Chinese Food: Best Food?

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. 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 don't have to share with Jerry, and this is Stuff You Should Know.
That's right. A lot of caveats on this.
Can I list off a few? Sure. All right.
First of all, this is going to be a very broad overview of a cuisine that we could probably do like a 10-part at least episode series on. I would say 11.
Yeah, maybe 11. 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, 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.

Yeah, there you go.

That was great. Caveat City right there.
Caveat City. David Bowie, great song.
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.
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, 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 Chinese food was born. And America is no exception to that.
So we have American Chinese food. Yeah.
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'd have I have no examples of places where Chinese immigrants have brought their food and people are like, nah, no thanks.
Right. The only one I could find was Belize.
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 love Filipino. I like Korean food.
I love it all. But at the end of the day, good old-fashioned Chinese takeout is just one of my favorite all-time things since I was a kid.
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 there. Yeah.
Cause 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, um, you know, cuisines from another country you ever ate. Yeah, for sure.
You know, maybe Mexican food wasn't that big back then. That's only become more popular, I think, in the 80s and 90s even.

Even still, as a kid, maybe Mexican food wasn't that big back then. That's only become more popular, I think, in the 80s and 90s even.
Even still, as a kid, the Mexican food I was exposed to was Chi-Chi's, for God's sake. Or Del Taco.
We didn't even have that. That was exotic.
But I think maybe even before Chinese food, I was exposed to Japanese hibachi because there was this nice restaurant in Toledo called N Japanese.

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

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.

Yeah, I mean, I'm a simple guy, like a 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. 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. All right.
You know, hey, let's do let's do a shorty on egg rolls. Maybe we'll pair it 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 don't you tell them what the regions are, Chuck? 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, Sichuan, or I didn't look up C-H-U-A-N. I mean, you're braver than me.
I was just going to say the first ones that are mostly known by in the U.S. Oh, we can do that then.'s much easier so let's go with szechuan cantonese um hunan which is also zhong um let me see here we have shangdong we have jongsu uh we have uh oh i oh i did look that one up uh zhuzhong very nice uh fujian i've always heard it's fian, but that sounds kind of like an American version.
Well, I heard it pronounced as if it had a Y in there almost, like few. Okay.
Fujian. Okay.
And then what's the last one there? Anwei. Yes.
And some people added at least a ninth one with Shang-Zhi. And they're all a little different.
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 are coastal.
So they incorporate a lot of seafood. Yeah.
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 prancing around the wilderness and catching deer.
So they incorporate like local wildlife into it. And usually what I've seen is when they, 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.
Yeah. And how they achieve spice is kind of different depending on where you are too.
Sometimes it's those numbing Chinese peppercorns. I can't.
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 I have a hard time with it. Yeah.
I think that's natural. It's tough, but I can, you know, it depends on the cuisine.
Other sort of like the chilies that they use, I can handle that pretty well. It's hot, but I like it.
And sometimes it's just the chili flakes. Yeah.
The little red chilies, they'll sometimes serve whole with the dish. Yes, I can handle those too.
There's a certain level. That's tough.
Yeah. And what I mean by handling those little red chili peppers is that I eat around them.
Same here. 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, 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.
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. I hate to say, like, because it used to annoy me when a certain person I knew used to say, like, tortillas are like American bread.
And I was like, no, they're just tortillas. Who said that? I'm not going to tell you.
I'll tell you offline. But 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 steamed 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.
Okay. It's amazing.
I will thank you later. I've never really had dim sum actually, now that I think about it.
Ooh, boy. Uh, I mean, I like all kinds of food in Chinatown and New York, but, um, dim sum is definitely one of them, but I'll also go to just the, you know, cause if you're staying in hotel, you can't get these huge orders and just like take tons and tons of food with you.
you. So my move now is generally just to pop down there by myself and get a couple of gigantic egg rolls.
You and the egg rolls, huh? Wait, wait, we can't talk about that. We have to save it for short stuff.
Forget I even said that. But you did mention San Francisco in 1849 was the first operating restaurant in North America.
And by 1851, when the population of San Francisco was but 34,000 and change,

there were seven full-time Chinese restaurants open,

which for that few people is pretty good for that time period.

