1950s: Cold War Dishes

South India, Not Southern France, drawn by Lucey Bowen from 2009 photograph by Lucey Bowen.

 
     The editorial staples of Gourmet in the 1950s continued to be well-written restaurant reviews, essays on travel and recipes.  Understandably, since travel to France, Italy and Spain was once again possible, those were the main dishes. The provinces of France with their sights, their foods and their wines, were glowingly described and illustrated.
    Asia was dangerous, contested territory. Since the close of the war, American troops had been stationed in occupied Japan, responsible for its military government.  In 1950, as the demilitarization of Japanese forces was completed,  the North Korean invasion of South Korea brought United States forces, into that conflict, and the Seventh Fleet to Taiwan.  Then, in 1955, as the Korean conflict began to wind down, military advisers were sent to aid South Vietnam.
     With the exception of missionaries, and the soldiers, nurses, diplomats and journalists directly involved in the conflicts, Americans had little first-hand knowledge of the region.  Years of legislation had denied citizenship, and sometimes entry, to "Hindus, Chinese and Japanese races."  On the West Coast, the discriminatory policy of interning all Japanese, whether foreign or American born, had destroyed the restaurants, grocery stores, farms and other Japanese economic and cultural resources that had existed throughout towns in the West.  While legislation against Chinese immigration had been eased in 1943, the communist takeover of mainland China meant a trickle of Nationalist Chinese would arrive, via Taiwan.
     Gourmet's task was education.  The teachers were various; the good ones had first hand information to impart.  Z. L. Loo's four part series of accounts of his privileged childhood in early 20th Century China.  Editorially, such essays were triple plays.  Recent Chinese history was reviewed, the basics of the Chinese Confucian ethos was explained, and recipes were included.  That they evoke with nostalgia a lost era goes without saying.  Tao Kim Hai's wife wrote about a meal celebrating his birthday while they were stationed in Korea, and later about an early morning gustatory expedition in Thailand.  Tao Kim Hai wrote of himself as a "Disciple of Ong Tao," the Vietnamese kitchen god.  It is an explanation of how, in spite of Vietnamese society's strict hierarchy of occupations, he was attracted to the kitchen before he could crawl.  His mother was a great supervisor of cooks, but she knew chef wasn't a fit occupation for a gentleman scholar.  If readers had been paying attention, they would have wondered about all the male chefs in America's Chinatowns.
    Several Chinese restaurants were found worthy of mention in the "Spécialités de la Maison" column.  The founder of Lum Fong's was born in Canton in 1886, came to the United States in 1915, and established his first restaurant, at 220 Canal Street, in 1920.  In 1940 he opened a second one in mid-town Manhattan at 150 West 52nd Street.  It is claimed that Lum Fong introduced the egg roll to New York.  When describing the restaurant in 1953 and again in 1955, Gourmet's reviewers, as usual, went to some trouble to mention the names of owners, managers, and in this case, a waiter who was the nephew of the late Lum Fong.
     Tom Marvell, author of the "Spécialités de la Maison' column used his review of the Sun Luck restaurant to inform readers that Chinese cuisine could be broken down into four styles: Northern or Peking, Eastern or Shanghai, Southern or Cantonese and Western or Chungking.  He offered the further advice: go in a group and listen to the headwaiter.
     By 1959 another restaurant, East Horizon, at 116 57th Street, and another reviewer, Alvin Kerr, were on the scene.  Kerr also reviewed Esther Eng's at 1085 2nd Avenue.  He remarked on the Chinese theatrical regalia that decorated the restaurant.  He seems to have been unaware that Esther Eng was a major figure in motion pictures. She made films in Hollywood and Hong Kong. According to film scholar Frank Bren, prior to 1950, she was the most prolific film-maker in Chinese cinema and perhaps its first feminist director.  She even gave Bruce Lee his film debut, as a baby,  in 1941!
     Esther Eng is neglected in accounts of Asians in popular American culture in the 1950s. Non-Asians capitalized on the American fascination with the dangerous and contested territory, and appropriated the narrative for movies and books.
     Examples are numerous, but I'll focus on two which formed my understanding of Asia in the 1950s.  When I saw Rogers and Hammerstein's films, Anna and the King of Siam (1956) and South Pacific (1958),  I wanted to be Anna, I wanted to be Nellie.  I whole-heartedly embraced the idea that an English teacher or an American nurse had something to contribute to the King of Siam, or an aging French planter and his mixed-race children.  (Hopefully, it wasn't Fritos, which an advertisement in the September, 1950 of Gourmet lauded as "A Truly Distinctive American Food.")  What did I know?