do with the first wave of migrants
that came over to the United States. A lot of
them were from Canton. And as a matter of fact,

(07:43):
the first Chinese restaurant to open in all of North America,
I'm including Canada and Mexico here was called Canton and
it was in San Francisco.

Speaker 1 (07:54):
That's right. I mean, if you've ever had dim sum,
that's Cantonese. If you've never had dim sum. I highly
recommend it. It's I hate to say like because it
used to annoy me when a certain person I knew
used to say like tortillas or like American bread, and
I was like, no, they're just tortillas. Who said that,
I'm not gonna tell you. I'll tell you offline. But

(08:17):
I was going to say, like, if you've ever had tapas,
dim sum is kind of like the Chinese version of tapas,
but it really is just dim sum. But it's like
shared small plates, a lot of steam stuff, but also
fried stuff, baked stuff, a lot of dumplings, right, a
lot of dumplings. You know. Just go to New York,
go to hopkey, get some dim sum and thank me later.

Speaker 2 (08:38):
Okay, it's amazing, I will thank you later. I've never
really had dim sum actually, and I think about it.

Speaker 1 (08:44):
Oh boy. I mean, I like all kinds of food
in Chinatown and New York, but dim sum is definitely
one of them. But I'll also go to just the
you know, because if you're staying in a hotel, you
can't get these huge orders and just like take tons
and tons of food with you, right, So my move
now is generally just to pop down there. By myself
and get a couple of gigantic egg rolls.

Speaker 2 (09:06):
You and the egg rolls. Huh wait, wait, we can't
talk about that. We have to save it for short stuff.
We forget I even said.

Speaker 1 (09:11):
That, but you did mention. San Francisco in eighteen forty
nine was the first operating restaurant in North America, and
by eighteen fifty one, when the population of San Francisco
was but thirty four thousand and change, there were seven
full time Chinese restaurants open, which you know, for that
few people is pretty good for that time period.

Speaker 2 (09:31):
Yeah, it's not bad.

Speaker 1 (09:32):
Like people liked it clearly.

Speaker 2 (09:33):
Yeah. And there's a book that is going to come
up or we're going to draw from a lot in
this episode is called from Canton Restaurant to Panda Express
A History of Chinese Food in the United States by
Hi Ming Lao and Leo makes this this point that
a lot of like we tend to equate Chinese migrants

(09:56):
in the nineteenth century, especially to California, with like railroad workers,
maybe miners. We have like a certain idea of what
the Chinese migrants were at the time, and that is
a I mean, it's pretty stereotypical. It's also pretty narrow.
There were a lot of Chinese migrants who made their
way over just to feed the people in the Gold

(10:17):
Rush of eighteen forty nine in California. They were like,
people are going to need food, and we're going to
knock their socks off with Chinese food. And so they
started to go and open Chinese restaurants. And apparently you
could pick out a Chinese restaurant pretty easily because they
hung yellow flags outside.

Speaker 1 (10:33):
Yeah, and this is also sort of the kind of
right away when racist feelings toward Chinese immigrants started, racist
feelings toward their food even started arising out of the gate.
In Lao's book, there were some a couple of examples
that she cited. One was a criminal lawyer defending a
white client following their race riot in eighteen sixty five

(10:56):
and told the judge why, sir, and I'm not going
to say the racist Chinese name, but they live on rice,
and sir, they eat it with sticks. And then there
was a pamphlet from American Federation of Labor President Samuel
Gompers in nineteen oh two titled Some Reasons for Chinese
Exclusion colon Meat versus Rice, American manhood versus Asiatic coolism,

(11:19):
and apparently COOLi is a pejorita term for a low
age worker. Right, So it's all happening early on.

Speaker 2 (11:26):
Yeah for sure. And it's interesting because and we'll talk
about immigration and racism, but those two things definitely shaped
Chinese food in America in some surprising ways as a
matter of fact, Yeah, for sure. So it turns out
that the oldest continuously operating Chinese restaurant in the United
States is Pekin without a g noodle parlor and where

(11:47):
else but Montana, right, And it started out as a
general store back in nineteen oh nine, but within two
years they added a noodle parlor, the very same noodle
parlor that's still opened today. And I guess at some
point they ran an illegal gambling parlor out of the basement,
but that has since been turned into an old navy.

Speaker 1 (12:09):
Is that true, because that I could believe. Actually, if
you you know, I looked at that place to see
what it looked like, and it looks like a you know,
a Chinese restaurant and a building of an old West
Town man exactly what you might think. And there's a
big neon sign this is chop suey, And I realized

(12:30):
that chop suey is not a dish I've ever had,
But chop suey is sort of the beginning of Chinese
food in America. That's the dish that first sort of
captured young America's attention. And there's some debates on whether
or not it's even American in origin. And we're going
to talk about chop suey right now.

Speaker 2 (12:51):
Yeah. I don't know if I've ever had it either,
but I think anytime you've ever made like a vague
Chinese surfry with chicken and vegeta and maybe like some
sort of thickish sauce, you basically made chop suey. Some
people say that you can make it with egg, but
those people are wrong. For the most part, is the
mixture of meat, vegetables of thick sauce, usually with rice.

