Don’t Take Me Out: Flavors of Chinese American Takeout Histories

Cookbooks are archives of culinary culture. As society changes, so do cookbooks, and as takeout is becoming increasingly popular, so is—perhaps ironically—the takeout cookbook. While one of the most compelling advantages of takeout is not having to cook yourself, several of today’s cookbooks specifically offer recipes imitating popular takeout dishes that can be prepared by their readers, which is to say, their cooks. Rather than scrolling through an online delivery app, those cookbooks invite us to close UberEats, Doordash, Deliveroo & Co. and instead go out grocery shopping and spend more time in our kitchen. What might appear paradoxical at first, enjoys global popularity; especially in the Anglophone world.

Taking a closer look at two examples of Chinese American takeout cookbooks, this paper explores the potential of the takeout cookbook genre to preserve, in this case, Chinese American cultures and histories, while simultaneously breaking with common conceptions of an “ethnic cuisine”1 and contextualizing often overlooked aspects of its traditions. Although takeout may commonly be perceived as a trivial aspect of people’s daily lives, these two examples serve not only as archives of contemporary culinary tastes but, by historicizing and contextualizing Chinese American recipes, they also serve as archives of culinary histories.

Considering the immense impact of the pandemic on the food and restaurant sector, and with new food delivery apps regularly entering app stores, the demand for takeout and food delivery is growing substantially worldwide.2 In the US, takeout certainly plays an important role in people’s daily lives and although American food culture is a melting pot of different ethnic cuisines, some clearly enjoy greater popularity than others. According to a 2016 statistic, “Chinese” is among the most favored cuisines in the US. Interestingly, while it ranks only fourth when it comes to eating out (49 %),3 it is the second most popular option for both takeout (38 %) and ordering in (48 %).4 So, with more than 40,000 Chinese restaurants throughout the United States,5 Chinese cuisine is not only ‘a vital part of American culinary culture,’6 but is also more commonly associated with eating on-the-go or at home than with dining at a restaurant. In this light, it may come as no surprise that, with the emergence of the takeout cookbook genre, Chinese American takeout cookbooks have also gained momentum.

However, what is now considered popular, or even mainstream, cuisine is rooted in a history of not only Chinese immigration to the US but also of hostile treatment of Chinese immigrants.7 With the California Gold Rush and the subsequent construction of the Transcontinental Railroad resulting in a massive wave of migration attracting travelers and immigrants searching for prosperity from all over the world, Chinese migration to California also increased during that period.8 Although many of them were tradespeople looking for ways to make money, and food businesses ‘were among the earliest economic activities pursued by such pioneer Chinese immigrants,’9 Chinese-owned restaurants were comparatively few in number and did not become popular until later in the 19^th century. This was due to anti-Chinese sentiments and xenophobic narratives such as the ‘fear of a “Yellow Peril,”’ that led to numerous exclusionary immigration laws like the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.10 These laws were aimed at preventing further Chinese immigration and ‘mak[ing] it difficult for existing Chinese American communities to endure.’11 Among other things, the exclusion laws largely prohibited Chinese immigrants from acquiring citizenship, owning property, and finding employment in most industries, which in turn, resulted in the establishment of many Chinese-owned businesses such as laundries and restaurants.12 Despite ‘[w]ork competition, racial hostility, and the exclusion laws,’13 Chinese (American) restaurants would soon not only become enormously popular but also leave their mark on American culinary culture,14 including takeout and ultimately, the US cookbook market. By adapting traditional Chinese dishes to local tastes and ingredients, recipes were modified and new dishes were invented, creating a distinct Chinese American cuisine. As demonstrated by, for instance, the previously mentioned survey, the American public seems to perceive this culinary tradition as Chinese rather than Chinese American cuisine. To recognize the Chinese American culinary history, its transformation and blending of cuisines, this paper will speak of Chinese American cuisine when applicable.

