[Sca-cooks] Regarding the Size of Rissoles

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Bill Fisher:
>On Fri, 15 Oct 2004 21:35:55 -0400, Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
><adamantius.magister at verizon.net> wrote:
>>  As far as I know, in the US, an egg roll is usually the Cantonese
>>  variant of the spring roll, which is, in turn, a snack eaten in China
>>  during the festival marking the beginning of spring: the Lunar New
>>  Year. Chinese restaurants normally sell "egg rolls" with pork and/or
>>  shrimp, as described above, more or less, and the name indicates an
>>  egg & wheat-flour pasta wrapper, as opposed to the eggless wrapper
>>  resembling a high-gluten filo dough used for the Shanghai spring roll
>>  variant (which has a moister, more delicate and tender filling).
>>  Spring rolls are found in many southern Asian cuisines, but I believe
>>  they all probably stem from the Chinese originals.
>
>Dunno, the cantonese ones are usually steamed, not fried.  I think
>frying is an American variation on the process though.

Are you perhaps thinking of Vietnamese "summer rolls" (which are 
usually meats, raw and/or cooked vegetables, sometimes even salad 
greens, rolled into a softened rice-paper wrapper, or Cantonese har 
cheung, ngow cheung, etc., which are steamed rice flour or wheat 
starch noodle rolls (the same stuff chow fun is made of) filled with 
meat and steamed? And are we talking, when we say Cantonese, about 
the same place in southern China, Quangdong Province, where Quangzhou 
(a.k.a. Canton) and Hong Kong are situated? The place where, once 
upon a time, nearly every Chinese immigrant to the US came from? That 
Cantonese?

I confess I've never seen or heard of a steamed chuen guen, nor seen 
a recipe for such a thing. Sure, there are plenty of steamed rolls, 
but I don't think they get identified as spring rolls or egg rolls...

>  > >I think they are Filipino in origin and became popular in the US 
>after WWII.
>  >
>>  Lumpia are, AFAIK, the Filipino variant.
>
>Yeah, but Lumpia are the same size and shape as our eggroll and have
>most of the same ingredients and are deep fried.  I remember my grandad
>and Dad telling me they tasted very similar (both were Navy men)

Lumpia are also generally eggless, though: the filling of the 
Cantonese spring roll inside a wrapper more like the Shanghai 
version. Yes, they're pretty clearly either descended from or sharing 
a common ancestor with other spring rolls.

>  > There used to be a Hakka restaurant (the Hakka are sort of the
>>  Cantonese equivalent of gypsies; they live on boats in harbors in
>>  several southern Chinese towns) in New York's Chinatown called The
>>  Home Village, sadly long gone. Early in my time in the SCA, I had
>>  dinner there after working in the Wall Street financial district,
>>  wearing a nice suit and sitting there by myself, taking notes on a
>>  little pad while I wrote up an event proposal I was to present at a
>>  Provincial Commons meeting two hours later... they apparently thought
>>  I was a restaurant critic, and kept bringing food to my table that I
>>  hadn't ordered... it was a little embarrassing...
>
>There was a place like that in the Philadephia Chinatown when I was
>there in 1995 - we ate there during a (gasp) gaming convention. A
>group of seven, long-ish haired gentlemen, all well dressed in black,
>we roilled into the restaraunt, and received preferential seating and
>a different menu than they had on the tables.
>
>Really good food.  I didn't recognize much of what was on the menu,
>but they said it was "Hakka chinese."  I retraced my steps when I
>moved about an hour from Philadelphia and the place had been
>bought out and a Subway was in its place.
>
>Sad and depressing.

Such is progress. I was horrified to learn, recently, that the 
infamous Yellow Shed, an almost obscenely filthy establishment that 
could leapt unaltered from the works of Jean Shepherd, where I bought 
bait and fishing tackle (they also sold fast food! eeee-ew!!!) to use 
while bicycling through some pretty scary traffic to get to one or 
the other of the bridges across Broad Channel for angling purposes, 
is now a Starbucks. As Art Carney might have said, "A pox on them and 
all their ancestors!"

If they made good coffee, it wouldn't even be so bad, but since 
they're the ubiquitous McDonald's of bad coffee, it's a source for me 
of what approaches despair for our society.

>  > One of the dishes was the Hakka version of the spring roll, which
>>  contained shredded bamboo shoots, shredded barbecued pork, and
>>  shredded black mushrooms, wrapped in leaves of what might have been
>>  Bibb lettuce, dipped in a crunchy batter (probably water-chestnut
>>  flour based), and fried. I've never had them anywhere else, but these
>>  were absolutely the best.
>
>I have had something similar before, out in Omaha at a Pan-asian
>restaraunt that I can't remember the name of now. (Probably due
>to the drinking that happened afterwards at the casinos in Iowa).
>
>>  Up until the 1960's or so, you could also buy a commercial
>>  dinner/burger/hot-dog-type bun which was sort of
>>  challah/brioche-like, and these were also commonly known as "egg
>>  rolls". I never seem to see these any more.
>
>When I was a kid in PA, we used to get egg rolls and egg bread.
>Then the local bakery we got it from closed due to lack of sales.

And another institution of merit bites the dust. Interestingly 
enough, I'm finding Pennsylvania products like Stroehmann's (sp?) 
potato bread to be pretty similar to what I called egg buns/rolls as 
a kid.

Adamantius
-- 
"As long as but a hundred of us remain  alive, never will we on any 
conditions be brought under English rule.  It is in truth not for 
glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are  fighting, but for freedom 
-- for that alone, which no honest man gives  up but with life 
itself."
	-- The Declaration of Arbroath, 1320

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
	-- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry 
Holt, 07/29/04