Quote:
Originally posted by RT14@Sep 27 2005, 02:21 AM
I have three questions:
1. Why does Chinese food in Canada taste so much better than Chinese food in China?# (There's some good stuff here, but most is just disturbing) and,
2. Why don't they have all the same food here as a Chinese restaurant in Canada would have?# ie. eggrolls, springrolls, schezhuan(sp?) beef, special chow mein, etc.
The closest I've found to chow mein is choa mian pian, but it's not really even close.#
2. Why don't they have fortune cookies in China?
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1. The Chinese Food in Canada is typically regarded as not authentic Chinese. They are dumbed down dishes for Western consumption...or in many cases they were completely invented here by immigrants trying to appeal to the Western palatte. IE: Ginger Beef was invented in Calgary and you won't even find it in Chinese menus in Eastern Canada. When my friend got off the plane from Toronto, the first thing he requested was beer and ginger beef
You probably just didn't encounter the more traditional dishes because they are harder to know and only exist on the complex Chinese menu. If you order fish for example, you will indeed get the whole thing including the head and eyes. If you order Crab, you get the actual shell and the brain, etc. can be eaten. A common dim sum food and also in Vietnamese Pho noodles is tripe - cow stomach lining. High in surface area!
2. Because again, none of what you listed is really considered Chinese food by the Chinese. Maybe some form of roll or chow mein as in some noodle dish but most of what you find don't really exist in real Chinese cuisine. Egg rolls and spring rolls are never ordered by Chinese as the course of a meal. They are really more like appetizers that you have during dim sum. And China is a huge country. Regional cuisine is different in every part. Beijing is northern Chinese mainly. If you want food closer to what you are used to in Canada, try Southern China like the Guangzou or Hong Kong areas because that's mostly where the Chinese immigrants came from originally so their food spread first. Something like "Schezhuan" is actually a south-central province in China, it's a prefix to show where the food came from to be able to differentiate regional foods. Chinese people don't all look the same so why should the food, there are millions of varities, mostly regionally distinct. Would you expect to eat good Cajun food in Nebraska?
3. Fortune Cookies are not Chinese. Like many of the answers to 1. and 2. They are actually post WWII inventions of American restaurants copied off a Japanese snack. According to Wiki, they are indeed non-existant in China except for a few places that sell them as "Genuine American Fortune Cookies".