Epicurean Delights and Enchanting Encounters
In the 1950s and 1960s, several white Americans enjoyed Asian/Pacific cuisines in restaurants across the United States. Although they frequented Chinese restaurants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (when it was considered slumming), during the postwar period, Asian food became even more popular, along with the growing number of Chinese restaurants around the country. And even though dining out at an Asian restaurant was still rel- atively unusual, a night on the town that included indulging in lobster fried rice and beef in black bean sauce was still a meaningful social and cultural experience. During this time, most Chinese restaurants served Cantonese and Mandarin dishes in addition to the more familiar “chop suey”: a stir-fried dish of meat, eggs, bean sprouts, cabbage, and celery in a thickened sauce. Restau- rant owners also catered to non-Asian guests, creating Western-style menus with combination dinners offering a choice of dishes from either column A or
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column B. Owners also decorated their restaurants in ways that played up to white fantasies of Asia and the Pacific. In the 1950s, for example, Trader Vic’s tiki-themed restaurant at the Savoy Hotel in New York City became a huge hit, with customers coming in droves for the tropical drinks, especially the mai tais.12 Although Trader Vic’s purported to serve Polynesian fare, it served mainly Cantonese dishes, which included rumaki (Polynesian hors d’oeu- vre usually made with water chestnuts and duck or chicken liver wrapped in bacon), crab Rangoon (deep-fried wontons filled with crab and cream cheese), and Calcutta lamb curry, as well as egg rolls, fried rice, wonton soup, barbe- cued pork, almond chicken, and beef with tomato. Restaurants like Trader Vic’s were so popular that they inspired copycats like the Kon-Tiki Club in Chicago, which advertised “Escape to the South Seas!” and offered a complete Cantonese dinner for $1.85 to $3.25.13 The craze for Polynesian-style restaurants serving Cantonese food continued well into the 1970s. They popped up in dif- ferent parts of the United States, such as the Oriental Luau, an eatery on a com- mercial strip in New Jersey that featured a popular all-you-can-eat “Hawaiian smorgasbord.”14 Furthermore, several restaurants were designed to provide an upscale dining experience for food connoisseurs and, of course, celebrities. In 1960s New York City, Bruce Ho’s Four Seas restaurant catered primarily to a white, “very good high clientele” who came to enjoy assorted seafood Canton- ese, lobster rolls, spare ribs, and sizzling pork wor ba (over rice).15
While some people traveled from their suburban homes into the city for a taste of Asia and Pacific, others traveled across the Pacific Ocean. In the 1950s, west Los Angeles homemaker Marie Wilson moved to Thailand and had her first encounter with Thai cuisine. Apprehensive and slightly disgusted at first, Wilson eventually became smitten with Thai food for its unique, rich, and highly seasoned dishes that “happily” combined its Indian and Chinese ori- gins. She discovered the greatest pleasure, however, in the cuisine’s hot and spicy flavors: “Thais don’t care whether their food is hot . . . we soon learned that hot food was only a Western idea but we never gave up trying to convince our cooks [that hot] was better.”16 At the same time, Meda Croizat traveled across the Asian continent and became “Gung Ho for Oriental Cookery.” By the late 1960s, Croizat, a gourmet chef, home economics teacher, and “interna- tional hostess” from Santa Monica, California, had had more than twenty years of experience with Chinese (as well as French) cooking and had developed a taste for Thai food, a cuisine described by Croizat also as unique because of the “spiciness of the curries and by the unusual and abundant fruits.” She espe- cially liked the mee krob, a sweet crispy noodle dish that was a “favorite with all of us.”17
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The experiences of U.S. Peace Corps volunteers (PCVs) offer further evidence of how white U.S. citizens, specifically women abroad, approached Asian/Pacific food with curiosity and excitement. PCVs in Thailand fondly remembered their first tastes and smells of Thai food when recalling their Peace Corps assignments during the mid- to late 1960s.18 Marianne May Apple, a volunteer from San Diego, assigned to Trat Province in southeastern Thailand, typed a letter to her parents on May 24, 1966, explaining, “The food really takes getting used to. It all has a distinctive taste and most of it is so hot that you think you’re on fire.”19 In another letter to her sister later that year, Apple wrote:
My teacher . . . usually invites me to lunch on Sat[urday] after I finish teaching. Last time we had crab eggs and blood—good[,] believe it or not! . . . I think I will write a Thai cookbook . . . because I have so many recipes that are of more a variety that those in the book at home.
