On Mon, 14 Mar 2005, aem wrote:

> Dave Smith wrote:
>>
>> You have to wonder about the authenticity of Chinese food when every
>> region of North America seems to have its own version of Chinese
>> cooking. Around here the only difference between chop suey and chow
>> mein is that the latter is topped with some crisp chow mein noodles,
>> but if you order Cantonese chow mein it is made with the soft
>> noodles, and if you order War Bar you get basically the same dish but
>> with more spice, and some of the noodles are fried crisp. The
>> rudest surprise I had was when I had Chinese food in Winnipeg about
>> 30 years ago. Where I expected bok choy they used cabbage.
>
> This is hardly a surprise if you're just ordering chop suey and chow
> mein. Both of those are catchall dishes--simple stirfries of
> whatever's handy. There's no specific list of ingredients. You'll get
> bok choy if they have it, cabbage (usually Napa) if they don't, carrot
> where the cook likes the color. Differences in noodles are partly
> regional, partly again what's on hand. The crispy chowmein noodles are
> pretty much an American thing.
>
> But if you start ordering specific dishes with traditional names at
> decent restaurants you will find a lot more uniformity wherever in
> North America you are. Mapo dofu or ants climbing a tree or kung pao
> chicken or hot and sour soup, to name a few that have been recently
> mentioned on rfc, are pretty well standardized. Vancouver has such a
> large Chinese population now that you can get the same dishes as are
> served in Hong Kong.

And the standardization comes by way of Confucianism... which made certain
dishes "possible" and others "unthinkable". Chinese cooking is more...
rigid (some might say "fossilized") than most other cuisines.

Hence why there is a good argument that Fusion cooking is better (strip
away cultural inhibitions, and you get something really, really cool...
just like my "Steak Merlot", which combines Indian, Morroccan, and French
cooking....)

Lena