[URBAN NOTE] "How Chop Suey and Ginger Beef Helped Canada Discover Itself"

[rfmcdonald]

Nick Rose's Vice article is a wonderful examination, with many hunger-inducing photos, of how Canadian Chinese food came about and what its genesis means.

Last summer, Elyse Bouvier got into her beat-up Volvo station wagon and drove across Alberta in search of something very personal but very foreign.

It was not any kind of spiritual epiphany or Kerouacian pursuit of freedom. Instead, she ate and took dozens of photos of ginger beef at tiny Chinese restaurants across rural Alberta. Through the lens of her camera, she was trying to capture a cuisine that is ubiquitous and mysterious in Canada, and the trip culminated in an exhibition called Royal Cafe: Chinese-Western in Alberta.

But the journey of reconnecting with Canadian Chinese food is not unique to Bouvier. It’s the same one embarked on by chef Evelyn Wu and professor Lily Cho, each of whom have used their professional lens to better understand the food brought to Canada by Chinese immigrants over a century ago—food that remains a staple of the Canadian diet.

[. . .]

Ginger beef is an iconic Canadian Chinese dish made of battered and deep-fried beef and coated in a thick, dark, sweet, vinegary sauce. It’s the perfect springboard off of which to jump into the murky waters of Canadian Chinese food and its origins.

Ginger beef is indigenous to Alberta but can be found, it’s safe to say, on pretty much any Chinese takeout menu in Canada. But like its American cousin General Tso’s chicken, you’ll have a hard time finding anything resembling ginger beef in China—it doesn’t exist. It is neither Chinese nor Canadian, and yet it is both.

So how can one food occupy such a strange, culturally ambiguous place in Canada? Part of the reason is that Canada was, by all accounts, a very strange and culturally ambiguous place when Chinese immigrants arrived here during the second half of the 19th century. And like a lot dishes, from General Tso’s chicken to poutine, a lot of restaurants claim the inventor’s throne, but there is no definitive evidence to support these claims.