Food is a cultural nexus in many ways. It brings people and traditions together. It connects different nationalities as they try each other’s cuisines. It is a practice that reinvents itself every day in kitchens across the globe.
Like music and storytelling and other folk arts, food and food writing are subject to questions about originality. Cooking is an evolving practice, shared across continents and generations.
It’s hard to find an original recipe. I have come up with only one recipe in my life that I believed was truly original, my rhubarb fritters. I later found out (not surprisingly) that others had created this dish before me.
My mother had her own spin on meatloaf, which she inherited from my grandmother. Neither of them invented the concept of turning ground meat into a shaped, baked substance, however.
Recipes are difficult to copyright. U.S. copyright law specifically avoids giving copyright protection to lists of ingredients, in large part because it’s entirely possible for individuals to come up with the same food combinations independently, as I learned with my rhubarb fritters.
Headers, directions, and general information that accompany those lists of ingredients can, however, be copyrighted. Even so, it is only fair when a food writer like me “borrows” a recipe idea from another cook to give credit to the original source. I try to do this as much as possible.
Cultural appropriation is thornier than originality. We live in an era of fusion cuisine. Celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck began blending Chinese and French traditions four decades ago in his restaurant Chinois on Main.
Over Christmas, my family took me to one of their favorite Florida eateries, Inchin, which combines flavors from Indian, Chinese, and other Asian cultures.
I choose to believe that these mergers of food traditions represent cultural appreciation rather than cultural appropriation. Still, I worry a bit. Our “melting pot” has a long tradition of stealing traditions from other cultures and profiting from the theft.
This is particularly true of Chinese cuisine. Oddly, many so-called Chinese dishes in this country, Chop Suey among them, were created by Chinese cooks looking to please the American palate. They may use Chinese-cooking techniques, but they did not originate in China.
Perhaps my favorite faux Chinese dish is Chinese Chicken Salad. I love Chinese flavors, I love chicken, and I love salads. I make this dish acknowledging that it didn’t come really from China.
Fortunately, its purported inventor, Sylvia Cheng Wu, was Chinese. She was also a cook and a personality to emulate.
Sylvia Cheng was born in Jiujiang, China, in 1915 and moved first to Hong Kong and then to the United States in the 1940s. She was pursuing a degree in education in New York when she met King Yan Wu, a chemist. The two married, had children, and moved to Los Angeles.
Madame Wu, as she liked to be called, had grown up in a wealthy household but had always enjoyed watching her grandfather’s cooks prepare food. She eventually learned to cook herself.
In 1959, appalled at the unsophisticated Chinese food available in California (“Chop suey everywhere!” she told a newspaper), she opened a restaurant called Madame Wu’s Garden in Santa Monica.
The delicious cuisine, along with Madame Wu’s glamor and grace, attracted Hollywood glitterati.
Her Los Angeles Times obituary noted, “Elizabeth Taylor came in after the premiere of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ Robert Redford always asked for Booth 55, secluded in a dark nook. Mary and Jack Benny celebrated their 46th anniversary, just weeks before the actor’s death.”
Sylvia Wu’s favorite movie star (and one of my own) was Cary Grant. Both Grant and Benny wrote blurbs for one of the restaurateur’s books, “Madame Wu’s Art of Chinese Cooking.”
Grant’s was typically witty and “masculine”: “Any bachelor who wants to pitch woo, should get a copy of Madame Wu. And WOW!”
Benny’s fit his humorous persona: “I enjoyed it so much, an hour after I read it, I had to read it again.”
(Younger readers may not recall the old joke about Chinese food that maintained that one was hungry again an hour after eating it.)
Madame Wu prided herself on presenting a more authentic version of Chinese cuisine than her clients had experienced in the past. Still, she didn’t mind straying from tradition.
“Her enthusiasm for the new was as strong as her reverence for the old, and she was always landing on another way to please her audience, grow her business and show off the finesse and beauty of Chinese cooking,” Tajal Rao wrote in The New York Times. “She had moves.”
Madame Wu’s most famous invention — of course, we should take the word “invention” with a grain of salt — was her Chinese Chicken Salad.
According to legend, it was inspired by her beloved Cary Grant, who told her about a salad he had enjoyed elsewhere and wanted to try again. Madame Wu went into the kitchen and came up with a dish that would become famous.
The salad has changed over the years. Madame Wu’s chicken was served over undressed vegetables, and mine (adapted from The New York Times) tosses the greens with a tasty Asian-fusion dressing. Still, in any form it has become an American tradition.
Vivian Ho paid tribute to Madame Wu and her salad in Saveur magazine in 2022 on the occasion of the restaurateur’s death at the age of 106.
“Chinese chicken salad … belongs to a category of cuisine that’s as old as the first Chinese immigrants: not Chinese. Not American. Chinese American,” pronounced Ho.
I thus feel comfortable making, and adapting, this salad. And I enjoy paying tribute to a cook who like me loved food and people and had vanity plates on her car. Mine read, “TINKY.” Hers read “MMEWU.” Although she drove a Rolls Royce instead of a humble Honda like me, I sense in her a sister behind the wheel.
Above all, I endorse Madame Wu’s view of cooking as an act of love. “Chinese people do not show affection by kissing and hugging,” she declared, “but rather by preparing special dishes for those they want to please.”
Chinese Chicken Salad
Ingredients:
for the dressing:
3 tablespoons rice vinegar
3 tablespoons sesame oil (toasted, if possible)
1/2 teaspoon hot chili oil (plus more to taste if you like spice)
2 tablespoons peach jam
2 tablespoons mayonnaise (this seems unlikely, but it helps the dressing stay together)
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 teaspoon chili powder
for the salad:
2 cups torn or chopped cooked chicken
8 wonton wrappers, cut into thin strips
Canola or peanut oil as needed for frying the wonton strips
salt as needed
1 1/2 to 2 hearts of romaine, coarsely chopped
1 to 2 pickling cucumbers, cut into small pieces
2 scallions, chopped
1 handful fresh cilantro, chopped
2 Mandarin oranges, peeled and divided into segments
Instructions:
In a large bowl, whisk together the ingredients for the dressing. Taste it and add ingredients to taste. When I made it last week, my soy sauce and sesame oil seemed a little strong so I increased the peach jam.
In a saucepan or skillet, heat 1/2 inch of oil. You will know it is hot enough when a wonton strip bubbles when put into the pan. Gently add strips, a few at a time, to the hot oil, and fry them until they are golden (this won’t take long), stirring with tongs.
Remove the strips from the oil and place them on paper towels to drain. Sprinkle salt on top of them.
Re-whisk the dressing and add the chicken to it. Toss. Add the romaine, the cucumber, the scallions, the cilantro, and half of the wonton strips. Toss.
Top with the remaining wonton strips and the orange pieces. Serve. Serves 2 as a main course.
Tinky Weisblat is an award-winning food writer and singer known as the Diva of Deliciousness. Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.
