»Imbruce, who's researched the Chinatown produce economy for over a decade, is the author of From Farm to Canal Street: Chinatown’s Alternative Food Network in the Global Marketplace. In the Journal she distills to Kadet the real reason Chinatown can keep prices low: “Chinatown’s 80-plus produce markets are cheap because they are connected to a web of small farms and wholesalers that operate independently of the network supplying most mainstream supermarkets.” While most of the rest of New York's markets get their produce from the Hunts Point Market in the Bronx, Chinatown sellers work directly with small neighborhood warehouses. Since they're operating in close geographic proximity, they can get fresh produce throughout the day from wholesalers, and therefore don’t need a store with refrigeration or a lot of storage space.«
that said, if you've ever walked down Mott St. on a hot summer afternoon there will be no doubt in your nose that the produce isn't making the sanitation grade that you will find at Whole Foods.
Are you sure what you're smelling isn't the fish markets or medicinal herb stores? Produce is produce, it doesn't smell like anything.
Things I've noticed about the particular Chinese food culture of my girlfriend: Ginger goes in Chicken soup. Garlic does not. Broccoli is only cooked until bright green. Black pepper is used, basically never. All vegetables are to be rinsed, even the things in Trader Joe's packages that say "Triple Washed, Ready to Use." Almost no claim on the package should be trusted, ever.
Meat is always well cooked. (And there are plenty of ways to make meat very tasty without having it be super-rare.)
Broccoli and other vegetables are cooked only slightly because it is considered wasteful of the natural qualities of the food to overcook it (and probably because it wastes fuel also, which is also the reason for everything being cut small before cooking).
I blame the French.
Indochina happened.
The biggest evidence for this is Vietnamese word for beef is Bo. Which is a borrowed French word.
http://www.asian-central.com/stuffasianpeoplelike/2010/05/21...
Vietnam is "Yue-nam" in Chinese, and Cantonese is "Yue-yu" in Chinese, whose literal meaning is "Language of Yue".
First, most of the Viet-Cantonese words are likely brought by Chinese migration since the 15th century. When the Ming dynasty fell, many Chinese fled to South Vietnam and helped Viet people annex that land from the Cambodians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoa_people
Second, tt's true that we "might" have lots of connections with the ancient Yue people, but this is still in debate. Just like the Romans called everyone on the other side of the Rhine "Germans", the Chinese of 2000 years ago called everyone south of them "Yue", even though they can be different tribes or nations. Being named the same thing by the Chinese doesn't actually mean anything. Genetically we have many similarities with the people of south China, but the history of vocabularies can be more complicated than that.
I think there's no way Cantonese and Vietnamese don't have lots of connections with the ancient Yue people; A whole people don't just fall off the face of the Earth, unless there was a most serious kind of genocide. Almost certainly Cantonese and Vietnamese can trace some of their ancestors to the Yue one way or another. It's true Chinese at the time called everyone south of them Yue, but it didn't mean they were that much fragmented into tribes. The kingdom of Nanyue has borders pretty much exactly matching Guangdong + Vietnam. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanyue. Nan = south, and so does the "nam" in Vietnam. I don't think that's a coincidence.
But your larger point is very much correct now that I think about it - the history of vocabularies can be very much complicated.
Edit: I concede that Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi are two very different cities and the proliferation of French like restaurant is more present in Ho Chi Minh City as far as I remember.
I mean, that's the correct way to cook it in any context, I would have thought. The whole massively overcooking vegetables thing is thankfully mostly dying out now.
This is really good advice. Food contamination happens, even in your triple washed, plastic bagged veggies.
See steamed chicken where often it will be served with the marrow still red. And it's blasphemy to overcook fish.
Thanks. I think I just figured another one out!
That's not strictly true. There are plenty of classical Chinese dishes - many of them family type dishes - that are composed of raw vegetables.
Also pickling is pretty big in Chinese cuisine, but I guess that's not "raw" in the technical sense.
Lastly, Chinese people love raw seafood - sushi, oysters, etc.
() Chinese-American family.
