Culture Building: The Food Edition

Volume 3, Issue 60

April 29, 2016

Culture Building

The Food Edi*on

Chef’s Recommenda>ons Hello Gastronauts!

This month on Culture Building, we're geHng down and delicious with the role of food! As you may know, this topic is near and dear to my heart- I even studied it in school!

When I went in to my first class, I didn’t know too much- I knew that food was important culturally, and I guessed that it could be analyzed in real life. But I didn’t know how- I would not have known where to begin!

And look at me now! All grown up and wri>ng magazines. I’ve come so far- not only can I talk about analyzing food, but I can also conceptualize it as a site of transla>on and interven>on between individuals and cultures. I can apply its theory to literature and to real life, and I can take that theory forward with me to other classes and topics in the future.

And I certainly don’t need any more proof of how important food is!

As for this par>cular topic, let me whet your appe>te a bit: I compiled this issue with the inten>on to explore how food changes culture, and how culture begets food. While I was loosely inspired by J Berry’s accultura>on strategies and Vincent Cheng’s interpreta>on of them (Cheng 204), I also wanted to explore some of the personal experiences I and others have had; personal observances on food influencing culture and culture food. Some>mes it happens in small ways- some members’ cooking incompetence leads to a micro-culture and community of women around the holidays. Some>mes the changes are larger, as American percep>ons about Chinese food and culture created modern Chinese food. In this month’s line up, we get to explore how food and culture interact across the cuHng board.

Food For Thought: Co-on Club Chop Suey I am excited to bring you an experimental new sec>on: Food for Thought! In this

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sec>on some friends and I will research a culturally important place, and then a\empt to make a dish related to it. This month we are taking on the Co\on Club, and making chicken chop suey! We will walk you through the research we did, and the actual recipe, in hopes of shedding some light on what people knew or thought that they knew about The dishes they were ea>ng and the places those dishes came from. We want to talk about people’s percep>ons of food and culture, and how those percep>ons go on to influence and create spaces for new foods and cultures.

Momofuku: A Book Review

This month we reviewed the o]en- praised cookbook

Momofuku, by David Change and Peter Meehan. I’ll tell

you who he is, what this book does, and why it’s so

awesome. Here’s a hint: it involves rejec>ng the cult of

authen>city and an explora>on of how the resistance to

cultural norms can lead to wondrous new foods!

I (SAll) Make It Be-er Reflec>ons on an interview with a dear friend, Tirsana Paudel, as we discuss a food that reminds her of home, how it is important to her, and whether or not she cooks it best out of her family. I par>cularly consider ques>ons of how one adapts food according to the influences of another culture, and how those adapted food create a new culture in return.

The View from Chinatown

An explora>on across two Chinatowns and Barcelona;

what we saw there, what we did not see, and how one

can adopt the dominant culture in addi>on to one’s own,

and how that fusion leads to new foods and new

interpreta>ons of both cultures.

I am so excited to bring you this month’s collec>on- I think you’ll find it a treat!

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The Al La Carte Menu Chef’s Recommenda>ons

$2

The Al La Carte Menu

$4

Food for Thought: Co\on Club Chop Suey

$5

Momofuku: A Book Review

$13

I (S>ll) Make It Be\er

$19

The View from Chinatown

$25

Special Thanks

$36

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Food for Thought: Co3on Club Chop Suey

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Food for Thought: Co\on Club Chop Suey Hello, dear readers!

As you know, we're trying something knew this month. Since this volume is all about food, the making, the ea>ng, the making other people eat-- it seemed only fiHng, nay, it was even required that I get in on the ac>on myself!

This month we decided to research the Co\on Club, and to see what recipes we could find.

The Co\on Club was a club that opened in Harlem, New York, in 1918. It was located at 142nd street and Lenox avenue; the building was first a casino, and then a supper club, before it evolved to the Co\on Club remembered today. Jack Johnson, a heavyweight-boxing champion, ran the club un>l Owney Madden, a pre-prohibi>on gang leader, took it over. Madden le] Johnson as a front man to run the club, and used it as an outlet to sell his bootleg beer. As for the name, no one is certain of why it is the Co\on club. Many theories assumed Owney Madden that it was a func>on of the club's whites-only venue and their rela>ons with the South.

The club was very strictly white-segregated: only the lightest-complexioned black people were allowed in, only a]er careful screening, and not to mingle with the white crowd. Most of the white downtowners, a]er all, only wanted to observe Harlem blacks, not mingle. To that end, almost all of the performers, chefs and wait staff were black, while the audience was white; those staff that were not black were s>ll people of color. Many of our most famous jazz ar>sts gained their fame at the co\on club; Lena Horne, Ethel Waters, Cab Callaway, and Duke Ellington among them. “what happened was that the co\on club sound became a na>onal smash. Before long, nearly every American who had a radio knew of the co\on club” (Haskins 57).

The co\on club was perfectly willing to capitalize on racism directed towards non6 black popula>ons as well. They performed ma>nees of "the Hot Mikado," based

off of Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Mikado." Both plays take place in Japan, and are filled with racist stereotypes about the Japanese. ”Organized civilian tours of Chinatown were a hit among Caucasians in the 1940s, and Cab Calloway captured Shanghai’s lively feel in the refrain to his famous di\y about Minnie the Moocher, whose friend Smokey 'took her down to Chinatown'" (Spiller). Meanwhile, by the mid-1940s Chinese American nightclubs were spreading rapidly in San Francisco, with Forbidden City growing into the na>on's premier all-Chinese nightclub. These nightclubs helped popularize Chinese food in America, as other non-Chinese clubs took their cue from Forbidden City's success. While the Co\on Club offered basic steak and lobster fare, it also offered Chinese and Mexican dishes. Some>mes those dishes were just set under the subheading of "Chinese special>es," some>mes they were listed on a completely separate "Chinese Menu." The menus that we looked at, however, only separated out the Chinese food- all other "ethnic foods" were blended into the common sec>ons like Sandwiches and Soups.

So, what did I make, you ask?

Why that's simple, my dear readers: chicken chop suey!

Now, before I can hear any detractors out there start

up, let me line up a li\le history for you.

There is a reason why I chose to cook chop suey.

Several, even.

Oxford English Pocket Dic>onary The first, let's face it, it because chop suey is delicious. If you don't like chop suey, odds are that you just haven't found the right recipe yet- chop suey is the Americaniza>on of the dish tsaāp suì, which literally means "mixed bits" (Oxford Pocket Dic>onary of Current English). Whatever le]over meat and veggies a chef had could be tossed into a s>r-fry with a cornstarch-thickened slurry and enjoyed.

That, I figure, makes it analogous to the New Orleans po'boy, and it would win points for that comparison alone. Toss in how tasty it is, and I have every reason to make it, whenever I get the chance!

Then there's the history of Chop Suey in America. Did you know that, for much of 7

the twen>eth centuries, chop suey was the single most iden>fiable, "quintessen>ally Chinese" dish (Cheng 201; tour guide)? That makes sense, if you think about it- a lot of Americans did not know anything about China or Chinese culture, and since chop suey is a make-it-with-what-you-will sort of dish, it was very easy to adapt to American taste buds. There’s a lot of debate about where chop suey was invented; some argue it is a tradi>onal Chinese dish, while others propose that it was invented in America, by Chinese ambassador Li Hong-Chang’s chef, deliberately to please both the American and Chinese preferences (Cheng 201). And yet, percep>ons of Chinese cooks and Chinese cooking were riddled with disgus>ng stereotypes, fear, and mistrust (tour guide). Chop suey was a universally loved dish, but almost universally despised for its origins. In response to this, there were “clean up Chinatown” ini>a>ves, a\empts to make Chinatowns and Chinese restaurants as approachable and unthreatening as possible, while s>ll maintaining their “familiar-yet-exo>c” flavor. The tourist parts of Chinatown got brighter and gaudier to match “oriental” stereotypes, and the food got more American to match the hoped-for customers. American percep>ons of Chinatown and the Chinese influenced how those people expressed their culture and changed their food, and those food and cultural changes cemented and furthered American percep>ons of Chinatown and Chinese food. The cycle just con>nued. Soon, everyone from the finest of restaurants all the way down to the McDonald-equivalents served versions of chop suey: it was one of the most recognizable and adaptable dishes.

The Co\on Club served many different chop sueys among their dinner op>ons, including vegetable, "subgum" (literally “numerous and varied”, a dish with one or more meats and vegetables mixed with rice or noodles), and any number of meatbased dishes.

Some friends and I- Emma, Ashvika, Connie, and Ari- were looking through some of the Co\on Club's old menus; "chicken chop suey" was listed on several of them.

Chicken chop suey had the double benefit of sounding delicious, and not sounding like it would trigger any of the group's allergies! (Connie and Ash do not have any food allergies, but between the other three of us we're pre\y much allergic to the grocery store.)

"Aha!" we said, "we can work with this!”

We were cooking in a borrowed kitchen, so the process was a li\le harder than it might have been otherwise.

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Some Co\on Club Menus, the Chinese food marked

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First we went shopping for ingredients:

Original Recipe Ingredients Used

Reduced-sodium soy sauce

Source

Soy sauce

SGA Kitchen

Chives

Haffner

Salt Garlic cloves

Scallions/green onions SGA Kitchen Fresh beansprouts

Canned beansprouts

ACME

Green bell pepper

Red bell pepper

Haffner

Rice noodles

Udon noodles

Haffner

Dark brown sugar

Dark brown sugar

Haffner

Boneless skinless chicken breast

Boneless skinless chicken breast

ACME

Onion

Onion

Haffner and SGA Kitchen

Canola oil

Canola oil

Haffner and SGA Kitchen

Small fresh mushrooms Small fresh mushrooms ACME cornstarch

cornstarch

SGA Kitchen

Celery ribs

Celery ribs

Haffner

Black pepper

Black pepper

Haffner

Water

Water

SGA Kitchen 10

Shopping was actually quite hard, as our local grocery store did not have everything we needed, nor was it easy to find what they did stock. We replaced garlic with chives, some green onions, and some scallions due to my own garlic allergy. We replaced a red pepper with a green pepper because Haffner was out of red, and we used rice noodles from Haffner because no one was gluten intolerant, and Acme did not stock rice noodles, so udon noodles were deemed a suitable subs>tute. For the chicken, We were trying to find chicken breast that were boneless and skinless and not too much over a pound which was difficult because we were not used to buying chicken. We ended up picking the boneless chicken cutlets that was 1.13 pounds. The canola oil was brought over from Haffner, and addi>onal oil was found in the kitchen itself. We used pre-sliced mushrooms from Acme, calcula>ng 8oz to be approximately half a pound. The kitchen already had cornstarch, but there were no fresh bean sprouts anywhere to be found. We finally bought canned bean sprouts in Acme's Asian sec>on, rather than in the canned food sec>on.

As for the actual process, we washed the dishes we were cooking on (an unexpected but necessary step), set the chicken to marina>ng in a the soy sauce and brown sugar while we chopped and sweated the rest of the ingredients in the vegetable oil, each veggie entering and exi>ng the pan successively to result in a flavorful oil . Then we cooked the meat in that oil, finally adding the veggies back in. Undoubtedly the most >me consuming part of the en>re recipe. We served the finished dish over rice noodles, which probably would have been easier to eat with chops>cks than the flatware we were using.

For your viewing pleasure, we complied a video! Despite issues with the camera and filming in a >ght space, we can now bring you over an hour of raw footage, compressed into a mere 11:30 minutes long. Its even got period Co\on Club background music to boot!

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Momofuku: A Book Review

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Momofuku: A Book Review “Momofuku” by David Chang and Peter Meehan. It was not a word I had heard before- it was not a language I recognized, even. I knew that I had picked up a cookbook about ramen and cooking, but not even that was obvious from the cover.

Momofuku starts with a forward, called the Introduc>on, by Peter Meehan.

Therein the reader learns about Meehan's rela>onship and history with David Chang, chef, and how he grew involved in this book to begin with. It does not, however, set up the rest of the cookbook except as a character reference and a third perspec>ve on Chang; in some ways it reads more like a personal essay than the introduc>on to someone else’s book.

The table of contents was probably the most revealing thing at the start of the book; it told me that there were three main sec>ons, called “noodle bar,” “ssäm bar,” and “ko.” Ah ha, I thought. These are restaurants. This book is divided into sec>ons, separa>ng the recipes Chang uses in each of his restaurants. I admit to some confusion on this point before Chang explained it. Without knowledge of Chang and his restaurants going into the book, a casual reader would be very lost.

Author David Chang is a chef, who gained fame through his success with the Momofuku Noodle Bar, and whose star has been rising ever since. Now 39, he is the founder of the Momofuku Restaurant Group, which includes the Momofuku Noodle Bar, Momofuku Ssäm Bar, Má Pêche, Milk Bar, and Momofuku Ko in New York City; Momofuku Seiōbo in Sydney, Australia; the Momofuku Toronto restaurants Momofuku Noodle Bar (TO), Nikai, Daishō and Shōtō; and Momofuku CCDC in Washington, DC. This cookbook, however, only focuses on the Momofuku Noodle Bar, Momofuku Ssäm Bar, and Momofuku Ko in New York City.

This book is an informal nostalgia cookbook, a place where cookbook-meetsmemoir and you can look into the life of David Chang before, during and a]er he opened the Noodle Bar. While it does not stand out as an atypical representa>on of that genre, what is perhaps the most unique thing about it is the overall take away: according to Chang, authen>city is not the point.

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The Noodle Bar tried being authen>c when it first opened, and nearly went belly up with that a\empt. It was once Chang and his co-chef started experimen>ng, using Japanese ingredients to create American flavors, and strange cooking techniques with weirder flavor combos, that they hit it big. A]er that, the whole point of the Noodle Bar was to not worry about "authen>c," but to cook what they want to cook how they want to cook it. So it is not what one could call an "authen>c" ramen shop, if one considers authen>cism to be a template, a recipe that must be followed at all costs. If one considers an "authen>c ramen shop" a shop true to the nature of ramen, a delicious and infinitely variable soup and noodle dish, then Momofuku must be authen>c, for the varia>on follows the myriad possibili>es of ramen be\er than most other shops can speak of. Similarly, it is not an authen>c "Japanese" or "American" cuisine, if "authen>c" means accurate to the le\er of some guidebook. It is very authen>c American cuisine in the sense that it uses a mel>ng pot of ingredients and techniques, and is an authen>c Japanese cuisine in that it took on the spirit of the chef's home, just as ramen has across Japan. As miso ramen is to Hokkaido Prefecture, so Momofuku's ramen is to New York.