(13:14):
And the name itself not only where it originated, but
the name itself is debatable what it means. I remember,
I think I might have learned this from Uncle John's
bathroom reader, that it meant leftovers in Chinese, so that
people from China coming to America would see chop suey house,
and they would think it would say like Leftover's house

(13:35):
to them. That's not exactly true, but it's not that
far off.

Speaker 1 (13:39):
No, that's pretty close actually. Because some people say the
name came from Cantonese t sap top suey sui instead
of suey. That seems to be an American ice spelling
which is mixed bits or odds and ends aka probably leftovers.

Speaker 2 (13:56):
Yeah. Leau, the author of the book, said that it
probably comes from chow chop suey or chow chop suey,
which some people call. It probably comes from the Cantonese
pronouncing a Mandarin chow's zuei chow meaning stir fry and
z azui meaning animal intestines. I tend to go with

(14:17):
the sap sue.

Speaker 1 (14:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:20):
I mean, that's just my take and it's almost meaningless,
but that's where I'm gonna go with. Since it's up
for debate.

Speaker 1 (14:26):
I'm with you. I'll be in your camp.

Speaker 2 (14:28):
Okay, thanks.

Speaker 1 (14:29):
At least we can hang out and play cards.

Speaker 2 (14:31):
What do you want to play?

Speaker 1 (14:33):
I don't know a lot of card games. I like
Jin Rummy.

Speaker 2 (14:36):
I was gonna say gin Rummy too.

Speaker 1 (14:38):
I do love spades. But we need Emily and U
me to come along.

Speaker 2 (14:41):
Okay, that's fair enough. They probably will anyway if we
end up in a camp together.

Speaker 1 (14:47):
Because that means zombie apocalypse has happened.

Speaker 2 (14:50):
Yeah, or else the Russians have invaded all a red
dawn and you and I are alone in a men's camp,
which is really just a fenced off drive in Yeah.

Speaker 1 (15:00):
Soon to die.

Speaker 2 (15:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (15:02):
Anyway, that's a weird sidetrack a quote that and we're
going to explain the origins of this quote. But you
may have heard that Chop Suey is an American is
as American as pork and beans, and that actually comes
from a lawsuit from the early nineteen hundreds. In nineteen
oh four, a guy named lem Sen said, you know what,
I invented Chop Suey. I made it for a Chinese

(15:25):
diplomat who visited in eighteen eighty six. And everybody making
this dishos me money.

Speaker 2 (15:30):
Yeah, it's kind of a bold law suit. Sure, I
don't even know who he sued.

Speaker 1 (15:36):
I couldn't find it everybody, I guess, so.

Speaker 2 (15:39):
Lem Sen versus all Chop Suey chefs, Yeah, exactly. So
he ended up dropping the suit. But The suit left
a huge mark on America. I mean like it was
reported on. It made the news for sure, and people
knew about it. And one reason why it became such
a big deal is because at the time, as we saw,

(16:02):
there was the Chinese Exclusion Act. So lem Suenn brought
his lawsuit in nineteen oh four. The Chinese Exclusion Act
was passed in eighteen eighty two. It was the first
time the United States had ever passed an immigration law
specifically targeted at one nationality. And it also basically laid
the foundation for exclusionary immigration laws and much tighter immigration

(16:24):
laws than we'd had before that we still have today.
But this was super tight. I read when they loosened
it up. The quota for Chinese immigrants was one hundred
and four Chinese immigrants per year.

Speaker 1 (16:37):
Really wow.

Speaker 2 (16:38):
Yeah, And everybody was racist and against Chinese at the time, right, So,
but people also love Chop Suey by then, I mean
love Chop Suey. So lem Sen's lawsuit said, hey, you
can keep loving Chop Suey. I invented this in America.
It's really an American dish. So you can continue being
racist against Chinese immigrants while still loving Chop Suey, You're

(17:00):
welcome America, and America said thank you, get out.

Speaker 1 (17:04):
Yeah, And he's the one who had the quote it's
as an American as pork and beans.

Speaker 2 (17:10):
Yeah, in the lawsuit. I think you said it too.
I couldn't find that quote. I couldn't find the lawsuit.
But even if it's not specifically in the lawsuit, it
definitely seems to have developed out of that.

Speaker 1 (17:20):
Yeah. But it's possible that it was Chinese in origin initially,
because apparently there are some dishes from the Pearl River
Delta that are pretty similar, and some of the earliest
Chinese migrants to the US were from that area. I
can't parse out what's so different from Chop suey than
any stirfry.

Speaker 2 (17:39):
I don't know either. There's a lot of overlap between
Chinese dishes and including authentic cuisine, Yeah, but especially American Chinese.
I think it was. It was one of the first.
It was almost like an umbrella term for all Chinese
dishes in America at the turn of the last century,
kind of like smurf but with Chinese food essentially. And

(18:02):
I think because it was the first, a lot of
dishes that we recognize as like American Chinese developed out
of it.

Speaker 1 (18:08):
Okay, that makes sense. I do know that when I
was a kid going camping growing up in Georgia, I
loved nothing more than taking a can of Lachoi. You know,
it's like veggies and sauce, basically.

Speaker 2 (18:24):
Just sipping on it the whole weekend, a lot of water.

