Chinese Menu: The History, Myths, and Legends Behind Your Favorite Foods by Grace Lin

Chinese Menu explores the stories, myths and fables behind the many foods that make up Chinese cuisine.

First up is a chapter on Chopsticks. Lin admits to using chopsticks incorrectly, that her parents from Taiwan, never really instructed as to how to hold them. She uses chopsticks to eat but holds them "wrong", as her older sister likes to remind her.  In this chapter, several stories about how chopsticks came to be invented are told.  In the introduction, Lin writes that chopsticks were probably used as cooking tools during the Shang dynasty (1600 to 1100 B.C.) or Western Zhou dynasty (1100 to 771 B.C.). They were made of bronze and were much longer so they could be used in deep pots and hot oil.

The great Chinese philosopher, Confucius encouraged the use of chopsticks over forks and knives, which he believed were reminiscent of weapons. A man of peace, he felt this was not good dining protocol. So forks and knives were replaced by polished chopsticks. Around 400 B.C., a population boom meant a need to save cooking oil. To do this, vegetables and meat were cut into smaller portions and chopsticks made eating these smaller pieces easier. Eventually chopsticks became rounded, shorter and commonplace.

Lin identifies some the superstitions around the use of chopsticks and recounts several of the stories surrounding chopsticks. For example, do not place chopsticks near the cups, uneven pairs mean possible bad luck and do not place them upright in food! There are many stories about chopsticks including how Yu the Great or possibly the beautiful but selfish Daji, companion of Emperor Zhou may have invented them. Do chopsticks detect poison?

In Chapter 2 Tea, Lin explores the central place tea has in Chinese culture and identity. Tea was first cultivated by China, where different varieties were grown. Tea ceremonies are important as they can serve to honour elders and be rituals of contemplation and respect. In this chapter the author highlights some of the stories that are often told about how Dragon Well Tea, Jasmine Tea, Oolong Tea (often served at Chinese restaurants) and White Hair Silver Needle Tea (a medicinal tea) came to be. Lin also shares one of the many legends about how the tea plant came to be cultivated, a story that is connected to the founding of Zen Buddhism in China.

Chapter 3 explores appetizers. A traditional meal in a Chinese home is usually comprised of soup, rice and three or four hot dishes. However, in Western society meals are organized differently with appetizers, side dishes and desserts. So Chinese immigrants designed their restaurant menu's in this way, but also mindful of the American palate. Instead of tofu, jellyfish and seaweed, they chose street food common in China such as meat kebabs and festival foods like dumplings and spring rolls.

In this chapter Lin tells the story of how the first dumplings came about. The name dumpling possibly originated from the word jiao er which means "tender ears".  Chinese takeout almost always offers egg rolls and spring rolls. Egg rolls are dipped in egg before frying  while spring rolls often have a rice-flour wrapper and can be eaten cold. Spring rolls have been a part of Chinese cuisine for a long time: the story of their invention goes back to the late 1500's and the Ming dynasty. Another interesting story in this chapter is how scallion pancakes became the inspiration for pizza.

Soup is a very common part of meals in China where it is "considered an essential part of a meal in Chinese cuisine." It is possible soup has been served in China for at least twenty-thousand years. It was often used to treat illness. In Chapter 4, Lin discusses soup in general, including how making soup in Chinese cuisine is an exact process, from how meats and vegetables are diced, to the temperature and amount of water used (no water is added during cooking!). The legends behind various soups are presented: from Wonton Soup, Crossing the Bridge Noodle soup originating in Yunnan Province, to Hot and Sour soup (likely adapted from a spicy soup receipe from Henan Province), Sizzling Rice soup to the famous Bird's Nest soup made from siftlet nests. 