Does this flexible authen>cism make it appropria>ve? No. Appropria>on comes when one takes a closed prac>ce out of the socio-cultural context, and then claims that prac>ce for a different culture. To wear a Na>ve American War Bonnet is appropria>ve, because it is an honor restricted to the highest honored in--dividuals, and has layers of cultural and social meaning in context. To wear that war bonnet, without the context and without the culturally granted permission, is to demean and devalue every individual who did win that honor through the cultural means. Ramen, in contrast, is not part of a closed culture- indeed, it has come to be a part of most cultures, making it hard to extricate out beyond the history of it. Historically, its predecessors were Chinese dishes, which moved to Japan, and from there diversified and spread around the world. It does not, as Chang describes it, have any socio-cultural importance, and it adopts the sociocultural context of the chef that makes it. As such, it can not be appropriated, because there is no group or groups that it can be taken from, or given to. Further, even if ramen as a category could be appropriated, Chang took care to situate it within its socio-cultural background. Throughout the book, recipes are preceded by historical, cultural, and social context for the dishes, with the relevant cultural significance explained, but not tampered with. Rarely, if ever, does Chang men>on a tradi>onal dish without aver>ng it somehow- whether he is making bacon duri or

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David Chang

The Noodle Bar

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re-imagined taré, the book offers the tradi>onal insight and then the Momofuku way of cooking.

Part of what makes Chang such an interes>ng cook is his respect for cultures without holding too >ghtly to those cultural norms. He rejects those norms, “marginalizes” himself from those cultures’ expecta>ons, and uses that rejec>on and individuality as an opportunity to create a new food en>rely. Chang’s new food style went on to be so appreciated, that he is now world famous for it. Consider, in comparison, Adrià Ferran. Ferran was trained in tradi>onal Spanish cooking, and then went on to invert everything he had ever learnt to revolu>onize and popularize the field of food. In many ways a leader in the molecular gastronomy movement, his food and his work now influences every cook and chef around the world, whether they know it or not. While Chang is not and may never be a Ferran, his food similarly rejects everything people thought they knew about his dishes, and has also rippled out to influence cooks and food lovers around the world.

As for the recipes themselves, I liked his style. In the beginning of Noodle Bar's recipes, he offers the Noodle Bar's "Momofuku Ramen" recipe, prefacing it with "Ramen = broth + noodles + meat + toppings and garnishes" (Chang 39). He describes the ingredients and their amounts that the Noodle Bar uses, but he also discusses how one might vary the dish as they make it. He offers recipes for some of those ingredients, for his taré, his noodles, his pork belly and shoulder, his bamboo shoots, seasonal vegetables, and even his poached egg. When one looks at any of those recipes, they similarly offer the advice to do what tastes good, and some >ps and tricks about how to get the best flavor of the sort the Noodle Bar favors.

The book as a whole accomplished a decent memoir of Chang’s professional life and the evolu>on of the Noodle Bar, Ssäm Bar and Ko, and the recipes were delicious and generally suited to an average American kitchen. While there will always be more work necessary to disturb the cult of the authen>c, Momofuku also did a good job there, taking the pressure off of authen>city without making it into a conten>ous topic.

Overall, I quite liked the book- while not mind blowing, it was fun, informa>ve and interes>ng. I enjoyed the casual approach to the recipes themselves, and the 17

encouragement that the readers take what they like and leave the rest. I par>cularly enjoyed Chang’s dethroning of the ideal of authen>city; when he thought the noodle bar was going to fail, he specifically said “to heck with authen>city, I’m going to cook what I want to cook,” and it worked. Now, he passes that advice on to his readers, and I love it. I also enjoyed the brief history of each recipe down at the bo\om of the recipe pages- they made for engaging reading, and helped me feel closer to these dishes than twenty-three pages worth of memoir did. The only sec>ons I have mixed feelings about were places in the memoir: on the one hand, they were well wri\en and interes>ng, on the other, the stories some>mes seemed to drag on; I occasionally wished he would skip ahead a bit. Worth the read, but not exactly my cup of tea.

I would definitely recommend this book to ramen enthusiasts, cooking fiends, and anyone who has ever grown so >ed up in the ques>on of authen>city that they were unable to cook at all.

Momofuku's memoirs and recipes, inauthen>c and authen>c but never appropria>ve, inspire the mind as much as the taste buds. Whether or not you ever intend to make ramen, I find it worth the read just for the story.

Sound intriguing? Order your copy of Momofuku today!

Momofuku,

By David Chang and Peter Meehan Published by Clarkson Po\er, 2010 304 pages Many full page full color high quality photographs Hardcover: $27.14 Kindle: $21.99 ISBN-13: 978-0307451958

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I (SCll) Make It Be3er

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I (S>ll) Make It Be\er “What is a dish that reminds you of home ?”

Tirsana Paudel is my friend, a Bryn Mawr sophomore, and a Nepalese-American woman; she was quick to answer. “One of the dishes I love to make is called puri.”