Speaker 1 (18:26):
Justice, Yeah, put it my canteen and you know, making
some campfire rice and dumping that stuff on top, you know,
heating it up and dumping it on top. I thought
it was like the peak of you know, fine cuisine
in the woods.

Speaker 2 (18:39):
Yeah. No, I mean that's definitely better than you know,
a human finger that you found.

Speaker 1 (18:44):
Yeah, but they were. Lachoi was around since the nineteen
thirties doing that, you know, canned vegetable sauce. I was
gonna say trick, but you know it's a thing.

Speaker 2 (18:53):
Yeah. But I mean that's a great explanation of just
how crazy people were in America for chop suey. Lachoi
could pack it and sell for decades this stuff, and
people were nuts for it. Another sign, apparently, was that
by the turn of the last century, chop suey houses
were so popular they'd started to migrate out of Chinatown. Yeah,

(19:14):
which was a huge deal, and I should say in
Manhattan specifically. That was a big deal because I think
there were a lot of people who are like, I'd
love chop suey, but I don't want to go to Chinatown,
and these Chinese entrepreneurs said, hey, you don't need to anymore.
Here we are at I don't know, so ho right.

Speaker 1 (19:34):
Another like pretty startling factoid is that it was in
well this part isn't. It was in the nineteen forty
two edition of the US Army Cookbook. But as a result,
when US troops were stationed overseas in China and Japan
and World War Two, restaurants would put chop suey on
the menu to cater to those American soldiers because they

(19:56):
came in were like, where's the chop suey?

Speaker 2 (19:58):
Yeah, we want a hot hamburger and chopsuit exactly. You
want to take a break, We're like twenty minutes.

Speaker 1 (20:05):
Basically, Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and put it in
my order for pork fread rice and a girl.

Speaker 2 (20:10):
I'm definitely getting Chinese food for dinner.

Speaker 1 (20:12):
Yeah, shot.

Speaker 2 (20:20):
Shot, all right, chuck, So we're back, and we talked
about how immigration laws and racism against Chinese migrants helped

(20:46):
shape Chinese food in America. And one of the first
ways that it did was that eighteen eighty two Chinese
Exclusion Act actually led to a plethora of much more
upscale these restaurants. And the reason why is because part
of that Exclusion Act is that certain kinds of businesses

(21:09):
could achieve merchant status, or the owners of certain kind
of businesses they had to be legitimate businesses that were
considered kind of higher end, and that if you had
merchant status, you could sponsor relatives to come to the
United States. And I guess in nineteen fifteen, a court
case got Chinese restaurants added to that merchant status clause.

Speaker 1 (21:32):
Yeah, and this came from a historian named Heather Lee,
and she makes the cas is like, you know, this
addition to that list basically meant you were going to
get a lot of like higher grade chop Suey palaces.
So the restaurants kind of got nicer, and you had
to in order to qualify. You also, if you were
an investor and owner, you had to spend a year

(21:52):
managing the restaurant as the manager and not like you know,
working in the kitchen or something like that. And you've needed,
of course, this had to be thrown in there. You
needed two white witnesses to vouch for them. But because
of these strict rules, you got again these these nicer
Chinese restaurants opening up that were qualifying for that merchant status.

(22:13):
And then you would get investors getting together and saying, hey,
let's start this restaurant. We'll take turns running it for
a year and get our family members over here. And
as a result, I mean, this is not the only reason,
but this definitely helped Chinese restaurants in the US double
between nineteen ten and nineteen twenty, and again between nineteen
twenty and nineteen thirty, and by nineteen thirty they had

(22:36):
overtaken laundries as the largest employers of Chinese workers in
the United States.

Speaker 2 (22:41):
Yeah, so the first third of the twentieth century there
was a boom in Chinese restaurants, and in specifically higher
end Chinese restaurants. And then another boom happened after the
Immigration and Nationality Act of nineteen sixty five, which greatly
loosened restrictions on immigration, particularly from China and within a

(23:05):
decade of that act, the Chinese American population basically doubled,
which sounds eye popping, but don't forget there was only
like one hundred and four people coming in a year.
So it went from like, I don't know, three thousand
to six thousand in a decade.

Speaker 1 (23:20):
There's more than that.

Speaker 2 (23:21):
Yeah, it definitely was. But the point is is that
now you had way more patrons of authentic Chinese restaurants,
which meant there were more authentic Chinese restaurants, and then
you also had more people who were ready to open
and staff more Chinese restaurants, So you had a huge
boom in Chinese restaurants again in the sixties to the seventies.

Speaker 1 (23:42):
Yeah, for sure. And there was an article in twenty
fourteen in The New Yorker by Lauren Hilgers, and this
was eleven years ago, but I imagine it's not completely
different now. But how the labor arrangements work then and
probably these days is if there's a Chinese restaurant in
the US, there's more than forty thousand back then, and

(24:03):
there's probably a few more now. But that's a lot
of restaurants generally run by families. But staffed by new immigrants.
A lot of them are undocumented, a lot of them
apparently are coming from the Fujian province, and they're providing
the labor. So what will happen is they'll they'll have
a restaurant. A new immigrant will come to town, probably

(24:25):
a hub city. I think they concentrated on New York,
San Francisco, and Chicago for the article, but any major
city in the US probably, and they'll go to a
Chinese language employment agency and they'll say, all right, I
got a job for you. They'll say this in Chinese, though,
go get on this bus, here's the person's name, here's
their prone number, go to this restaurant, and you can

(24:46):
probably get a job there. And that's how they staff
their restaurants.