In Chapter 5 Side Dishes, Lin explains how the meal in China has changed through the years, from being a meal eaten at "low, individual tables throughout the Qin dynasty" to "shared-dish eating with gong-kai (literally translated as 'public chopsticks') as the shared serving utensil became the norm. The structure of the meal has also changed somewhat in North America from consisting of rice (fan) first followed by cai (vegetables and/or meat) to primarily meat and vegetables with rice on the side.  This chapter focuses on several dishes including rice which is easy to store and cook is a staple of Chinese cuisine. It is respected in Chinese culture because it is difficult to grow as evidenced by the complex system of rice paddies, terraces and irrigation systems the Chinese have developed. It is also used in many religious rituals and is believed to symbolize the connection between Earth and the Heavens. 

In this chapter, legends about how people first received rice, about niangao a special rice cake often a part of Lunar New Year celebrations are highlighted. As well, the history of noodles as part of Chinese cuisine, especially in Northern China where wheat is grown rather than rice, chow mein (stir-fried noodles) and tofu are complemented with wonderful stories.

In Chapter 6 Chef's Specials, Lin finally leads her readers to the main dishes of Chinese cuisine. Because most early Chinese immigrants were from Canton (now Guandzhou), food in Chinese restaurants was mainly Cantonese-style. Lin outlines the eight great regional cuisines of China in this chapter and why many Chinese dishes have elaborate names.

In this chapter readers will learn about Kung Pao Chicken or Gongbao Chicken as it is known in China, Sweet and Sour Pork, Buddha Jump Over The Wall (a type of rich stew that includes quail eggs, duck, chicken, ham and sea cucumbers!), Mu Shu Pork from the Shandong region, the famous Peking Duck, Beef and Broccoli, Emperor Chicken,  and Mapo Tofu (a Sichuan dish that is popular in Asia and very spicy). There's an interesting discussion on Chop Suey a Chinese dish that once was made with animal entrails! and Beggars Chicken, a stuffed chicken baked in mud. 

Finally, Chapter 7 Desserts touches on a few sweet offerings in Chinese cuisine. There is no dessert course and no traditional Chinese word for dessert, as sweets are usually eaten between meals. However, Lin explains some of the sweets Chinese love including oranges which symbolize luck, gold and success, Red Bean Soup, ice cream, and of course Fortune Cookies.

Discussion

Grace Lin's Chinese Menu is a long-overdue book that explains many different aspects of Chinese cuisine, as we know it in America (and Canada). Lin takes her readers on a smorgasbord of Chinese dishes from basic rice, to the famous Bird's Nest Soup and Peking Duck, to tofu, oranges and fortune cookies.

Most North Americans probably know that the food we eat in Chinese restaurants, is not really the food that is served or cooked at home in China. Lin acknowledges this in her Author's Note at the back. "Yes, every Chinese dish served in an American restaurant has been adapted and changed. Yes, many do not have the flavors of traditional Chinese cuisine and are unlike what you would find in China. But Chinese American cuisine is the flavor of resilience, the flavor or adaptability, the flavor of persistence and triumph. Above anything, this food is the flavor of America." 

As she remarks in her Note, the Chinese immigrants who faced racism, violence and hardship, "...used their cuisine - their cuisine with its rich and wonderful histories and myths - to survive. They constantly adapted and changed their recipes to use the ingredients that were locally available..." The result was the creation of a new cuisine, that of the Chinese diaspora. 

Lin wrote this book partially to dispel the notion that American Chinese cuisine is a "cheap" food offering compared with European cuisine, such as French or Greek food. Although Chinese food was often offered at bargain prices to attract diners, there was plenty of hard work by American Chinese to not only to adapt cuisine from their homeland dishes, but to establishing their restaurant clientele. 

As she so aptly demonstrates in Chinese Menu, Chinese food has a rich history with each dish having stories, myths or legends about how they were created or how their sometimes very unique names came about. Organizing her book according to a menu one might encounter in a Chinese restaurant, allows Lin to provide an overview of each category and then focus on some of the more common offerings. And to give her Western readers some context,  Lin provides not only a map of the provinces in China, but also a historic timeline of the various dynasties and the foods she writes about in the book. 

Chinese Menu offers readers the opportunity to better appreciate not only Chinese cuisine but also the rich culture that underlies each dish they might encounter the next time they have Chinese take-out. Lin discusses the importance of dragons in Chinese culture and mythology, Chinese history and festivals.  Accompanying each chapter is Lin's beautiful artwork, rendered "in pencil on tracing paper and then scanned, retouched and colored in Adobe Photoshop." The extensive Bibliography at the back is evidence that the author has done extensive research for each chapter to back up her own rich cultural experience. 

Chinese Menu is an exquisite and informative book with a beautiful cover that invites young readers inside. Highly recommended!

Book Details:

Chinese Menu by Grace Lin

New York: Little, Brown and Company    2023

288 pp.

Measuring Up by Lily LaMotte & Ann Xu

Cici loves life in her small town in Taiwan. She especially loves going to the morning market every Saturday with A-ma, her grandmother. She often cooks with A-ma, surprising her mother with things like tsui-kiau. Then one day Cici learns that her family is moving to America, but her beloved A-ma will be staying behind in Taiwan. Cici want A-ma to come with them, but she explains to that it is difficult to get a Green card. A-ma makes Cici promise to wash the rice, and Cici makes A-ma promise she will come visit next year when she turns seventy, which is an auspicious birthday.

Cici and her family move to Seattle, Washington. On her first day of school Cici makes two new friends, red-haired Jenna and Emily. But Cici is humiliated at lunch when her lunch of Taiwanese food attracts the attention of her classmates. As their friendship grows, Cici struggles to fit and and worries about being accepted. She's invited over to Emily's home, along with Jenna. Cici has fun, but when she learns that this was supposed to be a sleepover, she runs into trouble trying to explain this strange American custom to her parents.

Cici misses her old friends in Taiwan but she especially misses her beloved A-ma.Cici and her dad try unsuccessfully to convince A-ma to visit as each holiday comes about; the Lunar New Year, the Moon Festival and the Lantern Festival. Cici knows she has to think of a way to bring A-ma to America. She tells A-ma that it is only three months until her seventieth birthday and that her father would be cheered by her visit. A-ma agrees to come but doesn't know how she will pay for the plane ticket. Cici tells her she will figure that part out and asks her to keep her visit a secret.

Cici's friends try to help, offering suggestions as to how she can raise the money. One day while walking home with Jenna, they spot a sign for a kids cooking contest, Platinum Jr. Chef. The winner will earn a one thousand dollar prize! Cici signs up.

Cici tells her mother about her plan and she is impressed but she warns Cici that her father will be worried if her grades begin to slip. Cici begins practicing cooking so she will be ready for the first round of competition which begins in two weeks.

Can she pull of a win, earn the prize and bring her beloved A-ma to America?

Discussion

Measuring Up tackles some of the sensitive issues many new immigrants encounter as they settle into life in a new country. There is the struggle to be accepted in their new country, while maintaining many of the traditions and beliefs of their home culture. And in the case of many young Asian immigrants like Cici, there is the burden of dealing with intense parental expectations.

LaMotte captures Cici's stress about making friends and fitting in. Cici is not happy about leaving her home and friends in Taiwan but she has no trouble making two new friends. She wants badly to fit in and so she quickly ditches her Taiwan lunches after being teased about her pickled cucumbers looking like worms. The author highlights some of the common Western prejudices and misunderstandings about Asian culture through Cici's schoolmates. For example, during a visit to Emily's home, Emily speaks slowly because she believes Cici can't understand English very well. Her American classmates who learn that she is in a cooking contest,  assume Cici is Chinese, not understanding that there are many different Asian cultures and view Chinese food as "takeout" food and not real food.

But Cici eventually discovers that she and her friends are not so different. When they visit her family home and see the family altar, Jenna explains how her mother lights candles for her Irish grandparents and Emily tells her mother keeps her grandfather's ashes in an urn on the mantlepiece.

Both Cici and Miranda, her partner in the cooking contest are struggling to cope with parental expectations. Miranda's father owns a restaurant and his expectation is that she will someday work there and take over. However, she confides to Cici her big secret, that she doesn't want "to be a great chef or run the restaurant." She tells Cici that "Cooking isn't my thing. It's my dad's" and that she really wants to be an artist like her mother and draw comic books. Cici is surprised because Miranda lives in a large home with a state of the art kitchen and doesn't have the pressure of having to get good marks like she does.Eventually Miranda does tell her father what she wants for herself.

