![]() ”īut over the years, many of those traditional restaurants closed since second- and third-generation families were less interested in taking over the family business. ![]() ![]() That’s why the food often would all taste the same. “Because of limited language skills and resources, they would share with each other even though they were competitors, and develop the recipes together. “The way the origin story goes, all the immigrants, when they came here in the early 1900s, they would work together with each other to come up with these recipes for a region,” she says. Margaret Yee, the proprietor of Kim’s Restaurant in Troy, Michigan, has served almond boneless chicken at her restaurant since it opened, and she suggests the recipe dates all the way back to when her grandfather opened the restaurant’s former location in Detroit. Though the almond boneless chicken may have originated in Ohio, it’s become so beloved in Detroit that some consider it one of the city’s iconic dishes. “It’s just fried chicken and gravy more than anything else,” he says. Kenny Yee notes that some places in Columbus serve it with a darker gravy with a stronger ginger flavor. Ding Ho, which has been open since 1956, has its own particular blend of spices and makes sure to use broth from simmering the chicken in the gravy there, wor sue gai (as they spell it) outsells everything on the menu at least three to one, according to third-generation owner Steve Yee. Restaurant owners Kenny Yee of Wing’s Restaurant and Steve Yee of Ding Ho Restaurant, both in Columbus, both claim the dish originated in the city: Each had family members who worked at the former Far East Restaurant in Bexley, Ohio, back in the 1920s, where they say war su gai was born.Īt Wing’s, which Kenny’s father founded in 1970, star anise is in the broth that makes the gravy, and the topping is peanuts rather than almonds. The exhibit featured hundreds of Chinese food menus, but none of them named almond boneless chicken, Caputo says. in the mid-19th century, but the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 suspended immigration the early 20th-century emergence of Chinese-run “chow chow” or “chop suey houses” often combined Cantonese culinary traditions with Western flavors. Chinese immigrants, mostly from Canton, started arriving in the U.S. “Sweet and Sour,” a 2011 exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History chronicled the long history of Chinese food and restaurants in America. The origin of almond boneless chicken has proven tough to nail down. Search menus across the country for war su gai or any of its spelling variations, and you’ll find even more iterations, particularly in Ohio.Ī chef prepares almond boneless chicken at Ding Ho in Columbus, Ohio. Start describing this dish to someone from Michigan and the response will be immediate present the same scenario in Cleveland or Columbus, Ohio, and the reaction probably won’t be as instantaneous, but frequent takeout orderers will still likely have some familiarity with a similar dish, there known as war su gai (spelling variations include wor sue gai and war shu gai, which roughly translates to “wok-fired chicken”). “For a lot of us, it was our first exposure to Chinese food we grew up eating it and took it for granted.” “So many people have this longing for it after they leave the state,” Caputo says. After time, Caputo and her transplant friends - also from Michigan or elsewhere in the Midwest - would get together and prepare the version they knew for dinner parties. More popularly, “almond chicken” in America’s wide swath of Chinese-American restaurants would mean a version of cashew chicken, a dish of diced poultry, stir-fried with vegetables and cashews and then topped with toasted almonds elsewhere, the chicken would be appropriately breaded, fried, and almond-topped, but served without gravy. It was served with a drizzle of savory brown gravy and a scattering of almonds, and she knew it as almond boneless chicken.Ĭaputo never found a version of almond boneless chicken in SF’s Chinatown that quite resembled what she’d had in Michigan. The dish, which she ordered countless times growing up at her neighborhood Chinese restaurant, Lotus Pond, involved crispy, deep-fried white-meat chicken, cut carefully into slices and set atop a bed of iceberg lettuce. When food writer Tina Caputo moved to San Francisco, a city renowned for its Chinatown, a few years ago, she searched far and wide for a beloved Chinese-American dish of her Michigan childhood.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |