Jewish customers embraced Chinese food in return. Joshua Eli Plaut writes in his book A Kosher Christmas : 'Tis the Season to be Jewish that the Chinese, as non-Christians, didn't perceive any difference between Anglo-Saxon New Yorkers and Jewish immigrants they accepted all non-Chinese customers with open arms. They came to New York City seeking new business opportunities, and some opened restaurants.īy and large, Chinese restaurateurs didn’t discriminate against Jewish customers. After its completion in 1869, these laborers faced violence and discrimination in the western states. to work on the Transcontinental Railroad. Many Chinese immigrants had initially come to the U.S. Right next door to the burgeoning Jewish community on the Lower East Side was the city's nascent Chinatown. "They were often criticized not only for not dressing like Americans and not speaking the language, but also for not converting to an 'American' religion." While Jewish immigrants found community on the Lower East Side, "there was a lot of discrimination against Jews at the turn of the century,” Lohman adds. “You started here, and then moved on," Sarah Lohman, author of Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine, says. Between the mid-1800s and the 1930s, waves of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Germany, and Greece began settling in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a gritty, inexpensive neighborhood teeming with tenements, docks, and factories-and filled with synagogues and kosher butcher shops. Jews developed their love for all things steamed, stir-fried, and soy-sauced after leaving the Old Country.
But as historians and culinary experts tell Mental Floss, other ingredients play a part in this delicious story. Suddenly, egg rolls with pork were fair game, transfigured into permissible delicacies through hunger and willful ignorance.Īs Gentiles feast on turkey and roast beef during the Yuletide season, why do many Jews opt for chop suey? For starters, it's convenient: Chinese restaurants are open on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. The future restaurateur's grandmother kept a kosher kitchen, but outside the home all dietary laws flew out the window with the single spin of a Lazy Susan. And just like his customers, Schoenfeld and his family sometimes craved Chinese food on Christmas, eschewing homemade fare for heaping plates of chow mein and egg foo yung. While his expertise lies in Far Eastern cuisine, Schoenfeld grew up in Brooklyn and learned to cook from his Eastern European grandmother. Schoenfeld is the Jewish owner-operator of RedFarm, an Asian-fusion dim sum restaurant with two locations in New York (plus one in London), and Decoy, a West Village shrine to traditional Peking duck. “We serve all day long, we stay open all day long.” “I think on that day we do more business than many restaurants do in three months,” Schoenfeld tells Mental Floss. Here, we’ve got Dunlop’s wide-ranging wok expertise down on paper, so you’ll know all about the crucial components of wok cookery when you shop for and cook with your pan.For Jewish New Yorkers, scoring a seat at one of veteran restaurateur Ed Schoenfeld’s Chinese eateries on Christmas Day could be compared to a holiday miracle. At a Chinese meal, there are many different types of dishes on the table at one time, and, “probably most of them will be done in a wok.” Stewing, steaming, boiling, and deep-frying are all in the wok’s wheelhouse. “It is the main cooking pot in a Chinese kitchen,” she says.
That means you can crank up the flame, get the pan really hot, and, by moving the food speedily around in the scalding pan, turn ingredients into dinner in almost no time.īut stir-frying isn’t all a wok can do, Dunlop wants us to know. “A wok distributes heat very evenly from the base and up the sides, and because of the steep sides, you can move food around in it,” explains Fuchsia Dunlop, the author of Land of Fish and Rice: Recipes from the Culinary Heart of China as well as several books about Chinese cooking. With the busy cook’s obsession with quick meals, it’s no wonder that the speed of wok cooking has captured the attention of most home cooks in the West.
Barely a minute or two passes before the finished dish is scooped out into an awaiting bowl. Wok cooking is all drama-high flames that curve around the underside of the dome-shaped pan as fragrant clouds of smoke cloak the stove, while vegetables and meat soar through the air above the pan, propelled by the chef’s practiced toss.
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