If you’ve ever pondered the origins of chop suey, wondered who the heck General Tso is or spent hours analyzing a fortune cookie message, “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food” by Jennifer 8. Lee is the book for you.
Scratch that. Lee’s inquiries into the cultural and historical phenomena behind Chinese food and its amazing spread around the world are so fascinating that anyone who has ever eaten a single egg roll should read her book.
That would be just about everyone, said Lee, a New York Times metro reporter.
In the United States alone, she writes, about 40,000 Chinese restaurants outnumber all the country’s McDonald’s, Burger Kings and KFCs combined.
“Chinese food has become an American comfort food in part because it is predictable,” Lee writes. “At times it seems that America’s Chinese restaurants operate as a single giant, pulsing entity, a lively example of one of the most fertile research areas for biologists, sociologists and economists: spontaneously self-organizing networks.”
Chinese food has also made its way to the world’s seven continents and is even available to astronauts as part of NASA’s thermostabilized menu, she writes.
Lee takes readers around the United States and the world as she probes anything and everything related to General Tso’s chicken, the fortune cookie and chop suey.
The book features captivating sections on human smuggling of Chinese restaurant workers, Chinese take-out menu wars on New York’s Upper West Side and virulent disputes in the international soy sauce trade — turns out most of the soy sauce packets Americans get with their take out actually contain no soy.
Another chapter pulls the curtain back on the secret travails of fortune cookie message writers, detailing their struggles with writer’s block, plagiarism and cutthroat competition. (Fortune cookies, by the way, originated in America.)
And then there are the restaurant reviews. Lee traveled from San Francisco to Lima, Peru, to the African island of Mauritius in search of the best Chinese restaurant outside China.
Want to know where it is? Go buy this wonderful book.
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