Speaker 2 (24:49):
Yeah, and Chuck, you mentioned the at least in twenty fourteen,
forty thousand Chinese restaurants in the United States. Yeah, which
is impressive in and of itself, But if you compare
it to McDonald's, which is you know, the benchmark comparison
for US. Yeah, there are thirteen six and twenty two
McDonald's in the United States. Wow, versus forty thousand Chinese restaurants.

Speaker 1 (25:14):
There's probably well, there's not, because we know that number two.
I was gonna say, there's probably fourteen thousand Panda expresses,
but we'll get to that later.

Speaker 2 (25:20):
Yeah, it's close.

Speaker 1 (25:22):
The long and short of it is was with how
the staffing arrangement works is these cooks are moving around
a lot. They'll sometimes work at a place for just
a few months and go to a different restaurant, maybe
for better pay. Oftentimes outside of city centers you can
get paid more, which sort of surprised me. I guess
it makes sense though, But if you're getting Chinese food

(25:42):
for years and years from the same place, a lot
of times there will be a different cook every few months,
and hopefully you won't even notice.

Speaker 2 (25:52):
Yeah. A lot of the reason you won't notice is
because the immigrants from Fujian. I could not find out
why the largest waves of migration lately have been coming
from Fujian, but they are. But they are coming and
buying Cantonese formerly Cantonese owned restaurants from the Cantonese owners

(26:13):
who founded them, and they're just keeping the menu the same,
because again this is American Chinese. Neither one's making the
cuisine necessarily that you would find in their provinces. In China,
they're making the American version. So if you have a
set menu, you're probably any chef's going to be able
to cook this stuff. I think.

Speaker 1 (26:31):
Yeah, now we're going to talk a little bit about
General So another classic Chinese dish that I've never had.
Oh really, now, I've never had it. I mean maybe
i've had it if someone else somewhere and they ordered
just a ton of food and I was kind of
just dumping all of it on the plate, which is
the best way to eat Chinese food. Yeah, but that's

(26:51):
something I've never ordered myself. I kind of just stick
to my main order and General So's chicken, is not it?

Speaker 2 (26:57):
It's good. It's a are you just sour? No, it's
not even sour. It's like sweet and savory.

Speaker 1 (27:04):
It's kind of spicy too, isn't it.

Speaker 2 (27:06):
A little bit? But nothing anybody couldn't handle. I think
there's usually sesame seeds on it too.

Speaker 1 (27:12):
It's good stuff, yeah, not like kung paw is the
real spicy one.

Speaker 2 (27:15):
Right, Yeah, and we all know who likes his kung
pow spicy.

Speaker 1 (27:21):
There's a funny Judge John Hodgman episode about that too.
There's a funny dad, or at least he thought it
was funny, and his kids were trying to get him
to stop making the same joke over and over. Wherever
this guy goes, it could be like a toll booth worker.
We'll ask like what kind of ticket he wants, and
he'll say, I'll have the Kung paw chicken m hm.
And he'll just say that to answer any question asked

(27:43):
by anyone ever. Really, and the kids are really annoyed.
I think it's hysterical.

Speaker 2 (27:48):
Yeah, it is pretty funny, for sure, unless you're in
a rush, because then you have to ask the question twice.

Speaker 1 (27:55):
Yeah. And I could also see how children of that
dad might get really sick of that joke.

Speaker 2 (27:59):
Totally deads can be pretty embarrassing, except for this one. Yeah,
well not you, of course.

Speaker 1 (28:06):
All right, So what are the origins of General So's chicken?

Speaker 2 (28:10):
Actually, Chuck? There was a guy named Pencheng Wi k
U e I. He was from Hunan and he was
living in Taiwan at the time as part of the
Nationalist government. He was a chef for the Nationalist government
who was being visited in Taiwan by the chairman of
the US Joint chiefs of staff. So he created a
special dish that was in no way resembles what we

(28:33):
think of General So's chicken today. It was a very
heavy dish, sour, hot, saltya It was just not American.
There wasn't fried. But this dish was named after an actual,
real Honanese general from the Qing dynasty. His name was
Zuo Zong Tang or So Sung Tang, and you get

(28:57):
General So from that. I think he was a Minister
of Taiwan for a little while. It made sense to Paning,
and eventually it got exported to the United States, I
think in the seventies, and it just got totally transformed.

Speaker 1 (29:11):
Yeah, apparently if you're in the Boston area, it's going
to be called General Gal either Gau or Gao. Did
not know that.

Speaker 2 (29:21):
I didn't know that either. But that doesn't sound totally
foreign to me, Like, I, well, it sounds a little form,
you know what I mean, Like I feel like I've
heard that before something.

