By Jolin Chan
Joyce Chen’s path to becoming a chef, restaurateur, and author began in an unassuming setting: her children’s school bake sale. In 1957, bearing two dozen homemade egg rolls and a few dozen cookies, Chen dropped off her contributions to the Buckingham School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the introduction to her 1962 cookbook, Joyce Chen Cook Book, she remembers asking her daughter Helen:
Did you see my egg rolls there? She replied, No, I only saw your cookies there, not your egg rolls. I thought they did not like them so they had not put them up for sale. But on the same evening when I was shopping I met one of the mothers who was in charge of the food table. She asked me, Mrs. Chen, do you think you could make some more egg rolls, your egg rolls sold out in five minutes. What a surprise to me. They did like them. I made dozens more the same night for that school.1
Chen was born in Beijing in 1917 to a wealthy family that employed a cook and multiple servants, though she remembers learning from them and her mother as they cooked. In 1949, she, her husband Thomas Chen, and her two young children fled China as the Communist Party took over, catching the second-to-last boat before the ports of Shanghai closed. They settled in Cambridge, worlds away from the life she once knew and where the search for Northern Chinese and Shanghainese foods felt impossible. Not only was Chinese food as you would find it in China rare in 1950s America, American Chinese food—a cuisine developed by Chinese immigrants who had to work with different ingredients and tastes during the Gold Rush—had long been rendered as cheap, unrefined, and even suspect.2 Asian Americans, and by extension, their food, occupied a tenuous position in the U.S. as a foreign “other.”
Rather than yield to her new circumstances, she began hosting dinners for Chinese students from Harvard, M.I.T., and Boston University. Realizing people were interested in Chinese cuisine, she taught cooking classes at adult education centers and, in 1958, opened the first of her four restaurants, the Joyce Chen Restaurant. (Her restaurants were frequented by college students, as well as figures like Julia Child, James Beard, Danny Kaye, and Henry Kissinger.)
It is one thing to introduce a new cuisine by cooking for someone, letting them smell the stir-fried garlic and ginger, taste the wok hei (“breath of the wok”), or feel the velveted meat, made tender with baking soda and a cornstarch coating. It is another thing, however, to introduce a novel cuisine through a list of ingredients, instructions, and if you’re lucky, illustrations. How does a recipe writer translate these experiences and the cultural contexts within which a cuisine has developed and evolved?
Chen’s cookbook answers this question, simultaneously advocating that the complexities of Chinese cuisine have a place at the table.3 With recipes that “still kept the authentic flavor,” her cookbook addressed common complaints: “It was too hard to get the ingredients. The recipes were too complicated to follow …. Many dishes simply did not come out right.”4 Some of her translations are quite literal, such as the handwritten Chinese characters accompanying detailed explanations for ingredients and techniques (Figures 2–4).
If translation is also a process of interpretation, Chen demonstrates the necessity of translations that extend beyond language, particularly in a diasporic context. Take, for example, how canned bean sprouts cannot replace fresh ones, but home cooks could use shredded lettuce in place of sprouts (Figure 2). Cooking fried rice, then, might require translating one vegetable (bean sprouts) to another (shredded lettuce). She suggests other culinary conversions: a metal can for a bamboo steamer, Smithfield ham for Chinese ham, and—for a Jellied Lamb Loaf—gelatin for pig rinds for a collagenous texture. She invites the readers to engage in their own acts of translation, asking them to transfer the meaning, use, and properties of one tool, ingredient, or flavor to another.
Chen transforms the unfamiliar into something digestible. This includes not only ingredients and techniques but also customs and practices. Sections are dedicated to the particularities of serving tea, the elements of a well-made dish (color, aroma, flavor, and nutrition), and the structure of a Chinese meal. While anthropologist Mary Douglas theorized the minimum structure of an English meal to be a formula of A + 2B (a main course plus two smaller courses), Chen decoded the Chinese meal, which does not have courses but rather “several dishes together.”5 Furthermore, her unique table of contents is a grid of dots that indexes recipes into categories like “Main dish,” “2nd Main dish,” and “Hors d’oeuvres” (Figures 5 and 6).
Chen has been called “the Chinese Julia Child.” They had some similarities: both called Cambridge their home and wrote cookbooks on daunting cuisines. They were even friends and shared the same studio for their respective shows. However, to know Chen only as Child’s Chinese counterpart erases the particular translations and renditions she strategically made. This is not to discount Child, a translator of French cuisine in her own right, but instead to present the context within which Chen worked to bridge her two homes. Her cookbook was written with her “blood, sweat, and love”: “love in remembering the old days in China where I was born, grew up and lived for more than thirty years” and “love to my new country for the freedom, wonderful friendships and good opportunities.”6 Honoring her first home and claiming a space in “my new country,” she reveals how recipe-writing can produce a sense of belonging for individuals and cuisines.
Her biggest impact was not necessarily identifying clever substitutes for winter melon (old cucumbers) or Shaoxing wine (a pale dry sherry). It was her translation of knowledge that introduced and championed a new form of Chinese cooking, one that required some adaptations but nevertheless unapologetically established itself as Mandarin, Shanghai, or Cantonese cookery. Recipes and cookbooks often present an argument, and hers was a trailblazing declaration to celebrate a long-disdained cuisine. For Joyce Chen, this was a cuisine that belongs in a dinner party, on a bookshelf, and on a TV screen in American homes.
- Joyce Chen, Joyce Chen Cook Book (J.B. Lippincott Company, 1962), 2. ↩︎
- Madeline Y. Hsu, “From Chop Suey to Mandarin Cuisine: Fine Dining and the Refashioning of Chinese Ethnicity during the Cold War Era,” in Chinese Americans and the Politics of Race and Culture, ed. Madeline Y. Hsu and Sucheng Chan (Temple University Press, 2008), 189. ↩︎
- While I focus on Chen’s cookbook in this article, her 1966 television show, which was produced and broadcasted by WGBH, offers other examples of Chen’s culinary translations. You can find her episodes on the American Archive of Public Broadcasting here: https://americanarchive.org/catalog?q=joyce+chen. ↩︎
- Chen, Joyce Chen Cook Book (J.B. Lippincott Company, 1962), 2. ↩︎
- Mary Douglas, “Deciphering a Meal,” Daedalus 101, no. 1 (1972); Chen, 207. ↩︎
- Chen, 223. ↩︎
References
Chen, Joyce. Joyce Chen Cook Book. New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1962.
Douglas, Mary, “Deciphering a Meal,” Daedalus 101, no. 1 (1972): 61–81. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20024058.
Hsu, Madeline Y. “From Chop Suey to Mandarin Cuisine: Fine Dining and the Refashioning of Chinese Ethnicity during the Cold War Era.” In Chinese Americans and the Politics of Race and Culture, edited by Madeline Y. Hsu and Sucheng Chan. Temple University Press, 2008. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/183/edited_volume/book/45919.
Jolin Chan is a recipe developer, content creator, and recent History & Literature and Social Anthropology graduate from Harvard College. Her undergraduate research focused on food studies and Asian American studies. After graduating, she continues to work within the world of food, collaborating with brands and businesses to develop recipes and social media content. You can find her cooking, baking, reading, and writing on @jolinfromscratch.