Puri is a type of Nepalese puffy deep fried bread, very so] and golden in color, which is usually served with a potato and tomato soup. Fried, they crackle in the oil while they cook, and a]erwards hiss as they cool and the steam escapes. They smell like fried oil, nothing you could dis>nguish as you walk down the street. For flavor, "They don't taste like anything par>cularly? you know the Chinese wontons?

Where it's just like those fried crispy- it's like that but it's not crispy. You can season it with salt and stuff if you want, but- that's where the soup comes in handy." The soup is potatoes, olive oil, vegetables, and spices, simmered in water for two hours. The puri recipe is even simpler: dozens of thin flat rounds, made of a firm dough of all purpose flour and water, deep fried in olive oil. These li\le dough balls with soup are what Tirsana thinks of as home.

Tirsana started cooking when she was nine or so, and made her first puri by herself at sixteen. Her mom stepped back and let her do all the cooking, start to finish. She says that it was "the first >me I'd ever made something for the first >me and didn't burn anything, you know, it wasn't a disaster." But puri means more than that. It is a special occasions dish, something "grown ups" make when they are having people over, not a meal designed for everyday dinner or for tomorrow's le]overs.

It is a meaningful, fes>val food, the first dish she ever made whose purpose was to celebrate and congregate as much or more than to feed. Culture and food feed into each other: puri gains importance as a holiday dish with "lots of fancy sides" despite its rela>vely easy recipe. Meanwhile, the interac>ons and culture around the holiday are flexed and formed, from recipe changes to holiday-only group bonding ac>vi>es.

She explained that the dish was not something you made just a few of, but it had developed a sprawling and social tradi>on. The women of the family would all come together to form an assembly line, cra]ing huge batches as they bonded and 20

relaxed over the repe>>ve mo>ons. "When you make it you make a lot. My grandma, my mom, or like on my dad's side, all his sister in laws and my aunts, and then my grandma, and they'd come together and they'd just be making puri, [...] it's just, you know, its this one grown up thing that the women just had to themselves, its there way of catching up, it was their way of talking to each other without interrup>ons from children, their husbands- and it's pre\y relaxing too."

In Tirsana's family the dish is pre\y much le] to the women, although she says that is not inten>onally so. She remembers the one >me her father tried to cook puri. "He set off so many smoke detectors in our house, our neighbors were quite concerned. A]er that he was just like 'No. I'm good'." He did not try again.

I find it really interes>ng that puri cooking is theore>cally a non-exclusive space, and yet Tirsana spoke at length about how the women of her family enjoyed their bonding experience and brief escape from their husbands and children. The best way I can explain that is to consider it a func>on of food crea>ng a space for a culture to grow. While puri-making is not technically a gender divided role, it's current gender division creates a space for female bonding and interac>on that does not necessarily exist elsewhere, or does not exist in the same way, during the holiday season.

"Mothers are the storytellers of food in that they pass on the informa>on, recipes, ingredients, and ways of preparing food onto their children through cooking" (Cosgriff-Hernández 130). Tirsana's puri recipe was certainly passed on through storytellers of food, and as was one site of her cultural blending. She learned the recipe from her mother, and her mother from Tirsana's grandmother: the dish is a cultural one, rather than a familial one, so Tirsana presumes that pa\ern con>nued backwards. And yet, at some point in the past, one of those teachers made a shi], and changed the puri recipe. The recipe Tirsana and her mother know requires all-purpose flower, an ingredient that is very difficult to find in Nepal. She believes that the original puri would have called for wheat flour instead. At some point, someone decided to use all-purpose flour, whether because of accessibility or a personal preference; in doing so, they changed the family's cultural narra>ve around that food. Cooks and parents have the “ability to facilitate change through self reflec>ve awareness of their func>ons as parent and role model” (Cosgriff-Hernández 130), and that change trickles down through from teacher to student; when Tirsana’s ancestor made that shi], whether it was a ma\er of availability or loca>on or taste preferences, that choice was made with 21

Tirsana Paudel

22

thought and some self reflec>on. It went on to influence all the puri chefs in Tirsana’s family since then.

Further, Tirsana’s personal recipe specifically requires olive oil, while the tradi>onal recipe would have just called for a generic cooking oil. Even the rest of her family just uses vegetable oil. Tirsana’s specifica>on of olive oil is her personal chance to use food as communica>on; she is the one who made the choice that olive oil was the best oil to fry the puri in. Opening the recipe up to all-purpose flour opened the food and the discussion around food up to non-tradi>onal narra>ves, and nonlocal alterna>ves. Specifying olive oil allowed Tirsana to put her personal stamp on the recipe, and opens up the opportunity to communicate about herself with those who read her recipes or eat her food. If Tirsana ever teaches someone else to make puri, she will likely teach them with olive oil, and pass on that model and preference to them.