A Fresh Take on Take Out: The Takeout Cookbook Genre

The term “takeout” today commonly refers to both the product i.e., the ‘prepared food packaged to be consumed away from its place of sale’ and to the sales location i.e., the ‘establishment selling takeout.’15 The concept of consuming prepared meals at another location is, however, by no means new. Looking back to, for instance, ancient Greece, people then enjoyed quick on-the-go meals bought at what are believed to be the first takeout restaurants—so-called thermopolia.16 Later, when the first modern takeout restaurants in the United States were established in the 1920s, restaurant owners found that offering takeout options proved profitable because they could sell ‘a larger volume of food than their dining areas could accommodate.’17 In the 1960s, drive-ups became standardized and changed the way takeout was distributed,18 and by the turn of the century, with the founding of Grubhub in 2004 and many more online delivery services following in the subsequent years, the way takeout found its way to our doorsteps was modified once again. Finally, takeout and delivery services gained tremendous momentum with the outbreak of the pandemic, when dining out became a temporary thing of the past. As convenience turns into a (forced) habit, one might ask: ‘[W]hy cook when you can have your favorite food delivered to your door with just the click of a button?’19 The phenomenon of the takeout cookbook, however, reverses this aspect of convenience and asks: Why get takeout when you can make it yourself?

I understand the takeout cookbook to be a cookbook subgenre. Looking at takeout cookbook titles, it becomes apparent that most of them follow a similar title pattern. They often include an ethnic cuisine such as “Thai”20 or “Chinese” and sometimes also an “ideological commitmen[t]”21 such as vegetarianism or veganism, which is then followed by the term “takeout” or “take-away”—depending on the variety of English used in the respective country. Other recurring patterns include the mentioning of “favorite” or “classic” dishes, promoting healthy, quick and/or easy cooking, and appealing to the at-home cooking aspect. In short, the takeout cookbook seeks to draw readers in through the familiarity of its recipes and emphasizes the convenience aspect of preparing takeout dishes at home. As an example, the title of Diana Kuan’s The Chinese Takeout Cookbook: Quick and Easy Dishes to Prepare at Home (2012)—which we will come back to in this paper—denotes the book as specific of an ethnic cuisine, i.e. Chinese. It includes the term “takeout,” promises fast and simple recipes and lastly, it seeks to appeal to potential buyers by promising that all of that is possible from the comfort of their own home.

In his Cookbook Politics, Kennan Ferguson argues that cookbooks with national titles like “Chinese Cooking” or “Indian Cuisine” ‘implicitly presum[e] the universality of a nation, promising the cook that she can experience and recreate the food of that state.’22 Similarly, while takeout cookbooks might not necessarily presume the homogeneity of a nation since they do not replicate the culinary culture of the said nation-state, they imply a universality of an (ethnic) cuisine. They aim at replicating recipes of an (appropriated) takeout culture with which their readers are familiar. Likewise, many titles that include words such as “favorite” or “classic” suggest a particular canon of takeout dishes to which potential readers are accustomed. This, in turn, creates expectations about the contents, i.e. the recipes, of these books.

Another commonality is the better-than-takeout claim, i.e., either the title or the introduction of a takeout cookbook makes the claim that replicating takeout at home is better than getting takeout, either because it is healthier, cheaper, or because it simply tastes better. The introduction to Dan Toombs’ The Curry Guy: Recreate Over 100 of the Best British Indian Restaurant Recipes at Home (2017), for example, illustrates this, in which he states that

‘...[i]n the time it takes to pick up your favorite Indian takeaway, you could be sitting down to a collection of delicious starters, curries, rice and naans that are even better and a lot cheaper.’23

Toombs thus argues that, despite the presumed inexperience of his hobby cook readers, with the help of his recipes and directions, they can make ‘even better’ Indian dishes than long-experienced Indian restaurant chefs.

In other regards, the takeout cookbook resembles more traditional forms of the (ethnic) cookbook. Both Kuan’s The Chinese Takeout Cookbook and Chris Toy’s Easy Chinese Cookbook: Restaurant Favorites Made Simple (2020), which will be discussed later on, follow a similar structure: starting with an introduction to the cookbook, they move on to a chapter on the “typical Chinese pantry,” including spices and sauces, to allow the reader to familiarize themself with the ingredients, whereas Toy especially highlights the diversity of Chinese cooking traditions and ingredients. When it comes to the recipe section, both cookbooks’ structure continue to follow a similar, and familiar cookbook pattern: moving from appetizers, soups and salads, to various forms of main dishes including poultry, beef, pork, and lamb, to vegetables, noodles and rice, to deserts and finally, to ideas for entire home takeout menus. Nevertheless, the most striking commonality is that both cookbook authors touch upon their own family background, larger historical developments, and their own relationships to the cuisine. In this lies the educational potential of this subgenre, which we will circle back to later in this paper.