Which Chinese people? There are approximately zero sushi restaurants in Manhattan Chinatown. There are a whole bunch of sushi restaurants in adjacent SoHo, which is filled with non-Chinese yuppies.
anecdotal: took my Chinese co-worker to The Pokespot takeout for lunch and he immediately turned around and went somewhere else when he saw that the menu contained only raw fish.
Raw seafood is pretty popular in coastal areas of Shandong and Liaoning. Cold seas and pretty easy to identify as fresh or not.
Raw veg in the Northeast in general is fine depending on what it is. Spinach should be cooked because of the way its grown (nightsoil not uncommon) but peppers/radishes OK raw (hanging fruit).
Simply pragmatic food culture responses to how food is sourced, and habits of what's OK or not. A Guangzhou person is unlikely to be OK with raw crawling shrimp in a salad in Panjin, and a Panjin person complains about how seafood in Guangdong is tasteless as the sea is too hot so the seafood grows too fast (despite these conditions making it plentiful).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radish#Seed_pod_varieties
> The seeds of radishes grow in siliques (widely referred to as "pods"), following flowering that happens when left to grow past their normal harvesting period. The seeds are edible, and are sometimes used as a crunchy, sharp addition to salads.[13] Some varieties are grown specifically for their seeds or seed pods, rather than their roots. The rat-tailed radish, an old European variety thought to have come from East Asia centuries ago, has long, thin, curly pods which can exceed 20 cm (8 in) in length. In the 17th century, the pods were often pickled and served with meat.[13] The 'München Bier' variety supplies seed pods that are sometimes served raw as an accompaniment to beer in Germany.[22]
(I hadn't heard of this until I looked. I firmly think of radishes as root vegetables.)
See this article for one datapoint: http://www.worldfishing.net/news101/Comment/analysis/norway-...
- http://www.flavorandfortune.com/dataaccess/article.php?ID=40...
Sushi is very popular in New York, much more popular than the Japanese population alone would support. There are sushi restaurants in neighborhoods where the residents enjoy sushi. The absence of them in Chinatown is an indicator that the residents there (> 90% Chinese immigrants) don't like sushi.
There are plenty of sushi restaurants in Chinatown: https://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=sushi&start=0&l=p:NY:N...
There are also traditional - and popular - Chinese dishes that involve raw fish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yusheng
You have to understand that Chinese people are huge gluttons (I say this without any judgement). They love to eat.. there are even idioms about it!
1) http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/they...
Did you check the results of your yelp search? that's 2 restaurants that are actually in Chinatown and actually serve sushi. An unusually small number for a neighborhood with one of the highest density of restaurants in the city.
Did you read the wiki article you linked? this sentence is in the summary: "While versions of it are thought to have existed in China, the contemporary version was created and popularised[citation needed] in the 1960s amongst the ethnic Chinese community and its consumption has been associated with Chinese New Year festivities in Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore." It's modern, and is a holiday feast meal served primarily by the Cantonese diaspora population. This isn't popular everyday eating, and is basically unknown on the mainland.
Even contemporary sushi/sashimi was not popularized in Japanese cuisine until relatively recently during the Edo period (1700s-late 1800s). Pre-edo times, "raw" fish was mostly preserved fish.
In regards to Chinatown, it's worth noting that many Chinese (and Korean) seafood restaurants also serve raw seafood (sashimi, poke, oysters, raw clams, etc.)
Perhaps Yelp is being too liberal with what they define as "Chinatown", but a quick pass on Yelp with the "Chinatown" area checked, returned the following:
Japanese restaurants:
* https://www.yelp.com/biz/alin-sushi-new-york-4
* https://www.yelp.com/biz/mika-japanese-cuisine-and-bar-new-y...
* https://www.yelp.com/biz/gohan-new-york
* https://www.yelp.com/biz/aplus-sushi-new-york-2
Chinese restaurants:
* https://www.yelp.com/biz/pings-seafood-new-york?