At her parents’ request, Apple photographed the Thai ingredients and dishes and suggested that the family plant a small Thai pepper plant and find lemon- grass and Kaffir limes in order to make “authentic” Thai food.20
Taste, smell, and sight defined U.S. citizens’ encounters with Asian/Pacific “epicurean delights,” thereby providing a powerful way to anchor ideas about race, ethnicity, and nation in the postwar world. In Marie Wilson’s Siamese Cookery, the first Thai cookbook published in the United States, she promises readers that “new herbs and spices will fill your house with appetizing odors and make meal time and exciting adventure.”21 The spiciness or heat of some of the foods indeed awoke new parts of the palate for the culinary adventurers. But they also allowed white American women to map the Cold War world and its people according to other senses besides sight. Taste and smell also helped them apply meaning to cultural and national differences. As another woman observed, “Satay vendors and their charcoal braziers are a regular feature of the streets. There is a smell of grilled meat mixed with the pungent aroma of fresh red chilies and peanuts typical to this part of the Far East.”22
As anthropologists have demonstrated, sensory perception like taste and smell are cultural as well as physical acts, in that they are infused with mean- ings and ways of knowing that are socially constructed and historically spe- cific.23 Janeth Johnson Nix suggests in her cookbook that taste is culturally spe- cific but implies that it is timeless:
[The] contrast of sweet and sharp, bitter and bland, soft and crisp, subtle and strong. Even hot and cool—not temperatures but flavor. The Chinese, like the
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Indians, feel that “hot” foods (like bitter melon and curry) cool you off, and that “cool” foods (like rice and yogurt) warm you up.24
The love affair with Asian and Pacific food surpassed simply wanting to con- sume new and exciting tastes and flavors. White American women wanted to learn how to prepare the dishes. This required more intimate contact with mem- bers of the local population, particularly domestic servants, which had both negative and positive consequences. According to Marie Wilson, Thai cooks and servants were “indispensable” to helping foreigners adjust in Thailand, especially to shop at the local market and prepare meals. But Wilson also recalled being “either ‘squeezed’ on the food money, or forced to care for dozens of the cooks’ ne’er-do-well relatives, or fed poorly cooked food, or just not fed enough. We felt put upon, deprived, and bullied.”25 Even though her servants introduced the family to Thai cuisine, they apparently often left a bad taste in their mouths.
Other interactions were much more pleasant and involved a semblance of equal exchange, mutual understanding, and emotional bonds. Johnson Nix, a home economist and food writer from California with a self-described “insa- tiable appetite” for Oriental cooking, learned to cook by trial and error while living in Japan in the 1960s—going to shops, buying what looked interest- ing, and trying to concoct something edible. When Nix improved her culi- nary skills, she began giving lessons in American cooking to Japanese women, with whom she also exchanged recipes and cooking methods.26 This sharing of recipes and cooking methods was not uncommon. For example, in Decem- ber 1962 on the Japanese island of Okinawa, a Japanese woman, referred to by Stars and Stripes newspaper only as “Mrs. Thomas H. Luke,” demonstrated how to deep-fry spring rolls to a small group of white American women in her Oriental cooking class at the Naha AB Community Center.27
Although white American women had wonderful memories of preparing and consuming Asian/Pacific cuisine, these memories were more feelings and longings for colonialism, or “imperialist nostalgia.” They found becom- ing acquainted with an exotic culture to be exciting. But they received enor- mous pleasure in food culture because it was during a meal that they felt truly revered, respected, and catered to by “others” whose main goal was to satisfy their needs. Several accounts of this colonial thirst for adventure to be quenched by Asian/Pacific food culture appeared in newspapers and oral his- tories, but the cookbooks from this period best capture the attitude of cultural food colonialism.