Archives of Culinary Histories

To come back to Chinese American cuisine: if we understand it to be an appropriation of Chinese food, does Chinese American takeout add another layer of appropriation to it? In an Eat Your Words podcast episode, Kuan states that she

‘...really wanted to do a book on Chinese takeout food because it’s part of a larger Chinese American food genre, which is a genre of its own and there’s no cookbook out there already that [...] knowingly focuses on that.’24

By situating her cookbook within Chinese American culinary tradition, Kuan refutes the misleading singularity or “culinary unity”25 of her cookbook title. Publishers Weekly, too, perceives Kuan’s recipes to be ‘classics of mainland American-Chinese cuisine.’26 In writing that ‘Chinese takeout is in many ways an all-American cuisine,’27 Kuan highlights and makes explicit the relationship and symbiotic ties between Chinese and American cuisines. Throughout her book, Kuan historicizes and contextualizes some of her dishes, viewing Chinese American takeout as ‘a natural by-product of Chinese immigration.’28 By illuminating historical aspects of an often trivially perceived aspect of people’s everyday lives, Kuan invites her readers to engage with the stories of this food genre that have been, in her view, underexplored. This also elicits questions of authenticity: Is Chinese takeout in the US authentic? What makes (takeout) food authentic: The cook, the recipe, the consumer? Can Kuan’s recipes be thought of as authentic Chinese cuisine, of Chinese American cuisine, or of neither? Kuan reflects on similar questions in her introduction and states:

‘I avoid using the word “authentic” whenever possible, because all cuisines have evolved from somewhere … Food almost always changes, and needs to change, across provinces, countries, and continents, adapting along the way to use local ingredients and to suit local tastes.’29

Instead of dismissing her cookbook as inauthentic, she asks: what defines authenticity? Kuan argues that since food is in constant flux when interacting with different culinary cultures, it has to ‘adapt to local produce and to local people’s taste.’30 Hence, Kuan understands Chinese takeout food as the ‘product of the American melting pot, [as] authentic in [its] own right’31—the result of adaptation and time—and as a genre of its own. Similar to how cookbooks can serve as culinary archives, takeout cookbooks can serve as archives of culinary histories—preserving not only flavors but also what those flavors might mean to people. They can serve as an entry point to delve into the stories behind a food genre that might have not meant much more to people than a quick and easy meal.

Chris Toy’s Easy Chinese Cookbook illustrates a similar dynamic. It promises its readers recipes for dishes such as Fried Wontons,32 Beef and Broccoli,33 General Tso’s Chicken34 or Crab Rangoon,35 all of which are dishes invented on American soil and are rarely or not to be found in restaurants in China. Egg Rolls,36 Orange Chicken,37 Egg Foo Yong38 or Hot and Sour Soup,39 on the other hand, are examples of dishes altered to cater to the American palate. The fact that these dishes, used for advertising purposes, are either products of American appropriation or inventions of Chinese American chefs, clearly locates the cookbook not within Chinese, but Chinese American culinary culture. What is, however, missing even from its list of recipes is chop suey—arguably the most famous and certainly the most historical Chinese American takeout dish. Though ‘an invention of overseas Chinese,’40 chop suey was transformed into an authentic Chinese dish in the American imagination. Chinese restaurants in the United States used it as a marketing strategy for their restaurants and thus, as Haiming Liu argues, chop suey can be understood as the result of ‘creative adaptation of Chinese Americans to American society.’41 In fact, in the first half of the 20th century, Chinese restaurants in the US were synonymous with chop suey houses whose popularity decreased when a growing number of Chinese immigrants moved to the US after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.42 What does not including a chop suey recipe in a Chinese American takeout cookbook imply? Does it suggest a decrease in the popularity of chop suey in the US or is it simply “too much of a classic” to be part of an advertising strategy? Would chop suey not be an authenticity marker for Chinese American takeout culture anymore?

The back cover of Toy’s book reads: ‘Authentic, quality cuisine: Pick from your all-time favorites and try new tasty dishes that will wow your taste buds.’43 What those recipes are supposedly authentic of is, however, not addressed. This claim of authenticity is in contrast to Toy’s approach: while the peritextual elements of Toy’s book claim the “authenticity” of recipes and use it as a marketing tool, Toy himself frames those dishes as ‘historic’44 rather than authentic in his introduction. He further contextualizes and historizes appropriation processes of Chinese American meals when he writes:

‘When I look back at Chinese American food, I also see layers of immigrant history that date back to the first Chinese migrants in the mid-1800s. The ingredients in each dish reveal exciting stories about where the migrants came from, how they preserved their culture, and how they adapted to mainstream America.’45

Toy hence touches upon historical as well as socio-political aspects of Chinese (American) migration and food culture in the United States. He traces the history of Chinese American cuisine to its beginnings and relates it to his own family memories.