Yeah, it's not bad.

People liked it, clearly.

Yeah.

And there's a book that is going to come up,

or we're going to draw from a lot in this episode. It's called From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express, A History of Chinese Food in the United States by Haiming Leo.
And Leo makes this point that a lot of, like, we tend to equate Chinese migrants in the 19th 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 rush of 1849 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.
Yeah. And this is also sort of the kind of right away when when feelings toward Chinese immigrants started, racist feelings toward their food even started arising right out of the gate.

In Leo's book, there were some a couple of examples that she cited.

One was a criminal lawyer defending a white client following a race riot in 1865 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 1902 titled Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion, colon, Meat versus Rice, American Manhood versus Asiatic Cooleyism.
And apparently, apparently coolie is a pejorative term for a low wage worker.

So it's all happening early on.

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 Peking, without a G, Noodle Parlor, in where else? Butte, Montana. Right.
And it started out as a general store back in 1909, but within two years, they added a noodle parlor, the very same noodle parlor that's still open 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.

Is that true?

No.

Because that I could believe, actually.

Yeah, me too.

If you, you know, I looked at that place to see what it looked like,

and it looks like a Chinese restaurant in a building of an old West town. Man, I'll bet it's so good.
Exactly what you might think, and there's a big neon sign that says chop suey. And I realized 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. Yeah.
I don't know if I've ever had it either, but I think anytime you've ever made like a vague Chinese stir fry with chicken and vegetables and maybe like a 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 it's a mixture of meat vegetables a thick sauce usually with rice and the name itself not only where it originated but the 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 leftovers house to them.

That's not exactly true, but it's not that far off.

No, that's pretty close actually, because some people say the name came from a Cantonese

Thank you. house to them.
That's not exactly true, but it's not that far off. No, that's pretty close, actually, because some people say the name came from a Cantonese T-S-A-P, Tsapsui, S-U-I instead of S-U-E-Y.
That seems to be an Americanized spelling, which is mixed bits or odds and ends, aka probably leftovers. Yeah.
Leao, the author of the book, said that it probably comes from chow chop sui, or chow chop sui, which some people call it, probably comes from the Cantonese pronouncing a Mandarin chow zazui, chow meaning stir fry, and zazui meaning animal intestines. I tend to go with the sapsui.
Yeah. I mean, that's just my take, and it's almost meaningless, but that's what I'm going to go with since it's up for debate.
I'm with you. I'll be in your camp.
Okay, thanks. At least we can hang out and play cards.
What do you want to play? I don't know a lot of card games. I like gin rummy.
I was going to say gin rummy too. I do love Spades, but we need Emily and Yumi to come along.

Okay.

That's fair enough.

They probably will anyway if we end up in a camp together.

That's true.

Because that means a zombie apocalypse has happened.

Yeah, or else the Russians have invaded all Red Dawn,

and you and I are alone in a men's camp,

which is really just a fenced-off drive-in.

Yeah, soon to die. Yeah.
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 as American as pork and beans.
And that actually comes from a lawsuit from the early 1900s. In 1904, a guy named Lem Sen said, you know what? I invented chop suey.
I made it for a Chinese diplomat who visited in 1886. And everybody making this dish owes me money.
Yeah. It's kind of a bold lawsuit.
Sure. I don't even know who he sued.
I couldn't find it. Everybody.
I guess so. Lem Sen versus all chopped 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, there was the Chinese Exclusion Act. So Lem Sen brought his lawsuit in 1904.
The Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882. 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 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 104 Chinese immigrants per year. Really? Wow.
Yeah. And everybody was racist against Chinese at the time, right?

Yeah.

But people also loved chop suey by then.

I mean, loved 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 welcome, America.
And America said, thank you. Get out.
Yeah. And he's the one who had the quote, it's as an American as pork and beans.
Yeah. And the lawsuit, I think he 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. 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 U.S. were from that area.
I can't parse out what's so different from chop suey than any stir fry. I don't know either.
There's a lot of overlap between Chinese dishes, including authentic cuisine. Yeah.
But especially American Chinese. I think 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 Chinese food essentially.
And I think because it was the first, a lot of dishes that we recognize as like American Chinese developed out of it. 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 La Choy. You know, it's like veggies and sauce, basically.
Just sipping on it the whole weekend? A lot of water just, yeah, put it in 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. Yeah.

