Eating - Jason Epstein [36]
Nom Wah Tea Parlor, on the dog-leg bend of Doyers Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown, was serving tea lunch long before Mrs. Chao’s cookbook was published in 1945, but as far as I can tell hers was the first book to introduce dot hearts or dim-sum recipes to American readers. Several common terms were coined by her with the help of her husband, Yuen Ren Chao, a distinguished if whimsical professor of comparative linguistics at Berkeley. For example, the term ch’ao “with its aspiration, low rising tone and all cannot be accurately translated into English. Roughly speaking ch’ao may be defined as a big-fire-shallow-fat-continual-stirring-quick-frying-of-cut-up-material with wet seasoning. So we shall call it stir fry….”
Mrs. Chao was a physician who had “never stirred an egg” until she attended the Tokyo Women’s Medical School, where she found the Japanese food “so uneatable that I had to cook my own meals.” She adds, in an author’s note to the first edition of her book, that “by the time I became a doctor I also became something of a cook.” Since she admits that she hardly knows English, it must have been her scholarly husband who chose, in his wife’s name, the word “eatable,” from the Old English “etan,” he explains, rather than the more pretentious “edible,” imported from the Latin edibilis. In fact, it is obvious from the text that the professor wrote the entire book in his wife’s name, using her recipes. This also explains why he coined the pronoun “hse” for “he/she” to refer to himself and his wife together, given the lack of a third-person singular pronoun of common gender in English except for the word “one.”
I met the Chaos only once, when they visited New York. Professor Chao was tall, handsome, lean, and slightly stooped, with thick gray hair combed straight back, a Chinese Rex Harrison. His glasses were in the Chinese scholarly style, jet-black circles resting at the tip of his nose, and he wore one of those indestructible gray cardigans favored by elderly Chinese gentlemen at the time. His manner was shy, grave, affable—he was a punster. His wife, much shorter and excitable, was a plump canary, hopping from twig to twig. I could not understand a word she chirped. Had it not been obvious that the whimsical professor had written the text, I would have wondered why the Chaos were still on good terms, since the author’s note was brutally insulting to the husband and their daughter, Rulan.
“I am ashamed to have written this book,” hse wrote. “First because I am a doctor and ought to be practicing instead of cooking. Secondly, because I didn’t write this. I speak little English and write less. So I cooked my dishes in Chinese, my daughter Rulan put my Chinese into English and my husband finding the English dull, put much of it back into Chinese again. Thus when I call a dish Mushrooms Stir Shrimps, Rulan says that’s not English and that it ought to be Shrimps Fried with Mushrooms. But Yuen Ren argues that if Mr. Smith can go to town in a movie, why can’t mushrooms stir shrimp in a dish?” To which one might reply that Mr. Smith goes to Washington under his own power, whereas mushrooms, being passive, must be stirred by the cook.
“I don’t know how many scoldings and answerings back and quarrels Rulan and I went through…. Now that we have not neglected to do the making up with each other …it is safe for me to claim that all the credit for the good points of the book is mine and all the blame for the bad points is Rulan’s. Next I must blame my husband for all the negative contributions he has made toward the making of this book. In many places he has changed Rulan’s good English into bad which he thinks