A bao in every steamer

FOR SEVERAL years, beginning in the mid-2000s, devotees of Chinese food on America’s east coast obsessed over a mystery: Where was Peter Chang? A prodigiously talented—and peripatetic—chef, Mr Chang bounced around eateries in the south-east. One day diners at a strip-mall restaurant in suburban Richmond or Atlanta might be eating standard egg rolls and orange chicken; the next, their table would be graced by exquisite pieces of aubergine the size of an index finger, greaselessly fried and dusted with cumin, dried chillies and Sichuan peppercorns. Or by a soup made of pickled mustard greens and fresh sea bass, in its way as hauntingly perfect and austere as a Bach cello suite. A few months later, Mr Chang would move on.

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Chinese restaurants began to open in America in the mid-19th century, clustering on the west coast where the first immigrants landed. They mostly served an Americanised version of Cantonese cuisine—chop suey, egg fu yung and the like. In that century and much of the 20th, the immigrants largely came from China’s south-east, mainly Guangdong province.

After the immigration reforms of 1965 removed ethnic quotas that limited non-European inflows, Chinese migrants from other regions started to arrive. Restaurants began calling their food “Hunan” and “Sichuan”, and though it rarely bore much resemblance to what was actually eaten in those regions, it was more diverse and boldly spiced than the sweet, fried stuff that defined the earliest Chinese menus. By the 1990s adventurous diners in cities with sizeable Chinese populations could choose from an array of regional cuisines. A particular favourite was Sichuan food, with its addictively numbing fire (the Sichuan peppercorn has a slightly anaesthetising, tongue-buzzing effect).

Yet over the decades, as Chinese food became ubiquitous, it also—beyond the niche world of connoisseurs—came to be standardised. There are almost three times as many Chinese restaurants in America (41,000) as McDonald’s. Virtually every small town has one and, generally, the menus are consistent: pork dumplings (steamed or fried); the same two soups (hot and sour, wonton); stir-fries listed by main ingredient, with a pepper icon or star indicating a meagre trace of chilli-flakes. Dishes over $10 are grouped under “chef’s specials”. There are modest variations: in Boston, takeaways often come with bread and feature a dark, molasses-sweetened sauce; a Chinese-Latino creole cuisine developed in upper Manhattan. But mostly you can, as at McDonald’s, order the same thing in Minneapolis as in Fort Lauderdale.

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Not everyone is enticed. The same cult of authenticity which decrees that good tacos only come from trucks posits that the best Chinese food is found in humble settings. That is as inaccurate as the snobbery that Mr Huang decries. Chinese chefs are as ambitious as any others; a bowl of noodle soup no more stands for all of Chinese cuisine than a slice of pizza does for Italian.

In any case, authenticity is a slippery commodity. Recipes constantly evolve as people move and mingle. The chillies now considered essential to Sichuan dishes were actually brought to China by Iberian traders in the late 16th century. Hot dogs were originally German, pizza Neapolitan, bagels Polish—but now they are all American, and like America, infinitely varied.

A bao in every steamer: The apotheosis of Chinese cuisine in America