China Best and Worst

I’m fascinated by cooking at the restaurant level: scaling a recipe up for, say, 200 people. I think this fascination has something to do with what motivates my interest in programming computers; but I also have a longstanding wish — or threat — to attend cooking school and open a restaurant when I get old. Every man thinks he can run a hotel or open a restaurant. I don’t pretend I could. But it does seem a fun way to lose half a million bucks.

Another of my persistent culinary interests is classic Chinese-American food, though my interest is more cultural and political than gustatory. Chinese-American food: that is, food that would be scarcely recognizable anywhere on the Asian continent. My first childhood exposure to food even remotely Chinese was a place called, as I recall, “China Best”. It was located in a strip mall on Spencer Highway, just down the road from Gilley’s Club in Pasadena, Texas — an area immortalized as the spiritual or, I should say, sensual center of Gulf Coast white trash culture by the movie Urban Cowboy.

On one side was a dollar movie house (where I spent time during high school perfecting the art of french kissing), on the other was a Shipley’s donut shop, and cattycorner was a Kip’s Big Boy. One bit from China Best I remember was the algorithmic tidiness of the menu. My family’s regular meal was composed of one item from Column A, one from Column B, one from Column C. One visit we might have Crab Rangoon, Moo Goo Gai Pan, and Pork Fried Rice; and the next visit it would be BBQ Ribs, Chicken with Cashews, and Vegetable Lo Mein.

This mix-and-match approach struck me then as a sign of the supremely rational nature of Chinese culture, a sign reinforced by the pictographic writing system. Anything that complicated, or so it seemed to me when I was 10, must be powerful and clever beyond my imaginings. It is unclear to me now whether these estimations of “Chinese culture” were distinguishable from the orientalist myths of Asian inscrutability I imbibed from the Christian missionaries my childhood church was so desperate to support.

How I loved China Best’s eggrolls! As a young boy I was an avid eater of eggrolls. At Michael Hsu's 10^th birthday party — Michael was the only non-white boy at my elementary school, and he could draw amazing fighter planes — I ate eggrolls till Michael’s mother, who must have assumed three dozen were enough for a small party of 10 year old boys, thought I must surely explode.

We slept that night in a tent his father pitched in the backyard. I woke in the morning with a bad fever and a very tender, very angry red spot just above my left hip. Apparently swimming in raw rain efflux earlier that week — Houston flooded near-catastrophically that summer, and the ones before and after it; seeing my dad’s white VW Bug (with the most beautiful oxblood leatherette interior) floating down our street, as if it were a Venetian canal, made my brain go warblely — was sufficient to cause a massive boil.

Which my parents treated by applying a poultice of eggs, sugar, and bacon. To which they added a malodorous, black, tarrish pseudo-medicine with the appalling name, Ichthammol (a.k.a. “the Black Salve”): a substance so foul it could’ve been created only by a soul tortured by the fiercesome, crazed rantings of Martin Luther, obsessed as he was by die Teufelsdreck — literally, the Devil’s shit.

They forced me to wear a belted poultice; an oozing, fetid, man-boy girdle. God only knows why they acted like medieval Gaullish peasants: my dad has a degree in chemical engineering and my mom was a nursing student. White trash genes will out, I suppose, at the oddest times.

Other China Best family favorites included Pepper Steak, the ubiquitous Sweet and Sour Pork, Combination Fried Rice, Lo and Chow Meins of various kinds.

Which brings me to the following recipe, which I noticed while browsing a web recipe arhive. It’s simply too terrible not to share.

CHOW MEIN FOR 200

15 lb. meat (beef, veal, pork); 30 lb. coarsely chopped onions
30 lb. celery, cut in 1½ inch pieces; 2½ lb. water chestnuts, sliced
1½ lb. bamboo shoots; 5 oz. Chinese vegetable powder
2-4 Tbsp. thick soy bean sauce; 10 lb. bean sprouts
20 lb. raw Chinese noodles

Brown meat in oil. Add celery, onions, chestnuts, bamboo shoots. Cook 1 hour. Add vegetable powder and soybean sauce. Cook slowly 1 hour. Add bean sprouts in the last 5 minutes. Fry noodles at 300 degrees in deep fat. Serve on crisp noodles with soybean sauce. Serves 200.