Another example: my father’s family has a recipe for the best leg of lamb you could ever find. The first step is to cut the leg in half and put it into two pans. When my dad asked his mother why she did that, she did not know: it was just how she was taught. His grandmother was in the same predicament. Only his greatgrandmother, the recipe’s originator, was able to explain the mysterious instruc>on: she had not owned a pan big enough to hold the whole leg, so she cut it in two. She changed the recipe in order to suit her needs and desires, and influenced three genera>ons of chefs because of it. When my father cooks leg of lamb now, he has a pot big enough for the whole leg and one preferred spice mix, and so the recipe changes again.

I would argue that Tirsana’s recipe create a community, a micro-culture of her family and those who eat her cooking where Nepalese and American cultures and food can cross-inform each other. Adap>ng foods to different places and different cultures requires shi]ing away from tradi>onal foods and cultures, if only because if you simply added all of the ingredients from both cultures to a recipe, then you would not produce the intended dish. When her ancestor adapted the recipe, they created this microcosm of American-Nepalese culture; when Tirsana requires olive oil in her recipe, she shi]s her dishes ever more into a new direc>on.

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It also provides a medium for discussion about family dynamics. Tirsana remembers how, when she was five or so, she walked in on her grandmother teasing her mom about how to make puri "right." "'No, I can do this, I make this on my own when I’m not coming and visi>ng you, and I do it completely fine,” and she looks at me and then she’s like ‘tell her I do it completely fine’. And I’m just like ‘You do it completely fine, ish, but I can do it be\er’."

"Do you s>ll make it be\er?" I had to ask.

"I think so. I think I make it pre\y good."

To Tirsana’s family, cooking, ea>ng, and cri>quing puri are part of a language of rela>onships and power nego>a>ons that they value, whether they are in with family Nepal or back home in Maryland.

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The View from Chinatown

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The View from Chinatown There is, I think, perhaps no place quite as ideologically American as a tourist shop in a Chinatown. Conversely, a Chinatown is o]en one of the best examples of how non-American cultures can survive and thrive in America. According to the Museum of Chinese in America, the vast majority of immigrants to America from China were male, and these men did not necessarily know how to cook. However, once in America they taught themselves, trying to replicate the food that they remembered from home (tour guide). This food, already different from “authen>c” Chinese food by nature of ingredients and knowledge, further changed when in the 1900s a “clean up Chinatown” campaign inspired many restaurateurs to refurbish their restaurants and menus to be “familiar-yet-exo>c” (Cheng 201). As American and Chinese foods merged and mingled, they produced a hybrid food, American Chinese food, and began to develop an American-Chinese culture that respected and reacted to that food. In response, there has also been push back against Chinese American food and culture. Chinatowns o]en are the fulcrum of those ba\les, between catering to what the tourists want and preserving what they know and love. Fusions are o]en at that fulcrum point; when foods merge, so do their cultures, which can create new foods and cultures that merge again. This cycle is part of why fusion restaurants are so fascina>ng to me; in this past year, I’ve even gone out looking for them.

January 31, 2016, Stephanie, Selena and I travelled into Philadelphia's Chinatown, searching for "fusion" restaurants; restaurants that combined two or more food cultures to create a new type of meal. We took the train into Jefferson and started walking.

One of the first things I no>ced was the community’s size. It was >ny. All told, the area we saw was maybe eight city blocks and felt more like four. The weather was cold and wet, so the streets were sparsely populated. As to the buildings, while the ground floors were o]en decorated and with many signs in different dialects, the second floor and above were o]en grey stone or brick, completely indis>nguishable from any other building in Philadelphia but for the occasional lone sign in Chinese.

We'd done some prior research, which suggested that there were at least five 26

Livetrekker Map- Philly Chinatown

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different restaurants in the area that self-iden>fied as "fusion." And yet, upon arrival we found only three of the five, and none of them externally marked themselves as fusion in any way. We walked in circles a few >mes just to make sure. In contrast, we discovered another two fusion restaurants that had not appeared in our research, one of which was T-Swirl Crepe .

T-Swirl Crepe was perhaps the most obviously fusion restaurant around, which is saying something, since there was nothing revealing in the restaurant's name or design other than its sub>tle: "Japanese Crepes.”

T-Swirl's website a\empts to explain. “The story of T-swirl Crepe starts thousands of miles away on the shores of Japan. The Japanese Crepe borrows from a western concept and modernized it into new level of versa>lity that you can gobble on the go. Building on this new concept, T-swirl started to research and have perfected the 100% gluten free rice flour ba\er, to cra] a crispy thin chewy layer that embraces all the decadent condiments" (t-swirlcrepe.com).

If you think that descrip>on sounds remarkably vague, then you would be right .

As it is, we were curious, so we went in and ordered a strawberry banana crepe.

When it was finished, the cook served to us wrapped like a funnel around the ingredients, as much a piece of art as it was food. Nor was it like any strawberrybanana crepe I had ever tasted: layers and layers of custard cream, whipped yogurt, chocolate pearls and pistachios joined the requisite strawberries and bananas.

