Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads - Sylvia Lovegren (2005)

Sylvia Lovegren, in her 1995 book Fashionable food: seven decades of food fads, seems to have the most contemporary opinion on authenticity in Chinese food of the authors mentioned today, recognizing the “peculiarly American: the émigré’s dream, the immigrant’s reality---and a dash of entrepreneurship” involved in creating Chinese American food, as well as the orientalism it has spawned. Lovegren even satirizes how Chinese restaurants have become, in some ways, almost a symbol for the orient and exotic beauty (just look at how Hériteau seems to describe a simple dish like egg foo young!), writing about “marvelous strange restaurants that have become as familiar as our own living rooms---the ones with red banquettes, dim lights, gleaming golden idols, and odd-sounding entrées (Jade on a Bed of Coral and General Ching’s Chicken, whoever General Ching was)”. 

Lovegren continues to describe how orientalist views of China have shaped Chinese American food in the past, writing, “It seemed that you could hardly turn around without being met by a plate of egg foo yung (or fu young). The dish was a favorite with Chinese cooks, although Buwei Yang Chao (another author in Chinese cuisine) distinguished between the real thing and the foo yung served in restaurants. Still, she gave recipes for both in her cookbook.” Despite the seemingly pervasive egg foo young of the 1940s-1950s, Lovegren recognizes how Chinese American cuisine is entirely different today.” And if Helen Homemaker was whipping up skillet beef egg foo young à la Good Housekeeping for her hungry brood,” Lovegren writes of the 1970s, “the trendsetters decided they had better find something a bit more exotic to eat.” No longer were American diners obsessed with Chinese food created for an Americanized palate, they’ve now taken an interest in authenticity, and so comes their interest in dim sum, Lovegren believes. Lovegren leaves off believing the fad of Chinese food has ended, “the average American had eaten enough mediocre Cantonese food to be tired of it”. Lovegren calls Chinese food a “cultural relic”, a thing of the past, and so the Chinese cuisine of today reflects so too. Instead of an obsession with new exoticism, American diners today are left with the good ol’ standards of yesterday, simple, yet seemingly more “authentic” foods.