Overall, both Kuan’s and Toy’s cookbooks act as (culinary) archives that provide insight into a popular takeout genre; they textually preserve the taste of a takeout culture by replicating, reproducing, and appropriating culinary (Chinese takeout) canonical recipes. They also engage with the current state, status, and perception of Chinese American takeout by inviting their readers to expand their knowledge of the complex histories of a culinary culture that is so closely tied to the hardships and struggles of Chinese immigrants to the US. Both cookbooks encourage reflections on larger discourses related to ethnic culinary cultures such as questions of authenticity. “Chinese authenticity” is in and of itself an American construct since ‘[i]n Chinese culinary culture, authentic food means regional cuisines. China has no national food.’46

Ultimately, these cookbooks—understood as cultural texts—function as “repositories of sensation”47 that preserve and perpetuate the flavors, tastes, and heritage of contemporary popular Chinese American takeout cultures in the US. Certainly, not all Chinese American takeout cookbooks might engage in contextualizing and historicizing Chinese American culinary traditions to a similar extent. However, by preserving not only flavors but also histories and discourses through the narratives of and around dishes, the two chosen examples demonstrate that the concept of the takeout cookbook bears the potential to conserve socio-historical entanglements. In doing so, they can break with grand narratives, myths, and stereotypical homogenization of ethnic cuisines that are inextricably linked with the histories of their creation, appropriation, and perception in the national—in this case American—imagination. With the intention of recreating already familiar takeout dishes at home, readers, consumers, and/or chefs may be left with unanticipated bites of culinary histories that may taste sweet, sour, or like something else entirely.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Kuan, Diana, The Chinese Takeout Cookbook: Quick and Easy Dishes to Prepare at Home (New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 2012).

Toy, Chris, Easy Chinese Cookbook: Restaurant Favorites Made Simple (Emeryville, CA: Rockridge Press, 2020).

Secondary Sources

Chin, Gabriel J. and John Ormonde, ‘The “War” Against Chinese Restaurants’, The Cato Journal, 2017, pp. 32-38.

Barnes & Noble, ‘Easy Chinese Cookbook: Restaurant Favorites Made Simple’. <https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/easy-chinese-cookbook-chris-toy/1136652980?ean=9781646115877> [accessed on 29 May 2022].

Erway, Cathy, ‘The Chinese Takeout Cookbook’, Eat Your Words, Heritage Radio Network, 14 January 2013 [accessed on 29 May 2022].

Fantozzi, Joanna, ‘These are the most popular takeout foods around the country’, Insider, 10 July, 2017. <https://www.insider.com/takeout-foods-around-the-country-2017-7> [accessed on 29 May 2022].

Ferguson, Kennan, Cookbook Politics (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).

Hogan, David, The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

Kuan, Diana, ‘The Chinese Takeout Cookbook’, Publishers Weekly, (19 November, 2012). <https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780345529121> [accessed on 29 May 2022].

Kurimoto, Suguru. ‘Food Delivery War Rages Amid Global COVID-19 Lockdowns,’ Nikkei, 22 August, 2020. <https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Food-Beverage/Food-delivery-war-rages-amid-global-COVID-19-lockdowns> [accessed on 29 May 2022].

Liu, Haiming, From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express: A History of Chinese Food in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015).

‘takeout’, in Merriam Webster Dictionary. <https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/takeout> [accessed on 29 May 2022].

Railton, Ben, ‘The Chinese Exclusion Act and Early Asian American Literature’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (2019), <http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/litthe/frm008> . [accessed on 29 May 2022].

Ramanathan, Lavanya. ‘Why Everyone Should Stop Calling Immigrant Food “Ethnic”’, The Washington Post, 21 July, 2015. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/why-everyone-should-stop-calling-immigrant-food-ethnic/2015/07/20/07927100-266f-11e5-b77f-eb13a215f593_story.html> [accessed on 29 May 2022].

Statista, ‘Restaurants and Food Delivery in the United States’, 2017, pp. 1-44.

Toombs, Dan, The Curry Guy: Recreate over 100 of the best British Indian Restaurant Recipes at Home (London: Quadrille, 2017).

Aline Franzus is a soon-to-be graduate of the MA programme British, American and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Münster, where she also serves as an editor for the student-run journal Satura. Her research interests lie at the intersection of literary, cultural, and book studies, including cultural memory, and censorship studies.