* https://www.yelp.com/biz/oriental-garden-restaurant-new-york
* https://www.yelp.com/biz/chinese-tuxedo-new-york-2
Fusion:
* https://www.yelp.com/biz/cutting-board-new-york
> Place of origin: Singapore
Generally, when we say Chinese, we refer to mainland China and Taiwan, not the Chinese Diaspora. This would be like saying Indian people love chicken tikka masala.
That's true everywhere in the US. It's very hard to find an authentic Japanese restaurant, and even harder to find one run by actual Japanese people. Usually, "Japanese" restaurants are run by Koreans.
In my town, the authentic Japanese restaurant was next to the Subaru and Mitsubishi/Toyota car dealerships, and was pretty much there just so the auto executives had a reliably Japanese place to eat while visiting. It went out of business.
Japanese people may be the best at making a restaurant authentically Japanese, but Han are (anecdotally) much better at making a Japanese-themed restaurant authentically profitable.
Sometimes the clues are really blatant that it's not an authentic Japanese restaurant. There used to be a Sushi place a few miles down the road where the hirigana on the sign spelled out Arikato.
Said dozens of times by my Chinese-born girlfriend in SF Chinatown: "I have no idea what this is." "This is weird."
Immigration from the mainland started picking up after the Cultural Revolution in the late 70s / early 80s through now.
"Chinese" food in the US is mostly Cantonese food. Only fairly recently have you seen an uptick of non-canton style food. The latest trend is Sichuan / Chongqing style of cuisine (spicy!).
My favorite Chinese regional cuisine is Xinjiang cai (food of the uighurs, China's muslim minority group). Very tasty - lots of bbq meats, delicious noodles, and spicy. Also bonus that its halal/kosher.
at least, much more similar to cantonese food than it is to northern chinese food, which in my (cantonese heritage) opinion look more like korean, given its extreme use of sour preserved vegetables and grains.
Also, that's what lemons actually look like.
Not true. Things that are definitely commonly consumed raw include all fruits, some roots and tubers, garlic, cucumbers, onion, herbs and leaves, chilli, sugar cane.
Perhaps your perspective is skewed by a limited, US-only sample. Food preparation preferences are largely regional in China, anyway.
If anything, I'd expect fewer golf balls in my food.
http://nypost.com/2017/04/22/chopped-golf-balls-in-hash-brow...
Hmm. They always cook their rambutan? That's sad.
That said, Thailand has similar market sanitation norms (I almost said "standards", but that gives the wrong impression). They do still have a culture of various raw foods (lahb, nahmtok), and yes, you should probably ask for them "sook" (cooked).
And I don't know what you call chinese food culture, maybe the traditional one 100s of years ago, but nowadays raw beef in hotpot restaurants as appetizers is very popular and sushi/sashimi even moreso, even if you go down to t2 cities. This is chinese food culture right? What chinese people like to eat nowadays in 2017, not like 1850 food culture
Do you have a source for this? Food borne illness goes massively unreported because except in infants and the elderly, it generally resolves by itself. I can only imagine that given the challenges immigrant communities have with getting adequate health care in the US, they are even less likely to report food borne illness. I just can't see the link between "Chinese cook their vegetables more" and no epidemics of food borne illness.
ever wonder why you dont pay sales tax when you pay with cash? (if they are even willing to accept anything else)
real Chinese eat lot of raw stuff, if ABCs don't it must be some of their local fetish
speaking from perspective of someone who lived years in China with real Chinese, ignorance of previous poster is unlimited
On the other hand they also buy from farmers who grow their crops off lands more suitable for farming as well.
Chinese don't eat raw foods at all, and especially not vegetables, which they correctly (by the standards of Chinatown produce) view as being unsanitary until thoroughly cooked.
They have created a market that is efficient by eschewing the standards of sanitation that Western produce markets use. That's not to say that this is bad. Their food culture is fully adapted to it and it doesn't produce epidemics of food-borne illness in their community because they handle and cook food appropriately. The same approach wouldn't work if it was mostly Westerners buying the food though. A taste for raw baby kale salad makes this entire approach to food marketing non-viable.