In The Original Thai Cookbook, Jennifer Brennan, who lived in East Asia and Southeast Asia for more than twenty years during the Cold War, invites readers
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to experience the romance awaiting them: “It is dusk in Bangkok and you are going out to dinner. The chauffeured Mercedes 280 sweeps you from your lux- ury hotel through streets lined with large, spreading trees and picturesque tile- roofed wooden shops and houses.” Upon arriving at your elegant Thai home, she continues, you are “greeted by an exquisite, delicately boned Thai woman, youthful but of indeterminate age” and served a “parade of unfamiliar and exotic dishes.”28 In her 1958 cookbook, The Far Eastern Epicure, author Maria Kozslik Donovan also takes readers on a journey through Indonesian food culture. Don- ovan, a housewife from Cook County, Illinois, who once lived in a bungalow on the hills of Java overlooking paddy fields, revealed that European colonialism attracted her to Indonesia and influenced her views before she arrived there.29
My culinary visit to the East began with Djakarta. . . . all I knew about the place was that the Dutch called it Batavia, that there was a canal there, a luxury hotel (old travel brochures mentioned it as the Ritz of the Far East!), a club with a clas- sical façade (“ou la Colonie s’amusait!”), and that before the war one could get the best Rijsttafel in the world there.30
One could argue that the burst of new tastes and flavors experienced in Asian/Pacific cuisine alone offered enough novelty for white Ameri- can women. In fact, Brennan once stated that she fell in love with Thai food because of its “indescribable mixture of flavors.”31 For Donovan, Indonesian food, too, was an “intoxicating mixture” of “Chinese, Indian, and Polynesian” influences that reflected the history of cultural blending in the country.32 And when she visited Singapore, she introduced readers to yet another place with a different variety of cuisines, “where all tastes are catered to.”33
These women craved more than just the food, however; they also wanted to be treated like royalty. In other words, white American women became enchanted with Asian and Pacific food culture in large part because they enjoyed the services provided by local natives. During her visit to Indonesia, Donovan’s experience of a rijsttafel, a formal Indonesian banquet consisting of a variety of dishes served with rice, serves as a powerful example of the centrality of service to constructing the fantasy of culinary adventure in the Asian Pacific. Donovan raves in her cookbook about the rijsttafel and provides a dish-by-dish account of the Javanese feast in which a series of “boys” brought out dishes and served the guests. “The first boy appears, . . . barefoot, but in a scrupulously clean linen uniform. The little black Moslem cap is placed firmly on his head. He brings the rice, the basis of the Rijsttafel, and serves you.”34 Donovan then describes in detail the range of dishes that the Indonesian “boys” deliver while the “smell of
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spices tickles our noses in the meantime”: “Opor Daging (slices of beef braised in coconut milk), Daging Ketjap (pork flavored with garlic and soybean sauce), Goreng Ati (fried calf ’s liver), salted and dried fish fried in oil, red hot chilies, and krupuk—frothy wafers made with shrimp and egg white.”35 After the last boy brings out atjar (pickled vegetables), “he steps back and takes his place in the row of silent figures who now watch you from the corners of their eyes.”
