Sometimes, fresh vegetables such as bean sprouts and bok choy were available. To this day, I don’t know what Uncle Ben’s converted rice is.Īt a store downtown called Asia Market, we shopped for rice, soy sauce, sesame oil, dried Chinese noodles and preserved vegetables in cans. Louis: fresh bamboo shoots, ginger root, sesame oil, preserved mustard greens and preserved turnip greens, dried shrimp, dried Chinese mushroom and another dried fungus called wood ear, star anise, preserved duck eggs, thousand-year-old eggs and soy products including tofu, five-spice dried tofu, bean curd sticks and bean curd knots, dried and fresh soybeans (edamame.) Oh, yeah, and rice. But she could not have anticipated that so many things that she considered staples weren’t available in St. Mom took some cooking lessons while in Hong Kong, preparing to take on this responsibility. I have a faint memory of Shi Fa, my grandfather’s cook in Shanghai, apron over an undershirt and holding a ferocious cleaver. She never had to cook before. There had always been servants, even during the three years we lived in Hong Kong as political refugees from Communist China. Mom faced another challenge to her determination to cook Chinese food besides the lack of ingredients. My mom had to explain to Americans that wontons were Chinese ravioli. Chow mein noodles were crispy and came in cans. It’s hard to imagine now the food landscape in the Midwest in the 1950s.
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