Delicious, but it did not seem par>cularly Japanese.

As for their other flavors, their menu also offered such quintessen>ally Japanese dishes as “Matcha Azuki Bean,” “Chicken Teriyaki,” and “Lychee Roman>c.” Nearly 28

Our T-Swirl Crepe

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everything else on their menu was closer to “Blueberry NY Cheesecake,” “Angus Short Ribs,” and “T-swirl BLT.” I do not know how successful a fusion it can be when all the chef did, func>onally, was slightly adjust the crepe’s dressing. At the same >me, on the most basic level food consists of the thing-you-serve and the thingsyou-serve-on-it; to change the flour to a rice flour, and toppings to something more Japanese, might be the only way to make a crepe cultural fusion. That the restaurant s>ll referred to their dishes as crepes only added to my confusion. I think of a crepe is a French dish, for all it is served all around the world, and when they did not change the concept of the crepe, the crepe’s ingredients in any no>ceable way, or even really change the toppings, it just feels too familiar to be an exci>ng new fusion.

I found T-Swirl par>cularly interes>ng as a site of a\empted cultural integra>on; TSwirl tries to use their na>ve culture to modify it’s adopted dominant one, and I would argue they fails. Geert Hofstede determined researched how cultures organized and thought; he determined that Americans are generally uninterested in hierarchies or power distances between people, and that they were the most individualis>c-minded country he surveyed. In contrast, Japan is somewhat more interested in observing and preserving the hierarchies and power distances between people, and are significantly less individualis>c. Here is this Japanese restaurant in the middle of china town, which is already a mixing of cultures, whose whole point is to take the western crepe and make it Japanese. The end result should be or a\empt to be a Japanese-like dish. And yet I found it was not. it was, as I found it, an Americanized fancy crepe- I found more obvious conceits to American culture than I found to Japanese or French culture, even in the middle of Chinatown.

"Each bite [...] is iden>cal," brags T-Swirl's webpage. "It is [...] a place of discovery and [to] embrace your soul." Equality in the dishes and the bites. Individuality in the dishes, and taking into account the customer's requests. Everything from the flavors available to the style and mechanism of serving was Americanized; even the descrip>on was Americanized, calling the crepe "western" when they specifically refer to or draw from the French dish.

February 12, 2016, It was not enough just to see Philly's Chinatown; we had to see New York City's 30

Livetrekker Map- New York City Chinatown

31

Chinatown as well!

We road the bus to New York, and took a brief tour Chinatown and the Museum of Chinese in America with a tour guide. A]er the museum, we went to lunch at the Golden Unicorn. There we sat around large tables and ordered as a group; sta wandered around the dining room pushing hot carts with dishes on them, and you ordered the dishes from their carts. Each dish had three or four servings on it, and those were divided around the table. There was food trading and nego>a>on, although not much power renego>a>on that I could see-- it was served, according to Vincent Cheng, much closer to a meal like one would see in China or Taiwan .

A]er lunch, we wandered out into Chinatown. First stop: Noodle Q Inc., a restaurant we'd no>ced. It had both Chinese and English on the sign, a familiar site from Philly Chinatown, and a >ny window-s>cker "Where the Locals Eat.� The

restaurant did not make grand claims about authen>city,

it did not even make a big deal about its local stardom,

and yet, theore>cally, something about it made it worth

no>ce to the local popula>on. On the other hand, the

s>cker was mass-produced and in English. I presume that

it was one of the awards of some local popularity contest,

designed and run by some party from outside of

Chinatown, but I can only guess. Meanwhile, around us the sparse pedestrians were mostly silent; two women speaking in mandarin and a man on his phone speaking mandarin with a Cantonese accent were some of the only excep>ons.

The smells were also muted by the cold and damp weather- we could smell the cold, but eventually we picked up the scent of dried mushrooms. Following the scent, the smell of wet cardboard, raw ďŹ sh and fried food soon overpowered it.

Those scents, we soon discovered, were the piles of trash by a market that displayed their mushrooms outside. The pedestrians around us, more plen>ful here, hurried past us. They might have paid even less a\en>on to us than they did the remnants of the Chinese New Year decora>ons that s>ll li\ered the streets. We heard some of them speaking in English, Italian, Cantonese and French, and a few languages we did not recognize.

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Looking up, we realized that throughout Chinatown, the second floor of buildings were less decorated and even less English-friendly. They seemed to be reserved for residen>al apartments and business offices that were less commercial, or perhaps less American, than the shops below. The sides of buildings were decorated with gargoyles, many of which decep>vely appeared to be Chinese figures at first glance.

The most Americanized shop that we saw was, predictably, a souvenir shop: Chinatown Gi] Center. The store sold every type of souvenir, kitsch, and product imaginable, from clothing and knickknacks to backpacks and firecrackers. It also sold items from the New Year's celebra>ons, from Christmas ornaments and earmuffs to Chinese dragons and party poppers .