Speaker 1 (29:32):
Yeah, I feel like I have too. So it may
exist outside of Boston, or maybe it's you know, just
more New England regional, but Chinese fuit is very popular
as a delivery thing. I can't remember the last time
I actually, actually I can rarely, rarely do I eat
in a Chinese restaurant, but I ate in Las Vegas.
There's a very popular, very upscale Chinese restaurant in one
of the casinos, the kind of place where like a

(29:54):
week ahead of time, you tell them you want the duck,
that kind of deal. H and our friend, the show
in friend of ours, Adam Pranica, made that with Ben
Harrison and our booking agent and friend Josh Lincren and
all our wives. We all went and had this beautiful, big,
big meal. But almost always I'm ordering takeout or delivery
Chinese food and grubhub and this is ten years ago,

(30:17):
but they said that General Sou's Chicken was the most
popular dish that they deliver, fourth most popular overall, and
just last year they reported Chinese takeout is the or
delivery I guess is the third most popular food overall.
I guess behind pizza, and I can't think of what else.
I would figure Chinese would be second, but I don't know.

Speaker 2 (30:37):
Pizza and take out lasagna maybe yeah, people love that.

Speaker 1 (30:42):
Yeah, And I think this guy is from Grubhub named
Garfield was reporting on.

Speaker 2 (30:46):
That nice that was a great joke, thank you. So
back in twenty twenty three, grub hub did say that
there are two cities where Chinese dish made the top
ten crab Rangoon and hold your emails, because we know
crab Rangoon is actually not a Chinese dish at all,
but it is found in just about every American Chinese

(31:08):
food place. It was invented by an American the restaurants
who are Victor Bergeron, whereas Polynesian themed chain Trader vis
Trade named after a city in Burma also known as
me and Mar and it has cream cheese, which is
as American as chop suey.

Speaker 1 (31:28):
Yeah, and I know I'm retelling this, but I'll have
to just quickly say. One of the funniest things from
when I was a kid was when I was like
twelve years old in a restaurant and there was a
gentleman ordering takeout from the counter and after like six
dishes in a row, he asked if it had cheese
on it, and the very kind restaurant owner kept saying no, no, no,

(31:49):
and at the very end he said, in his very
sweet broken English, that no Chinese food has cheese on it.
And I think the last time I told that story,
you and I thought about like a slice of American
cheese just on some stir fry. And then we're like,
I think we might want to try that.

Speaker 2 (32:06):
Yeah, it sounds like something we would try for sure.

Speaker 1 (32:09):
Yeah, very funny childhood memory.

Speaker 2 (32:12):
What else, Oh, hey, there's another reason that some Chinese
food became americanized.

Speaker 1 (32:18):
Let's hear it.

Speaker 2 (32:19):
Ingredients, that's right.

Speaker 1 (32:23):
You know, a lot of them were changed to fit
our tastes, including the ingredient sometimes. One example that Laura found,
of course, is beef with broccoli that is not you know,
they don't have that kind of you know, as far
as I know, they don't have that kind of broccoli
in China. What they use is Chinese broccoli or guy lahn,
which if you look that up, it looks it's more

(32:45):
like bakchoi than what we think of as broccoli.

Speaker 2 (32:47):
Yeah, and I was like, where's broccoli from? Turns out
the Mediterranean?

Speaker 1 (32:51):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (32:51):
It was, according to legend, brought to America by Thomas Jefferson,
who grew it experimentally in his garden. And they like
to fart. Yep, he said this is gonna make me
blow and then it was it took off in popularity
in the US in the nineteen twenties. Didn't see why,
but it did.

Speaker 1 (33:11):
Believe me, Well, we got to talk a little bit
about fortune cookies because that is not Chinese either. That
is originally adopted from something called the Japanese cracker, which
is a savory thing. But in the early twentieth century,
Chinese restaurants were owned a lot of times by Japanese people.
Japanese bakeries were making these cookies, and then after Japanese

(33:32):
in tournament, a lot of Chinese Americans took over these
cookie factories. And that got me down the road of like, well,
who's writing the fortunes. There's a guy named Donald Lao
who's a CFO of Wantan Food Company, the largest fortune
cookie maker in the world, and he was the sole writer,
or has been for thirty years of writing these fortune cookies.

Speaker 2 (33:55):
I don't remember specifically talking about him or his name,
but there's no way we don't talk about him in
our fortune cookie short stuff from twenty twenty two.

Speaker 1 (34:04):
If we missed him, I can't believe we would miss
that guy's no way. But as a recap he he
wrote him for thirty years. He used to write two
to three per day. Now it's two or three per
month because they have just thousands of them. And he
got that job by default because he spoke the best
English at the company. And his quote is I am
the most read author in the United States.

Speaker 2 (34:26):
I believe it for sure.

Speaker 1 (34:27):
It's pretty great.

Speaker 2 (34:29):
And then we got to talk about a couple of
regional specialties. Saint Louis. I remember when we went there.
We when we get back to touring again, I really
want to go to Saint Louis. Everyone there was crazy nice.

Speaker 1 (34:41):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (34:43):
They had really cool, like regional foods that you couldn't
find anywhere else, like good stuff. Oh is this a
good town? I want to go back. But I also
want to try the Saint Paul sandwich. There is eggfou young,
but a sandwich.

Speaker 1 (35:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (35:01):
So you've got an omelet with vegetables, a meat or
seafood topped with brown gravy on a sandwich. So you've
got mayo, pickle, lettuce, all that stuff. It sounds just
totally off the chain, and I really want to try it.