Donovan states in no uncertain terms that the rijsttafel’s aura of colonial splendor is what gives it its charm. In fact, it was the Dutch who instituted the rijsttafel as a “tradition” during its colonial occupation of Indonesia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The Dutch colonists wanted to impress their visitors with an array of exotic dishes that demonstrated not only the mul- tiethnic character of Indonesia but also showcased the abundance of their col- ony.36 Even after Indonesia gained independence from Dutch rule in the late 1940s, Donovan explains joyfully that in the 1950s, Dutch businessmen still gath- ered at the Hotel Robertson, a guesthouse facing the famous canal in the capital city of Jakarta, to enjoy the “traditional” rijsttafel. She writes, “In solemn silence, they ate through many courses, nostalgically evoking the past grandeur of Bat- avia, when the Rijsttafel was never less than forty dishes!”37 But more import- ant, despite her attention to the exotic flavors, tastes, and textures, Donovan pays equal, if not more, attention to the actions and behaviors of the Indonesian servants, young boys with bare feet and clean uniforms who, in representing a cross between rural backwardness and civility, are subordinate in status. They are childlike, subservient, and do not talk back. Thus, cuisine and service made Asia and the Pacific into a colonial paradise. Such was the romance of Asian/ Pacific food: it offered more than sustenance; it offered a lifestyle.
Some of the Asian and Pacific food cultures reflect the convergence and influ- ence of many different empires and colonial forces. Macao, a small city on the southern coast of China near Hong Kong, is one of those places, where Portu- guese, Chinese, and American powers collided in the postwar period. In Far East- ern Epicure, Donovan describes her visit in the 1950s and again paints an idyllic colonial backdrop for the reader. “The Pousada Inn in Macao awakens at sun- set,” described Donovan. “In the soft glow of the twilight the blemished, decaying stucco façade is transformed into a stage setting for a Mediterranean romance.”38 But it was the cuisine that made “pocket-sized Macao” a place where one could get a taste of not just China but the world. Tourists wandered around on the city’s sidewalks and indulged in food that was hardly “Chinese”—such as olives and garlic, Portuguese wine, “eels a la Pousada,” and “Chicken Mozambique.”
Donovan also profiles a chef, Angelo, who operated an open-air kitchen on a Macao street. She describes his latest possession, a “three-legged barbeque stove
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streamlined with the same efficient touch that marks all American products,” which he “received from a Chicago store after choosing it from a mail-order cat- alogue.” According to Donovan, Angelo had never traveled outside Hong Kong but had become increasingly “restless” because of an interaction he had had with an American businessman who wanted to open a Portuguese drive-in restau- rant in Los Angeles. During one visit, the businessman found Angelo’s food to be delicious and, upon returning to California, wrote to recruit him to come to California and work as a “blue-ribbon chef” at his restaurant.39
Donovan’s account vividly captures the way Portuguese, Chinese, and American influences played out in the textures of everyday life. The food of Macao certainly reflects this collision, particularly Angelo’s recipe for Chicken Mozambique, a dish that combines Portuguese and East African ingredients and flavors. Angelo got the recipe from African soldiers stationed on the island to “protect” Macao from invasion.
During the 1600s, the Portuguese Empire transported thousands of African slaves from one colony, in Mozambique, to Macao, where they sought to estab- lish another colonial outpost.40 As the African soldiers patrolled Macao, they often came into direct conflict with the local Chinese population. But more important, Portuguese influence and control over Macao waned after World War II as the result of both its struggle for independence from Portuguese rule and global independence movements. It was during this decline of for- mal European colonialism (formal British rule in Hong Kong ended as well) in Asia that the United States began insinuating itself into everyday Macanese life. Angelo’s interaction with the American businessman and his purchase of a new, “modern” American grill from what was most likely a department store catalog underscore U.S. economic and cultural infiltration. Macao’s food culture provides a glimpse of cultural mixing embedded in old-style Euro- pean colonialism and imperialism, as was the case in Indonesia. Yet this cul- tural mixing also was clearly about the influence of a new burgeoning global power: the United States. White American women’s growing fascination with Asian/Pacific cuisine food was not simply a feeling or attitude; it was part of the United States’ global expansion into Asia and the Pacific that secured and facilitated access to new markets, new people, and, thus, new cuisines.