March 29, 2016; April 1, 2016 We landed in Barcelona by 8am local >me; by 11 we had reached our dorms and started to disperse in search of food. The first problems we encountered were perhaps what should have been the most obvious: Spain, culturally, runs on an en>rely different schedule than America does. None of the restaurants or stores were open. However, as the stores slowly started to open, we no>ced something: there was no local food to be seen. We passed Belgian fries, tacos, shawarma, burgers, and three different sushi places, but the most Spanish food we could find was tapas. Tapas, which were not open, and which probably should not qualify as local since tapas-as-a-meal is an inven>on by the tourist industry. When we looked closer at these menus, we realized that all of these foreign foods focused on local ingredients. Jamon was common, as were local cheeses and other domes>c products. It strikes me as very similar to how visitors new to Chinatown might feel; the food is clearly not specifically American, nor precisely Chinese, but an odd mish-mash that meets in the middle .

In contrast, on our last night in Barcelona we were sent out to find an “ethnic restaurant.” Emma, Ari, and I found our way to Bro, an American-Argen>nian fusion restaurant. The restaurant was small, and looked like it had been shoehorned into place, across a narrow road from a covered market. Inside was oddly shaped as well; it seems likely that Bro was once part of the neighboring stores, and was since walled off and sold. There were four tables total, the two largest of which were already occupied. Even fiHng three people was a squeeze.

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Pictures from Bro

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One wall was covered in printed pictures of siblings from movies, TV shows, bands, plays, and anima>on. Some of the characters were related through blood, others only in spirit, but if the characters had a strong sibling bond then they were up on that wall. Other walls included a few canvas prints in both English and Spanish, and the menu itself. Bro was primarily a burger joint; the menu was small and split in half between English and Spanish. It consisted of types of burgers, and li\le else.

The restaurant felt quite peculiar to me, over all. For an American- Argen>nian restaurant, it did not express Argen>nian quali>es in any way that I could iden>fy.

As for its American quali>es, it was almost painful how stereotypically American the food and printed out art was, but much of the rest of the decora>on was in the local style of tasteful art and color schemes. The tables and seats were mismatched with each other and the restaurant; some of them, the wooden benches and wooden table, ďŹ t quite well, and some of them, cheap plas>c chairs at cheap vinyl tables, did not. The lack of coordina>on in the decora>on and theme, the cramped style and small menu all felt at odds with what I’d seen elsewhere in Barcelona. All in all, I would not consider it incomparable to an experience at a low quality Chinese restaurant in America, and I found it very odd knowing that my culture was on the other side of that comparison.

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Special Thanks To: Ferran Adrià and Why He Ma\ers." Ferran: The Inside Story of El Bulli and the Man Who Reinvented Food. New York: Gotham, 2010. 13-34. Print.

Andrews, Colman. "Introduc>on." Ferran: The Inside Story of El Bulli and the Man Who Reinvented Food. New York: Gotham, 2010. 1-12. Print.

Chang, David, and Peter Meehan. Momofuku. New York: Clarkson Po\er, 2010.

Print.

Cheng, Vincent (Tzu-Wen). ""A Four-legged Duck?": Chinese Restaurant Culture in the United States from a Cross-cultural/Inter-cultural Communica>on Perspec>ve." Food as CommunicaCon: CommunicaCon as Food. By Janet M. Cramer, Carlnita P. Greene, and Lynn Walters. New York: Peter Lang, 2011.

195-216. Print.

Cosgriff-Hernández, Kevin-Khris>án, Amanda R. Mar>nez, Barbara F. Sharf, and Joseph R. Sharkley. ""We S>ll Had to Have Tor>llas": Nego>a>on Health, Culture and Change in Mexican American Diet." Food as CommunicaCon: CommunicaCon as Food. By Janet M. Cramer, Carlnita P. Greene, and Lynn Walters. New York: Peter Lang, 2011. 115-36. Print.

Haskins, James. The Co3on Club. New York: Random House, 1977. Print.

Ho]stede, Geert. "What about Japan?" The HoMstede Center. I>m Interna>onal, n.d. Web. 29 Apr. 2016.

Karaosmanoglu, Defne. "Remembering Past(s): The Construc>on of Cosmopolitan Istanbul through Nostalgic Flavors." Food as CommunicaCon: CommunicaCon as Food. By Janet M. Cramer, Carlnita P. Greene, and Lynn Walters. New York: Peter Lang, 2011. 39-56. Print.

Museum of Chinese in America Tour Guide. "A Brief History of Chinatown." NYC Chinatown Trip. Chinatown, New York City. 12 Feb. 2016. Lecture.

"Our Story." T-Swirl Crepe. T-Swirl Crepe, n.d. Web. 29 Apr. 2016.

Spiller, Harley. "Late Night in the Lion’s Den: Chinese Restaurant-Nightclubs in 1940s San Francisco." Gastronomica. Gastronomica, n.d. Web. 19 Apr. 2016.

And to all of you, my dear readers! I could not have done this without you!

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By Thea Flurry