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On why their intestines are other’s chitterlings…

Length: 6 mins

I start this post with a thought from Jennifer McLagen’s “Odd Bits”:

“Although we suggest that you clean the intestines before using, many ethnic cultures prefer them to be left alone. The undigested food within the intestines is regarded as a delicacy, much like the tomalley of the lobster.” From “Offal: Gourmet Cookery from Head to Tail” by Jana Allen & Margaret Gin, 1976.

Or one could just brush if off and say this choice is simply following the “one man’s meat is another man’s poison” axiom.

But of course, it’s so much bleaker than that. The sharp intestinal smell, possibly of imminent decay, maybe just of proto-shit — certainly as perceived by Western noses — is of course exuding (to non-Western nostrils) the same stench of racism and discrimination and cruelty as has always assaulted their senses along the history of this type of food. ‘Food’ that was given to slaves, to servants, to those labouring in the railways, down the mineral mines and on the docks, given to the poor, as after all, that’s really no more than they deserve, isn’t it? Whitey has/had the money, the capital, the law, the power, the whip hand. And the whip. So, you don’t get to say “no” to him. You don’t get to choose your food. You take what’s given. And you better be grateful. Or at least pretend to be.

Jennifer 8. Lee in “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles” talks saying NO, about refusing to take that offered choice referring to gao, similar in its vividness of colour and textural unfamiliarity to tomalley:

“Our crabs burst forth with weird colours and textures. The goopy orange paste, called gao, was the best part, my mom told me.”

Roe inside steamed female hairy crab
©Jpatokal Taken at Yan’s Shanghai Fine Dining, Singapore.

You see? That difference is there again. Only this time, the ungratefulness comes from an American born Chinese girl (an ABC as she describes herself), who saw this food as marking her out as different. And not in a good way. She just wanted to fit in. The food she had at school, the food her white friends ate, was nothing like this. It certainly wasn’t brightly coloured and gloopy… She didn’t want her parents to give her gloopy. She wanted fish-fillet sandwiches on white bread (well, at least when she was young, she did).

In US Chinese food, that willingness to adjust the old to help the new, is never more apparent. There’s crab Rangoon via the Midwest, Philly cheesesteak rolls (egg rolls on the outside, cheesesteak inside) and the chow mein sandwich of New England. The new Chinese food does not have to originate in China. It’s not traditional. It’s not “authentic”, at least not to some people. Except that of course it is equally authentic. It’s been produced by immigrant Chinese people, to primarily feed other immigrant Chinese people. And then, later on, to sell to white people.

I think that a driving force behind immigrant Chinese (and other) cooking is the desire (often driven by the necessity for some measure of safety; read about the Snake River Massacre as just one example of why they felt this imperative) to adapt, incorporating indigenous ingredients whilst utilising Chinese cooking techniques.

Ever wondered why the two industries, cooking & laundry were chosen by immigrants? Because both were seen as “women’s work”; thus not a threat to men’s trades and unions…

So, diaspora cooking is not a set of dishes, rather a philosophy, that serves local tastes with local ingredients. On this side of the Atlantic, the English perception of “Indian food” was indelibly shaped by the people who actually cooked it here. People mainly from Bangladesh. Not from India.

Just like China, India is a hugely disparate country of multiple foods, indigenous groups, cooking styles, ingredients  and cultural (& more so in the case of India) and religious dietary strictures. Whilst as early as the mid 18th Century, the London (& other ports) Chinese & Indian populations started arriving as sailors or crew, we native English didn’t start eating their foreign food in any significant numbers, until well into the 20th Century. That induction into the joys of ‘Indian’ food was led mainly by these Bangladeshi cooks, coming to England, first to find employment — even with crappy working & living conditions — in the 1950s, followed by a further influx in the 70s, fleeing the war against Pakistan. The Thatcher induced mass unemployment in the 70s forced many to open restaurants. Calling them ‘Indian’ was sensible; I mean until The Concert for Bangladesh, few English people even knew of its existence, let alone be able to point out the country on a map and far fewer still would know what their food comprised.

Your beloved chicken tikka marsala — a new ‘inauthentic‘ plate of food — came into existence because of these pragmatic, unsung cooks. Just post-WWII in 1946, records would suggest maybe only 20 restaurants or small cafes (which were owned by Bengalis) existed; that number had risen to 300 by 1960; by 1980, 3,000+ had been setup and now there are over 12,000 Indian restaurants in almost every town & village high street across the UK, the vast majority of which are still Bangladeshi owned. And without their re-vamping of the classic Indian “butter chicken” dish, what would you all be ordering in takeaways and from supermarket “ready-meal” shelves?

See how Tesco brand it “A taste of India”…

Tesco chicken tikka marsala

Hey, but that’s not authentic Indian you say? Bollocks. It’s now a classic of UK Indian cooking, one exported to pretty much everywhere. Even if people in the sub-continent would be hard pressed to recognise it…

But intestines though? They are still a hard sell, well, at least to many Western palates. For most of the rest of the world? Not so much. Why would they choose to discard them, indeed to waste anything that can be cooked and eaten from an animal, one that you or your neighbour or the local farmer has spent time, energy and money in bringing to a killing size. Eat everything, fool!

That said, I’m not convinced that I’d choose to have those ‘pre-filled’ intestines referred to by Allen & Gin. But that’s just me being a little squeamish. Stupid even.

And finally, let me point you at a video from Jennifer; and urge you to go out and buy all her books. Including “Odd Bits” which does such a good job on intestines…

And finally, finally, I finish with this Eater piece on the recent allegations of plagiarism by Elizabeth Haigh in her book “Makan”. A book I was looking forward to and bought — in advance — at full price (unusually for me) mark you. In response to the claims, it’s now been withdrawn from sale by her publisher.

Makan by Elizabeth Haigh
©Joe Yonan/The Washington Post

I’ve not been on Twitter for some weeks now & rarely look at the ‘Gram, so this furore had passed me by. The Eater article, by the always excellent James Hansen is very well worth a read; whilst it seems to show quite clearly that this is almost certainly Haigh copying ideas, recipes and whole paragraphs from the older book…

Haigh & Makan plagiarism

…equally it speaks to the ways that the West has demanded that cookbooks and writing from ‘ethnic’ writers be formatted and recipes measured which is so very different to the way that these same people cook; in effect they’re being strait-jacketed, restrained, bound in by, those Western expectation and methods and memories that aren’t theirs.

Haigh & Makan plagiarism 2

One upside to this (should I even use “unsavoury”) episode is that it has also alerted me to that plagiarised earlier 2012 family memoir by Sharon Wee, “Growing Up in a Nonya Kitchen” which is apparently now going to be re-issued. And has been added to the “buy as soon as possible” list…

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