[Sca-cooks] Chinese/Cuban resturants

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Stefan sez:

>Rather than being two seperate cuisines that happened to be served
>in the same resturant, as I at first suspected, given the details
>above I would expect to see more of a melding of Chinese and
>Cuban cooking rather than two distinct cuisines. Was this your
>experience there, Brighid?

I'm not Brighid, but FWIW, there's some melding, at least in my
experience, but not much. What I have experienced is a failure (I
don't really mean anything negative by this word) of the cuisine to
evolve as it has in its mainstream "American" incarnation. For
example, in the 60's or so there was a big shift away from most menu
items being more or less Southern Chinese food (mild, subtle, and
heavily reliant on very fresh ingredients: probably the greatest
cuisine on earth when properly done, but not very good when too many
shortcuts are taken, American-type vegetables of mediocre quality
substituted for the vegetables used in China, etc.), and towards
Peking and Szechuan-style dishes. While this seems to have occurred
in Cuban Chinese restaurants, it seems to have happened later and to
a lesser extent.

There has been some melding, though. There are some dishes that are
sufficiently time-or-labor-intensive, and sufficiently similar, to
make having both a Cuban and a Chinese version on the menu sort of
redundant. One excellent example is the asopao I mentioned earlier.
Both asopao and  congee or jook are thick, rice porridgey-dishes. The
Chinese version is either cooked in water, with flavorings added
later, or in stock, and sometimes garnished with meat, shredded
pickled vegetables, etc., while the asopao starts out life as a clear
soup, but then has rice cooked in it until it is rather thick. It is
also, in every incarnation I have seen, colored yellow with annatto,
a little like Cuban rissotto Milanese. It's different from jook, but
it seems silly to have two different long-cooked rice soup dishes on
one menu, so most Cuban/Chinese restaurants omit the jook, and when a
Chinese person asks for it, they get asopao, so it's almost as if
jook has changed to something slightly different in this particular
milieu.

I also remember seeing (this was a quite recent incident, though) a
green rice dish that was essentially a pilaf with recaito, a
cilantro/onion puree/seasoning, stirred into it. This appears to be a
Latino dish, probably actually South American. Anyway, I saw a
Chinese family who had evidently conned the chef into using this rice
to make Yangchow fried rice for them. It looked really good, assuming
you like cilantro.

Adamantius