Fri 20 Jun 2008
A couple weeks ago, I went out for Chinese with some people, and the conversation turned to how un-Chinese American Chinese food is. There were a couple of Chinese people in the group, and they confirmed what we all knew about American Chinese — it’s obviously been altered to suit American palates, and many of the dishes are completely invented “Chinese food”. I found this interview with New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee, where she answers questions about American vs. Chinese Chinese food that was pretty interesting.
Another thing that I’ve found happens a lot, and apparently Manish at Sepia Mutiny agrees, is that people not totally familiar with Indian food will refer to anything Indian as “curry”. Not everything is a curry, and there are different words for different styles of dishes, but I can understand why people wouldn’t necessarily know. Heck, I don’t always know what stuff is called “officially”… But I found that an interesting post as well, along with the comments people posted.
June 30th, 2008 at 10:32 pm
if i wanted to casually observe indian-american culture, would sepia mutiny be the best blog to drop in on?
July 1st, 2008 at 8:51 am
I actually don’t read Sepia Mutiny regularly, but I do read http://www.ultrabrown.com/ which links to Sepia Mutiny sometimes… in fact, I think some of the authors are the same. Sometimes w/ Ultrabrown, though, it’s hard to understand what’s going on, just because some entries require so much previous knowledge of the topic being written about. But it’s good overall.