Zen Koan/

I've puzzled over this longer than one hand clapping. While there is beef aplenty in asian cuisine, except for Crab Rangoon I can think of NOTHING containing milk or milk products.

I once asked an Asian acquaintance about this, and she got dramatic and said -- What, consume milk from the beast ...

Is there a general tabu? ... nearby India uses milk & butter -- if you have a clue, please enlighten me.

Well, the lack of dairy in Asian food may be due, in part, to a high incidence of lactose intolerance among the Asian populations. I've heard estimates as high as 90% (http://kidshealth.org/teen/food_fitness/nutrition/lactose_intolerance.html)

Now, can you explain to me why the Buddha is a shitstick?

David "Enjoying Complete Enlightenment since the Summer of Love" Hammond

David Hammond wrote:Now, can you explain to me why the Buddha is a shitstick?

No, but I can show you this.

SGFoxe wrote:I've puzzled over this longer than one hand clapping. While there is beef aplenty in asian cuisine, except for Crab Rangoon I can think of NOTHING containing milk or milk products.

It's the Brit's fault -- Rangoon was a colonial city, and the British like their dairy products.

(edit) I have to take that back -- According to Wikipedia it was invented at Trader Vic's in the 50's.

dan ta - Chinese Egg Tarts / Pastry often served for dimsum, etc.

it uses milk (condensed, cream, or dairy in some way shape/form ) tho in very tiny amounts...

HI,

Follow the Events board, next week I will have a notice from the Chicago Foodways Roundtable on a lecture on Americanized Chinese food, which includes crab rangoon. The lecturers will be from the Chinese American Museum and the Field Museum. It will be February 18th at Roosevelt University, though I am waiting on the room assignment.

Crab rangoon is simply unknown in Chinese cuisine. Just as chop suey, egg fo yung and even General Pao Chicken is also unknown in China. Fortune cookies are so often expected by American tourists in China, that a bakery was opened to make them in China. Otherwise fortune cookies were unheard of in China.

Happy Year of the Dog!

Well, alls I know is what my Chinese colleagues told me when I asked them the same question.

1. There's a 10:1 caloric reduction going from grain to animal protein.

2. It's calorie-quantity that fights hunger, not calorie-quality; hence, more rice is a lot lot better than a little bit of animal protein.

Now that's THEIR arg, not mine.

But I do know the following.

1. By the end of the 80s, there was a pretty widespread acknowledgement in public health circles that the dowager's hump that many (where "many" = a *lot*) of older Chinese have results from calcium deficiency, mostly caused (among women, obviously) during bearing years.

2. Vegetables aren't a very efficient source of calcium; and, while fish bones are, there aren't THAT many recipes that use fish bones (think of fish bones here as borne by, say, tinned sardines).

3. Dairy products were preferable. But most Chinese (one out of three of my students thought either butter or cheese was palatable when I tested this) find most dairy products unpalatable.

4. The exception is a substance which is cold, sweet, and, preferably, drinkable. Sweetened yoghurt was thereby made available for pregnant/nursing women in Wuhan (deepest central China) by '88; British half-pint glasses of the stuff were being sold by that time on the streets of Beijing. You bought the bottle on your way to work in the morning outside your flat from a vendor, and one block later sold the empty bottle back to another vendor. I don't know when, or if, yoghurt became widely available in central China.

5. By '88 there was the first experimental (small, maybe 3 dozen head) of Guernseys at the ag school next door to my campus at U. Wuhan. They were also setting up an experimental dairy.

6. People lined up around the block in Summertime downtown Wuhan to buy ice cream. It was a party, standing in line for bing-ji-ling (?sp?).

As you can tell from all this, dairy was basically breaking news in central China in the late 80s, early 90s.

Geo
PS. And I expect that the lactose-intolerance is an effect, not a cause, of lack of dairy.

David "Enjoying Complete Enlightenment since the Summer of Love" Hammond wrote:

"Well, the lack of dairy in Asian food may be due, in part, to a high incidence of lactose intolerance among the Asian populations. I've heard estimates as high as 90%."

Indeed.

Human beings and, I suspect, other creatures driven to be fruitful and multiply, develop aversions to foods that do not agree with them. (At no time was this so clear to me as when I was pregnant.)

In connection with your question about the rare appearance of dairy in Asian cuisine, I find myself thinking about an article I read in Gourmet late last year (sorry, I couldn't find the citation). The author described the visit to California of five top chefs from The People's Republic of China, most of whom had little exposure to Western cuisine. What particularly engaged the author (and me) was the visiting chef's reactions to unfamiliar foods. Categories of foods experienced as difficult to enjoy were: 1) aged cheeses, 2) rare and raw meat, 3) raw vegetables, especially salads, 4) crusty breads and 5) thick sauces such as sabayon. Interesting, no?

According to the article, all but one of the chefs found the very idea of cheese (aged congealed sour milk) repellent. Their objections to rare/raw meat and raw vegetables centered on the idea that eating such things is barbaric, unhealthy, and unneccessary, given that we humans can cook. The distaste for crusty bread and sabayon-type sauces was appearently more of a "texture thing."

The author of the article observed that, when Americans visit China, the sorts of reactions they have to unfamiliar dining experiences parallel those of the visiting Chinese chefs. Either the idea of the food is repellent, or the experience of the texture is unpleasant. Even so, one of the visiting chefs was able to keep an open mind. His reaction to blue cheese was, "Umami!" And he tried to "get" the things that he was not prepared to enjoy, including raw oysters and fresh foie gras.

The author of the article wondered why, in the context of such cultural food shaping, we should see the success of pizza, ice cream, and sushi in China. I'm not sure what the corrollaries of this phenomenon are here, but I'm sure they exist. What about the wild success of salsa in the U.S.? To my mind, what we are seeing is more than the reflected glory of marketing. Could it be that, in spite of early education, it is possible to teach an old chowhound new tricks?

--Josephine "Decidedly Not Enjoying Shellfish Until Two Years After the Spring of Love" Hyde

Josephine wrote:Their objections to rare/raw meat and raw vegetables centered on the idea that eating such things is barbaric, unhealthy, and unneccessary, given that we humans can cook. "

I was reading the other day that steak tartare may not have originated with the tartars, but was simply a dish "associated" with the wild ways of these people. The contention of the author was that the Greeks and others promoted the myth that tartars, huns, etc., ate raw meat because...well, what else would you expect a barbarian to eat?

Hammond

Uh, another point--in addition to its perceived barbarity-- that should be made re: eating uncooked vegetables in China.

Typically human excrement is used for fertilizer in China. Has been for centuries--just think of the 'honeypot' collection every morning in urban Beijing.

One does NOT want to eat raw veg in China.

Going without salads in Wuhan used to drive us crazy. We routinely took 3-4 days R & R every 6 weeks or so, flying/training to Hong Kong. To us, in those far-gone days, Hong Kong was The West. First stop: Jimmy's Kitchen in Kowloon, where we could get a steak and a salad. They bragged that their lettuce was specially grown for them in the New Territories, and was triple-washed: one time in high-strength bleach.

The steaks were small and tough, but damn! didn't they taste good.

Some day, I'll tell you about the bbq pit I built on the roof of the Foreign Experts Residence....

Geo

Geo wrote:

"Some day, I'll tell you about the bbq pit I built on the roof of the Foreign Experts Residence...."

You've got me on the edge of my seat, Geo! Please post about that when you get a chance.

for the thoughtful responses