Cici's parents' motto is "good grades, good college, good job, good life". As a result, her parents expect Cici to get very high marks. When Cici confesses her plan about the cooking contest to her father, he tells her that studying is more important. "But it is important that you spend your time studying. You could eventually be the head of a research lab.You could be better than me. You see that right? It isn't wort h a few days of celebration for something that could affect the rest of your life." Cici begins to wonder if she wants what her father for her or if she wants something very different. She envies Miranda's opportunity to take over her family's restaurant because she wants to be a chef and not the head of a research lab.

Two weeks before the final round and instead of focusing on Cici's accomplishment of making it to the final round, her father is concerned about her studying for her math test. When Cici doesn't quite get her usual excellent mark on a math test, she lies to her parents and eventually her father learns about her mark. He insists that she quit the competition, explaining that she must work harder than American students to prove herself. However, Cici manages to convince her father by telling him how much it means for her to win and bring A-ma to America. Eventually Cici's parents come to see her cooking as an accomplishment, but only after she wins the competition.

While some of the story feels a bit contrived, for example Cici and her friend stumbling last minute onto a cooking contest that offers such a significant (and convenient) prize, the issues tackled in this graphic novel are all too real. Many new immigrants must bridge two cultures while satisfying the expectations of parents and new friends - they must measure up on more than one front. This novel  not only succeeds in highlighting these issues but LaMotte has managed to create and develop a cast of characters that feel realistic and engaging.

Measuring Up is Lily LaMotte's debut graphic novel and here's hoping there will be more graphic novels by this promising author. The story is very much helped along by the lovely illustrations of Ann Xu. The digital illustrations were created by using ink on paper and Adobe Photoshop.

Book Details:

Measuring Up by Lily LaMotte & Ann Xu
HarperAlley      2020
205 pp.

A Book For Escargot by Dashka Slater

Dashka Slater's delightfully sweet picture book, A Book For Escargot readers are treated to the second story about Escargot, that dashing, suave French snail. C'est un regale that breaks the cuteness meter and is sure to delight readers young and old.

In this adventure, dashing Escargot is on his way to the library to find a book, but not just any book. He's tired of eating salads. He dreams of something much more scrumptious and so he wants "a French cookbook, filled with delicious French recipes."

Along the way to the cooking section, Escargot is amazed at all the wonderful books in the library. But he does find it upsetting that there are no "books about a daring snail hero who saves the day."

But Escargot laments the lack of books "about a daring snail hero who saves the day" and suggests that the reader might want to write a story about a "very beautiful French snail hero" based on him. And so he imagines beginning to write such a book as he slimes towards the cookbook section.

Eventually, Escargot makes it to the cookbook section where he finds what seems like the perfect book, The Art of French Cooking. This book will help him find something to make besides a boring salad. But Escargot makes a startling discovery about French cooking and comes up with a satisfying solution to a book that views escargot in a way he never imagined!

Discussion

In this  picture book, Escargot is cheeky and he knows it. From the very beginning he has no doubts about himself, telling readers, " It can be very distracting to have a very beautiful French snail staring at you while you read."  He very innocently suggests some classic children's books, with a decidedly gastropod theme. He even suggests that the author of a book about a snail hero might be modeled after his "most beautiful parts, like my shiny brown shell or my translucent tentacle of my chic outfit." By his own definition, he is "handsome, suave, and smart." And when he shockingly discovers the real reason French cooking involves escargot, he retreats to his shell, where he is "not hiding but more like having a private moment."

Bringing this humorous tale to life are the colourful illustrations by Sydney Hanson. She usually works with pencil crayon and also watercolours. Hanson, a certified naturalist, is well known for her lovely animal illustrations and she perfectly captures the cheekiness of Escargot as he innocently seeks out a French cookbook. A Book For Escargot demands to be read with a French accent. Nothing less than that will do!

Book Details:

A Book For Escargot by Dashka Slater
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux      2020