No, I mean, that's definitely better than, you know, a human finger that you found.

Yeah.

But they were, La Choy was around since the 1930s doing that, you know, canned vegetable sauce.

I was going to say trick, but, you know, it's a thing.

Yeah.

But, I mean, that's a great explanation of just how crazy people were in America for chop suey.

That La Choy could package and sell for decades this stuff and people were nuts for it um 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 um which was a huge deal in i should say in manhattan specifically that was a big deal because i think there were a lot of people who were like, I 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, Soho.
Right. Another pretty startling factoid is that it was in the 1942 edition of the U.S.
Army Cookbook. But as a result, when U.S.
troops were stationed overseas in China and Japan in World War II, restaurants would put chop suey on the menu to cater to those American soldiers because they came in. We're like, where's the chop suey? Yeah.
We want a hot dog,

a hamburger,

and chop suey.

Exactly.

You want to take a break?

We're at like 20 minutes,

basically.

Yeah.

I'm going to go ahead

and put in my order

for a pork fried rice

and egg roll.

I'm definitely getting

Chinese food for dinner.

Yeah.

Running stuff is fun

with Josh and Chuck.

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All right, Chuck.

So we're back. And we talked about...
All right, Chuck.

So we're back.

And we talked about how immigration laws and racism against Chinese migrants help shape Chinese food in America. And one of the first ways that it did was that 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act actually led to a plethora of much more upscale Chinese restaurants.
And the reason why is because part of that Exclusion Act is that certain kinds of businesses 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 1915, a court case got Chinese restaurants added to that merchant status clause.
Yeah. And this came from a historian named Heather Lee.
And she makes a case that's 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 or an owner, you had to spend a year 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 nicer Chinese restaurants opening up that were qualifying for that merchant status.
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 U.S.
doubled between 1910 and 1920. And again, between 1920 and 1930.
And by 1930, they had overtaken Laundries as the largest employers of Chinese workers in the United States. Yeah.
So the first third of the 20th century, there was a boom in Chinese restaurants, and specifically higher-end Chinese restaurants. And then another boom happened after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which greatly loosened restrictions on immigration, particularly from China.
And within a decade of that act, the Chinese-American population basically doubled, which sounds eye-popping, but don't forget, there was only like 104 people coming in a year. So it went from like, I don't know, 3,000 to 6,000 in a decade.
It was more than that. Yeah, it definitely was.
But the point 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 60s to the 70s. Yeah, for sure.
And there was an article in 2014 in The New Yorker by Lauren Hilgers. And this was 11 years ago, but I imagine it's not, you know, completely different now.
But how the labor arrangements work then, and probably these days, is if there's a Chinese restaurant in the U.S., there's more than 40,000 back then, and 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 have a restaurant. A new immigrant will come to town, probably a hub city.
I think they concentrated on New York, San Francisco, and Chicago for the article, but any major city in the U.S. 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 the U.S. 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 phone number. Go to this restaurant.
And you can probably get a job there. And that's how they staff their restaurants.
Yeah. And Chuck, you mentioned at least in 2014, 40,000 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. There are 13,622 McDonald's in the United States versus 40,000 Chinese restaurants.
There's probably, well, there's not because we know that number too. I was going to say there's probably 14,000 Panda Expresses, but we'll get to that later.
Yeah, it's close. The long and short of it is, 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 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.
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 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.

Yeah.

Now we're going to talk a little bit about General So, another classic Chinese dish that I've never had. Oh, really? No, 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 something I've never ordered myself. I kind of just stick to my main order and General Tso's chicken is not it.

It's good.

It's a Swedish sour.

No, it's not even sour.

It's like sweet and savory.

It's kind of spicy too, isn't it?

A little bit, but nothing anybody couldn't handle.

I think there's usually sesame seeds on it too.

It's good stuff.

Yeah.