Speaker 1 (35:17):
There's another one, and I don't know if you looked
up a picture of this thing. No, I didn't, but
if you go to Fall River, Massachusetts, do you have
your phone with you or a computer or it means
of looking up a photo.

Speaker 2 (35:28):
Yeah, sure, let me do that.

Speaker 1 (35:29):
While I'm doing this, you should check this out. It's
called a chow main sandwich. It hails from Fall River, Massachusetts,
but it's in surrounding towns there, and who knows, maybe
elsewhere in New England. But it is exactly what it
sounds like. It's chowmain on a sandwich on like a
hamburger bun. But if you look this thing up, it's
not a sandwich it is. You can't see the bottom bun.

(35:50):
It is just chow main all over a plate. I
guess there's a bun underneath, and there's just a hamburger
bun sitting on top. Like it is a full plate
of chow main with just a fun in there somewhere.
It's not the kind of thing you would ever pick
up and eat as a sandwich.

Speaker 2 (36:05):
It looks like cousin Nit wearing his hat, actually a
little derby hamburger bun hat. Yeah, it's ostentatious to say
the least, for sure.

Speaker 1 (36:16):
Yeah, should we take another break? Yeah, all right, we'll
take another break and we'll finish up with an ode
to Panda Express and PF Changs right after this shot shot.

(36:50):
All right, so we're gonna start off talking a little
bit about how PF Changs came about a restaurant that
I think I might have been to once. I definitely
picked it up a lot as a PA in the
film business US for like big production meetings. So I
can't speak to its quality. It's supposed to be pretty good, right.

Speaker 2 (37:07):
PF Chang's Yeah, yeah, it's it's good. I mean, especially
for comparing chain typical. I would not call it a
high end chain, no more than you'd call cheesecake factory
a high end chain. Well, it's it's virtually on the
same level of dining. Okay, I'm not taking a shot
at it. I'm just saying, like, it's not It's not

(37:28):
like the place that you went to in Vegas or
or Peaking Duck in fall I think Fall Falls Church, Virginia,
which is an amazing spot. It's just like you can
go to a mall and there might be one attached
to it if it's a nice mall. Regardless, it is tasty,

(37:49):
especially compared to like Chinese takeout. It's definitely several steps
up from that. Okay, I got it's just really hard
to like what high end restaurant has three hundreds now, Like,
when you have three hundred locations, you're starting to work
in economies of scale. It's really tough to keep like
any kind of cuisine just top notch in that sense.

Speaker 1 (38:11):
Yeah, for sure. And I want to quickly plug since
you mentioned Cheesecake Factory, are again friends of the show
and friends in real life. Adam Pranica and Ben Harrison
of the Greatest Generation podcast have a side podcast called
Factory Seconds where they're working their way through the menu
of the Cheesecake Factory, one item at a time.

Speaker 2 (38:28):
Those two could not be any greater American treasures.

Speaker 1 (38:33):
Yeah, it's pretty great.

Speaker 2 (38:33):
I love it.

Speaker 1 (38:34):
Adam's uncle actually is the voice of the Memphis Grizzlies
as the announcer basketball team. And apparently Cheesecake Factory is
huge with NBA players, And I was like why, and
his uncle he was like, because there's one in every city.
It's the same menu. It's a huge menu, the portions
are huge, and they and the quality is always the same.

Speaker 2 (38:56):
Economies of scale.

Speaker 1 (38:58):
Well, I was wrong. Apparently they make all their stuff fresh.
It's not like bagged food.

Speaker 2 (39:03):
Oh, if you believe that, I actually no, I don't.

Speaker 1 (39:07):
It's true.

Speaker 2 (39:08):
Huh. That is a little surprising. But I mean it's
not like I'm hating on cheesecake factory.

Speaker 1 (39:13):
It's just I've never been.

Speaker 2 (39:15):
Oh, it's they have a really varied menu, that's yeah. Yeah,
the portions are gigantic and their cheesecakes are pretty great.

Speaker 1 (39:23):
All right, Well, I'm going to be a guest on
that show at some point. So next time in LA
We're going to go to one and then I'm going
to be a guest and okay, good. Anyway, A long
way around describing PF. Chang's, there was a woman named
Cecilia Chiang with an I in there from San Francisco
and she and I believe before nineteen sixty five, before

(39:43):
that immigration law, opened a high end restaurant there called Mandarin.
And she said, no Chop suey in my menu, and
no Eggfu Young. All this Chinatown stuff is a no no.
And she owned a restaurant, a Chinese restaurant in Tokyo
years ago, and her husband got a diplomatic post there,
so that's why she was doing Chinese food there and

(40:04):
Mandarin opened in nineteen sixty one, and that's where all
of a sudden people are exposed to like kung pou,
chicken tea, smoked duck, mushue, pork pot stickers, like some
of the really good stuff and authentic stuff. Yeah exactly.
She sold her son, Philip the restaurant Mandarin in nineteen
eighty nine, and he is one of the co founders

(40:24):
of PF Changs.

Speaker 2 (40:25):
Yeah, Philip F. Chang, but he dropped the I exactly.
So PF Chang's pretty large chain, three hundred restaurants. It's
definitely nothing to sneeze at. But if you really want
to talk economy of scales, let's talk Panda Express. They
have two thousand more restaurants than PF Chang's does twenty
three hundred in the United States.

