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Chow Chop Sueyby: Anne Mendelson
New York City NY:
Columbia University Press 2016, Hardbound
ISBN: 978-0-231-15860-2
Reviewed by: Jacqueline M. Newman
Summer Volume: 2017 Issue: 24(2) page(s): 21
Not a cookbook;
it has no recipes,
but details as the
subtitle indicates:
Food and the
Chinese American
Journey. It
integrates history and misunderstandings, information
about the Chinese culinary, restaurants, awakening of
American palates, Chinese cookbooks, and Chinese
food.
Written by a noted culinary historian, it tells how the
predominantly Cantonese and Toisanese immigrants
found ways to survive in the United States (US). In two
parts, it begins its tale in a six-page Introduction and
a four-page Prologue. What follows in the first part
includes four chapters discussing before the Chinese
came mostly to California. The second part is in five chapters that concentrate on
their arrival in California and their lives in the US. After
them, the weight of information is a two-page Postscript
titled: What Might Have Been. These chapters detail
violence against the Chinese as aliens, the founding of
‘chop suey’ restaurants, hybridizing Chinese-American
foods, eventual abolition of anti-Chinese immigration
laws after the Cold War, and post-1965 with the arrival
of thousands of Chinese immigrants from Taiwan,
Southeast Asia, and the rest of the world. A twentyeight-
page section called: Notes provides extensive
textual citations. After them, six-pages titled: Glossary provide Chinese
terms in Mandarin and Cantonese Putonggua and
in Chinese. This well-written impeccably researched
volume brings together political and culinary history,
and it ends with an eighteen-page Bibliography, a twocolumn
sixteen-page Index, and a two page list of
titles in the Albert Sonnenfeld-edited ‘Perspectives in
Culinary’ series, of which this is one. |
