Egg Foo Yuck by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
I
began reviewing restaurants for the Monterey
County (CA) Weekly (Circulation: 200,000) via a small column called “Side
Dish.” My second column was about how I
came to like Chinese food.
The
following article has been modified somewhat, but I still love Asian
restaurants for being able to whip up Cantonese refried rice with cooked egg
strips, chopped ham, and peas at almost any time of day:
Egg Foo Yuck
My
sister worked as a waitress at the Ho-Ho Inn in Detroit’s (MI) Cass Corridor
across from the Art Institute while in college.
She brought me to work one day and sat a plate of Egg Foo Yung in front
of 5-year-old me.
I
quickly renamed this dish, “Egg Foo Yuck.”
Tears ran down my cheeks as I thought about eating it.
The
Chinese waiter named George in and looked at me. He took the Egg Foo Yuck and threw it in the
garbage.
He
went to the freezer and brought me a coconut and mango ice cream cup. My sister came in and glared at me.
George
said, “She ate everything, so I gave her an ice cream.”
I
smiled sweetly at George. My love for
the Chinese, if not their food, began at that instant.
I
wanted to visit China one day after that despite the fact “China” was Communist
and off-limits for travel during most of my childhood.
In
1978 when I was 14, I raised money with 21 other young people to visit the
People’s Republic of China (Mainland China, which was going to be formally
recognized as the official representative of the Chinese people on March 1,
1979 when we enter China from Hong Kong.)
I
dreaded the culinary side of our visit, because I did not like pork, China’s
staple meat at the time. I was
suspicious of all seafood. My tour mates
teased me about all food, saying the shrimp was really cat, rat, or dog or that
the dog meat was on the next buffet table.
I
subsisted on rice and soup broth for two weeks.
I cringe now when I think of wasting food in a country that still had a
collective memory of famine due to The Great Leap Forward, which featured bad
planning. (5 million people died.)
At
lunch on a commune outside Shanghai, I tried to play down the fact that
Americans had been described in classrooms and in textbooks as foreign devils
until just 2 weeks before when China and the US formally recognized each other
diplomatically on March 1, 1979.
I
was 15 and did not like pork, but I liked pork stir fried with firm, white bean
curd and cabbage. I could not get enough
of that and thanked the commune workers at our after-lunch briefing for the
meal and admitted that I did not like Chinese food until I visited China and
tried that dish.
After
graduation from the University of Chicago, I worked for a translation firm and
boutique PR firm in Chicago. We worked
with both Asian and European firms. We
celebrated many Chinese banquets at House of Hunan and Szechuan House for
clients from both continents at these places.
I
learned to say “xie-xie” – thank you – many times.
When
I was 31, I bought a wok and a Chinese cookbook. (Lo’s Encyclopedia of Chinese
Cuisines. He used MSG, but I left it out
and kept this treasure chest of Chinese food.)
This
cookbook listed different cooking techniques and said that this was “just an
abbreviated list.” I had to relearn how to
chop vegetables. I tried several dishes,
but my family had its favorites:
-Cantonese
rice
-Egg
Drop Soup
-Stir-Fried
Beef in Oyster Sauce
When
my daughter Florence was small, I showed her China on the map and said:
“Rice
grows in South China where it’s hot and rainy in the summer.”
I
pointed to the North and said:
“The
Chinese grow wheat for noodles and dumplings in the North,” I said.
I
showed her how to stir-fry Chinese bok choy cabbage in the wok and hoped that
she would visit China one day loving Chinese food before she went.
By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
Note: Today I use Ken Hom’s cookbooks and Fuscia
Dunlop’s cookbooks to prepare Chinese food.
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