Speaker 1 (40:48):
Right, yeah, food Court City.

Speaker 2 (40:50):
But yeah, have you had Panda Express?

Speaker 1 (40:53):
Yeah? I have. I used to do it when I
was younger. I'm not going to say it's like not
any good, but you know, it's Chinese fast food, and
it's just not something I would eat now. I would
in a pinch. It's not like I'd turn my nose
up at it. But I have been there before you.

Speaker 2 (41:11):
Yeah, a couple of times. And yeah, it is fast food,
and it's great for fast food. It's just such a
it's just different. It's not you know, Taco Bell or
McDonald's or even like Chipotle or something. It's just Chinese version,
the Chinese version of fast food.

Speaker 1 (41:28):
Yeah, like it. Apparently it's a family run business though,
even though it's this huge chain, and in the seventies
they just had a few little sit down restaurants and
it kind of grew very naturally and organically as this
family business, which I never knew, which is pretty cool.

Speaker 2 (41:43):
And if you're a fan of orange Chicken, you can
thank your friends at Panda Express because they debuted it
in nineteen eighty seven and now you can find it
basically everywhere. But they were the ones who came up
with it.

Speaker 1 (41:54):
Yeah, what's your order in a Chinese restaurant or for takeout?

Speaker 2 (41:57):
I'm trying some hunan to know because I don't normally
eat that and I want to see what it's like.
But typically a garlic chicken of some sort. I like
savory brown sauces, umami brown sauces, usually chicken. If I'm
really feeling crazy, maybe like a happy family or something
like that.

Speaker 1 (42:15):
Are you white rice or fried rice?

Speaker 2 (42:17):
White steamed rice?

Speaker 1 (42:18):
M boy, I gotta have that fried rice.

Speaker 2 (42:21):
Oh yeah, there's too many peas and fried rice and
peas are one of my most hated things on the
entire planet.

Speaker 1 (42:27):
Oh I love peas.

Speaker 2 (42:28):
Eat.

Speaker 1 (42:29):
Yeah, I gotta get that fried rice. I'll get a
lot of sweet and sour chicken or ses some me chicken.
Got to get the egg roll. I'll take a beef
and broccoli if people have ordered it, but that's not
my order. But I'll also try a lot of stuff.
If I'm at a big group and someone's just ordering
a bunch of Chinese food, I'll eat almost all of it.

Speaker 2 (42:45):
Do you ask them first?

Speaker 1 (42:47):
What like what to order? No?

Speaker 2 (42:49):
Can I have some of your orders?

Speaker 1 (42:51):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (42:52):
Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 (42:54):
And then you know, if you're in a place not
all cities have this stuff. But if you're in a
place that has the really good, authentic stuff and you
get dim sum or some pork buns or soup dumplings,
like all that stuff is great, but you can't find
that everywhere.

Speaker 2 (43:07):
No, I really want some Chinese food.

Speaker 1 (43:09):
Now it's gonna happen. That's the first thing I ordered
after our week at the beach in South Carolina, after
eating you know, coastal seafood, American seafood, I was like,
I can eat some Chinese food.

Speaker 2 (43:20):
So America is not the only place that took Chinese
food and said here you meat this orange and squeezed
it together and then fried it. That's like I said
at the outs, That's happened all over the world. And
apparently I'm not on TikTok much as an ever, but
there was a thing on TikTok a couple of years
ago where American people picked up on UK British Chinese

(43:45):
food and We're like, what are you guys doing over there?

Speaker 1 (43:49):
Yeah. I didn't see any of that either, but apparently
it was pretty funny. Apparently the food in the UK,
the Chinese food is a lot different than here in America.
It is very popular over there, maybe even one of
the top two, maybe even the top food in the country.

Speaker 2 (44:07):
I saw that. It definitely was by a long shot.

Speaker 1 (44:09):
Oh really, Okay, so they love it over there. They
will have things like French fries, what they call chips,
a lot of curry sauces, which is different than us
because there's a lot of great Indian food obviously in
England and throughout the UK. And they also have something
called a chicken ball, and that's just what they call it.
I looked it up. I tried to find any difference.
It looks like the exact same thing we get here

(44:32):
in like a sweet and sour chicken. It's just a fried,
little chunk of chicken.

Speaker 2 (44:36):
Yeah, which everybody loves. Even if you don't need chicken,
you'll eat that.

Speaker 1 (44:40):
I couldn't determine though from looking at first, if it
was ground like a meatball, but it's not. And they're
not even usually round. They're just you know, chicken chained. Yeah,
like a little chicken finger kind of thing.

Speaker 2 (44:53):
Man. So poor chicken meat has been like subjected to
so many different indignantities over the eat, you know, more
than any other meat.

Speaker 1 (45:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:02):
So India also has a version of Chinese food that's
so popular that some Indian restaurants in the US. I've
not seen this, but they'll sometimes have dishes there called
Manchurian something or other. Yeah, and that I mean I
didn't either, I've never run across that. And then in
some cities, if the city's big enough, they might have
like full on Indian Chinese restaurants there where it's the

(45:24):
Indian version of Chinese, just like if you had an
American version of the Chinese food in India, there's probably
some sort of cultural exchange, like they open one here,
we have to open one there. It's got to be balanced.