Not like Kung Pao is the real spicy one, right?

Yeah, and we all know

who likes his Kung Pao spicy.

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 will ask what kind of ticket he he wants and he'll say, I'll have the Kung Pao chicken. And he'll just say that to answer any question asked by anyone ever.
Really? And the kids are really annoyed. I think it's hysterical.
Yeah, it is pretty funny for sure. Unless you're in a rush because then you have to ask the question twice.
Yeah, and I could also see how children of that dad might get really sick of that joke. Totally.
I mean, dads can be pretty embarrassing. Except for this one.
Yeah, well, not you, of course. All right, so what are the origins of General Tso's chicken? Actually, Chuck, there was a guy named Pen Cheng Wei, 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 U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.
So he created a special dish that was in no way resembles what we think of General Tso's chicken today. It was a very heavy dish, sour, hot, salty.
It was just not American. It wasn't fried.
But this dish was named after an actual real Hunanese general from the Qing dynasty. His name was Zuo Zongtang or Tso Zongtang or So Sungtang.

And you get General So from that.

I think he was an administrator of Taiwan for a little while.

It made sense to Peng.

And eventually it got exported to the United States, I think in the 70s, and it just got totally transformed.

Yeah.

Apparently, if you're in the Boston area, it's going to be called General Gao, either G-A-U or G-A-O. Did not know that.
I didn't know that either, but that doesn't sound totally foreign to me. Well, it sounds a little foreign.
You know what I mean. I feel like I've heard that before somewhere.
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 food is very popular as a delivery thing. I can't remember the last time I actually, I 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 week ahead of time, you tell them you want the duck, that kind of deal.
And our friend of the show and friend of ours, Adam Pranica made that with Ben Harrison and our booking agent and friend, Josh Lindgren, and all the, 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 was 10 years ago, but they said that General Tso's chicken was the most popular dish that they deliver. Fourth most popular overall.
And just last year, they reported Chinese takeout 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. Pizza and take out lasagna, maybe? People love that.
Yeah, and I think this guy from Grubhub named Garfield was reporting on that. Nice.
That was a great joke. Thank you.
So back in 2023, Grubhub did say that there are two cities where a Chinese dish made the top 10, 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 food place. It was invented by an American, the restaurateur Victor Bergeron, for his Polynesian-themed chain Trader Vic's.

Love Trader Vic's. Love Trader Vic's.
It's named after a city in Burma, also known as Myanmar. And it has cream cheese, which is as American as chop suey.
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 12 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.
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 were like, I think we might want to try that. Yeah, it sounds like something we would try for sure.
Yeah, very funny childhood memory. What else? Oh, hey, there's another reason that some Chinese food became Americanized.
Let's hear it. Ingredients.
That's right. You know, a lot of them were changed to fit our tastes, including the ingredients sometimes.
And 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 gai lan, which if you look that up, it looks, it's

more like bok choy than what we think of as broccoli.

Yeah.

And I was like, where's broccoli from?

Turns out the Mediterranean.

Okay.

It was, according to legend, brought to America by Thomas Jefferson, who grew it experimentally in his garden. So, he liked to fart? Yep.
He said, this is going to make me blow. And then it took off in popularity in the U.S.
in the 1920s. Didn't see why, but it did, 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 20th century, Chinese restaurants were owned a lot of times by Japanese people. Japanese bakeries were making these cookies.
And then after Japanese internment, 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 Lau, who's a CFO of Wonton Food Company, the largest fortune cookie maker in the world.
And he was the sole writer or has been for 30 years of writing these fortune cookies. I don't remember specifically talking about him or his name, but there's no way we didn't talk about him in our fortune cookie short stuff from 2022.
If we missed him, I can't believe we would miss that guy. There's no way.
But as a recap, he wrote him for 30 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. I believe it for sure.
It's pretty great. And then we got to talk about a couple of regional specialties.
St. Louis, I remember when we went there.

When we get back to touring again, I really want to go to St. Louis.

Everyone there was crazy nice.

Yep.

They had really cool, like, regional foods that you couldn't find anywhere else, like good stuff.

Oh, yeah.

It was just a good town.

