Chinese Cooking in the Diaspora

The Chinese kitchen abroad grew chiefly from the emigration of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when villagers from Guangdong, above all from the Pearl River Delta and the Siyi districts, and from Fujian and Chaozhou, sailed to Southeast Asia, the Americas, Australia and Europe. Grace Young's The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen draws on the home cooking of that Cantonese emigration, as it was carried to San Francisco and kept alive in family kitchens, and it is the thread followed here.

The first Chinese cooks overseas were labourers, miners, railway workers, laundrymen and small traders, and the cooking they made was the cooking of their home districts, adapted to what the new country sold. In California and elsewhere the Cantonese set the pattern, so that for generations the word Chinese food abroad meant a Cantonese-derived repertoire: stir-fries, steamed fish, congee, roast meats, soups and rice. Young's book is valuable because it records this cooking from inside the family, where the dishes were not restaurant inventions but the daily meals of households that preserved the habits of Guangdong in a foreign city. The wok is the clearest instrument of that continuity. Young writes of the seasoned carbon steel wok as the centre of the Cantonese home kitchen, and of wok hei, the breath of the wok, the smoky character a stir-fry takes from fierce heat and rapid movement. Carried abroad, the wok met domestic stoves far weaker than the flues of a Chinese kitchen, and cooks learned to work in small batches, to heat the pan until it smoked before the oil went in, and to keep the food moving, so that the technique survived even where the equipment did not match it. The pantry travelled in the same way. Dried shrimp, dried mushrooms, salted fish, preserved vegetables, fermented bean products, soy sauce and rice wine were the portable flavours of the emigrant kitchen, keeping through long voyages and through seasons when fresh ingredients were scarce. Young's attention to the family table also records how the festival calendar was kept abroad: the Lunar New Year feast with its dishes chosen for the names they carry, the steamed whole fish, the dishes of dried oyster and hair-like black moss, and the winter soups simmered for the household. The restaurant trade grew beside the home kitchen and often departed from it. To please customers who did not know the cooking of Guangdong, cooks in many countries devised dishes of their own, sweeter, more thickly sauced and more abundant in meat, and these became established forms in their own right, with their own histories in each country. Alongside them the home repertoire persisted, and Young's account is a reminder that the two were never the same table. The diaspora is not one cooking but many. Hokkien and Chaozhou emigrants shaped the kitchens of Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, Hakka cooks settled widely, and in later decades migrants from Sichuan, Hunan, the Northeast and the Northwest opened tables that broadened the picture. What the older Cantonese kitchen abroad shows, through Young's record, is a cooking held together by technique, by the pantry and by the family meal, and carried across oceans by people who were not chefs but cooks at home.

The taste of the emigrant Cantonese table is one of clean, restrained seasoning: ginger, spring onion, soy sauce and rice wine used to bring out the freshness of fish, vegetables and poultry rather than to mask them. Meals are built around rice with several shared dishes, a soup, and at festivals dishes chosen for the auspicious meaning of their names, and the pantry of dried and fermented ingredients supplies the deeper, savoury notes beneath.