Speaker 1 (45:37):
It's contractual, the same for Latin America. In the United States,
Chinese Cuban restaurants started opening in New York City, of course,
in the nineteen seventies, and then what they call would
it be China Latino?

Speaker 2 (45:52):
I'm going with Chino Latino.

Speaker 1 (45:54):
I mean, China Latino is what I want to say,
because it sounds so great.

Speaker 2 (45:56):
Mm hm.

Speaker 1 (45:57):
I just wasn't sure if that was right. But they
started opening later on. They're in decline in New York now,
but apparently, just like everywhere over the course of centuries,
Chinese workers were brought over to Latin America for a
lot of reasons, but usually servitude. Sadly, but again, they
brought their food with them, and their food existed alongside

(46:18):
stuff like Cuban food and Peruvian food, and then they
start to blend it together, and all of a sudden
you have these cool like sort of mix up dishes.

Speaker 2 (46:25):
Yeah, I want to try all of these.

Speaker 1 (46:28):
I do too.

Speaker 2 (46:29):
And then apparently also South Africa has Afro Cantonese and
that was again developed out of a Chinese community that
were brought there as indentured workers back all the way
back in the nineteenth century. Basically just like America, and
also just like America, as more and more Chinese immigrants
have come higher end, more Chinese authentic dishes have kind

(46:52):
of become more favorited than just the Afro Cantonese version.

Speaker 1 (46:58):
Afro Cantonese just to my ear, sounds delicious.

Speaker 2 (47:01):
Yeah, yeah again, I said it before and I'll say
it again. I really want some Chinese food right now.

Speaker 1 (47:08):
Yeah, it's gonna happen, and we're recording earlier, so it's
like creeping onto lunchtime right now.

Speaker 2 (47:12):
Oh are you doing it for lunch? I'm gonna make
myself wait until dinner and really ttilate myself.

Speaker 1 (47:17):
Oh no, no, no, I can't get it for lunch.
I'll uh well, I'll probably do skip lunch and order
it for dinner.

Speaker 2 (47:22):
There you go.

Speaker 1 (47:23):
But this has inspired me to I've been wanting to
do an episode on Cajun food, but it was very intimidating,
like Cajun sort of creole stuff because there's so many influences.
I was just like, we're gonna screw it up, but this,
this is uh maybe more brave.

Speaker 2 (47:39):
Well, if we do Cajun food, we have to consult
our good friend and friend of the show, Doug Shasherie.

Speaker 1 (47:45):
Oh yeah, m hm, oh that's right Doug.

Speaker 2 (47:48):
Yeah, when he brought us a Boudine balls at our
New Orleans show and we ate him on stage.

Speaker 1 (47:53):
Yeah, what a guy. He's great.

Speaker 2 (47:55):
Oh, he's wonderful. So yeah, Plus his last name Sashery,
so he knows what he's talking about Cajun food. That's right. Well,
since we talked about our friend Doug Shasherie here on
the episode, as was predicted back in two thousand and eight.
By the way, Chuck, today's the seventeenth anniversary of stuff
you should know today. Yeah, happy anniversary, baby.

Speaker 1 (48:16):
Wow, happy anniversary love.

Speaker 2 (48:19):
Okay, Well, anyway, onto it, as was predicted back in
two thousand and eight. Since we said Doug Shasheri's name,
we've unlocked listener mail boy.

Speaker 1 (48:29):
That's about as fan fairy as we get.

Speaker 2 (48:30):
Huh, yeah, we don't. Yeah, we don't do that. Kind
of stuff, you know. I mean, we don't do media
tours or anything and say look at us, everybody, look
at us. You know, we do that every week anyway.

Speaker 1 (48:41):
Who wants to do that? This is a correction. Hey, guys,
heard your short stuff on Tulipmania and wanted to point
out that Tulipmania is now largely believed to be a myth.
I only found out about that a few years ago
myself when I heard an interview from the author Anne Goldgar.
She discovered the historical reality when she dug into the
archives to research her book Tulipmania and Money, Honor and

(49:01):
Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age. The myth was largely
promulgated great word by Scottsman Charles Mackie in his book
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, and he
sent along articles from Smithsonian and History dot Com and
even Wikipedia that said although McKay's I'm sorry Mackie's book

(49:22):
is a classic, citation needed, his account is contested citation needed.
Many modern scholars believe that the mania was not as
destructive as described A little behind on some of the
show's guys. Perhaps others have written in but no one
else has written in, Richard, so you're the only one.
So way to go.

Speaker 2 (49:41):
I've seen that on the Internet's here there since we
released it. But I mean, honestly, Chuck, we used a
lot of different sources for that, and yeah, I mean, yes,
you can make a case that it was exaggerated, but
the idea that it's a myth is I did not
run across that, but who knows, and if it was,
then a lot of may that we released an episode

(50:02):
where we were catfished by.

Speaker 1 (50:04):
History by the tulipmaniacs.

Speaker 2 (50:07):
We'll have to get to the bottom of it. Who
wrote that, Richard? Thanks a lot, Richard. We appreciate that.
Thank you for sending us straight publicly. And if you
want to be like Richard and set us straight publicly,
you can send us an email to send it off
to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.

Speaker 1 (50:26):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.