I want to go back.

But I also want to try the St. Paul sandwich there.

It's egg foo young, but a sandwich.

Yeah.

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. 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 a means of looking up a photo? Yeah, sure.
Let me do that. While I'm doing this, you should check this out.
It's called a chow mein 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 chow mein 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. It is just chow mein 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 mein with just a bun in there somewhere.
It's not the kind of thing you would ever pick up and eat as a sandwich. It looks like Cousin It wearing his hat.
It does. Actually, a little derby hamburger bun hat.
Yeah, it's ostentatious to say the least for sure.

Yeah.

Should we take another break?

Yeah, let's.

All right, we'll take another break

and we'll finish up

with an ode to Panda Express

and P.F. Chang's

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Chang's 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 for big production meetings.
So I can't speak to its quality. It's supposed to be pretty good, right? P.F.
Chang's? Yeah. Yeah, it's good.
I mean, especially for compared to 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 virtually on the same level of dining. Okay.
I'm not taking a shot at it. I'm just saying it's not like the place that you went to in Vegas.
Right, right, right. Or Peking Duck in 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, especially compared to like Chinese takeout.
It's definitely several steps up from that. Okay, I got you.
It's just really hard to, like what high-end restaurant has 300 locations? No, that's a good point. Like when you have 300 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. Yeah, for sure.
And I want to quickly plug, since you mentioned Cheesecake Factory, our, again, friends of the show and friends in real life, Adam Franica 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. Those two could not be any greater American treasures.
Yeah, it's pretty great. I love those guys.
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 the quality is always the same.

Economies of scale.

Well, I was wrong. Apparently they make all their stuff fresh.
It's not like bagged food. Oh, I...
If you believe that. Actually, no, I don't.
It's true. That is a little surprising, but I mean, it's not like I'm hating on Cheesecake Factory.
It's just... I've never been.
Oh, it's... They have a they have a really varied menu.
That's. Yeah.
Yeah. The portions are gigantic and their cheesecakes are pretty great.
All right. Well, I'm going to be a guest on that show at some point.
So next time I'm in LA, we're going to go to one and then I'm going to be a guest. And I can't wait.
Good. Anyway, a long way around describing P.F.
Chang's. There was a woman named Cecilia Chiang with an I in there from San Francisco.
And she, I believe before 1965, before that immigration law, opened a high-end restaurant there called Mandarin. And she said, no chop suey in my menu and no egg foo young.
All this Chinatown stuff is a no-no. And she owned a Chinese restaurant in Tokyo years ago.
And her husband got a diplomatic post there. So that's why she was, you know, doing Chinese food there.

And Mandarin opened in 1961. And that's where all of a sudden people were exposed to like

Kung Pao chicken, tea smoked duck, mushu pork, potstickers, like some of the really good stuff.

And authentic stuff.

Yeah, exactly. She sold her son, Philip, the restaurant Mandarin in 1989, and he is one of the co-founders of P.F.
Chang's. Yeah, Philip F.
Chang, but he dropped the I. Exactly.
So P.F. Chang's, pretty large chain, 300 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 2,000 more restaurants than P.F. Chang's does.
2,300 in the United States, right? Yeah. Food court city, but yeah.
Have you had Panda Express? Yeah, I have. I used to eat 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? Yeah, a couple of times.
And, yeah, it is fast food. And it's great for fast food.

It's just different.

It's not Taco Bell or McDonald's or even like Chipotle or something.

It's just the Chinese version of fast food.

I like it.

Apparently, it's a family-run business, though, even though it's this huge chain.

And in the 70s, 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.
And if you're a fan of orange chicken, you can thank your friends at Panda Express because they debuted it in 1987 and now you can find it basically everywhere. But they were the ones who came up with it.
Yeah. What's your order in a Chinese restaurant or for takeout? I'm trying some Hunan tonight 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. Are you white rice or fried rice? White steamed rice.
Mmm, boy, I gotta have that fried rice. Oh, yeah.
There's too many peas in fried rice, and peas are one of my most hated things on the entire planet. Oh, I love peas.
I hate peas. Yeah, I gotta get that fried rice.
I'll get a lot of sweet and sour chicken or sesame chicken. Gotta get the egg roll.
I'll take a beef and broccoli if people have ordered it, but that's not my order. But I 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. Do you ask them first? What? Like what to order? No.
Can I have some of your order? Oh yeah, for sure. Uh, and then, you know, if you're in a place, uh, 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.
No. I really want some Chinese food now.
It's going to happen. That's the first thing I ordered after our week at the beach in South Carolina after eating coastal seafood, American seafood.

I was like, I can eat some Chinese food. So America is not the only place that took Chinese food and said, here, meet this orange and squeezed it together and then fried it.
That's like I said at the outset, this happened all over the world. And apparently, I'm not on TikTok much as in ever.
but there was a thing on TikTok a couple of years ago where American people picked up on UK, British, Chinese food. And we're like, what are you guys doing over there? 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. I saw that it definitely was by a long shot.
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 in like a sweet and sour chicken.
It's just a fried little chunk of chicken. Yeah, which everybody loves.
Even if you don't eat chicken, you'll eat that. 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. Yeah, like a little chicken finger kind of thing.
Man, poor chicken meat has been, like, subjected to so many different indignities over the years more than any other meat yeah um so india also has a version of chinese food that's so popular that some indian restaurants in the u.s i've not seen this but they'll sometimes have dishes they're called manchurian something or other yeah and i didn't know that either i didn't either i've never run. 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 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. 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 1970s.
And then what they call, would it be Chino Latino? I'm going with Chino Latino. I mean, Chino Latino is what I want to say say because it sounds so great.
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 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. Yeah.
I want to try all of these. I do too.
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 all the way back in the 19th century, basically just like America.
But, and also just like America, as more and more Chinese immigrants have come, higher end, more Chinese authentic dishes have kind of become more favorited than just the Afro-Cantonese version.

Afro-Cantonese just to my ear sounds delicious.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Again, I said it before and I'll say it again.

I really want some Chinese food right now.

Yeah, it's going to happen.

And we're recording earlier, so it's like creeping onto lunchtime right now.

Oh, are you doing it for lunch? I'm going to make myself wait until dinner and really titillate myself.

Oh, no, no, no. I can't get it for lunch.
I'll probably do a skip lunch and order it for dinner. There you go.
But this has inspired me. 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 going to screw it up. But this has made more brave.
Well, if we do Cajun food, we have to consult our good friend and friend of the show, Doug Shachery. Oh, yeah? Oh, that's right.
Doug. Yeah.
When he brought us a boudin balls at our New Orleans show and we ate them on stage. Yeah.
What a guy. He's great.
Oh, he's wonderful. So, yeah.
Plus, his last name name's Shachery, so he knows what he's talking about with Cajun food. That's right.
Well, since we talked about our friend Doug Shachery here on the episode, as was predicted back in 2008. By the way, Chuck, today's the 17th anniversary of Stuff You Should Know.
Today? Yeah, happy anniversary, baby. Wow, happy anniversary, love.
Okay, well, anyway, on to it. As was predicted back in 2008, since we said Doug Chachery's name, we've unlocked listener mail.
Boy, that's about as fanfairy as we get, huh? Yeah, we don't, yeah, we don't, 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.
Who wants to do that? This is a correction. Hey, guys, heard your short stuff on Tulip Mania and wanted to point out that Tulip Mania 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, Tulip Mania, colon, Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age.
The myth was largely promulgated, great word, by Scotsman Charles Mackey in his book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. And he sent along articles from Smithsonian and History.com and even Wikipedia that said, although McKay's, I'm sorry, Mackie's book is a classic citation needed.
His account is contested citation needed. Many modern scholars believe that the mania was not as destructive as described.
I'm a little behind on some of the shows, guys. Perhaps others have written in, but no one else has written in, Richard.
So you're the only one. So way to go.
I've seen that on the Internet here or there since we released it. But I mean, honestly, Chuck, we used a lot of different sources for that.
And 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 I feel a lot of dismay that we released an episode where we were catfished by history.

By the tulip maniacs?

Mm-hmm.

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 too.

Send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio.
For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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