Ted Chiang Interview

[Eryn]

Thesheer effrontery! The gall! Who am I to question the prescriptions of Mrs. Chiang as set forth by Ellen Schrecker? Chiang Jung-feng grew up on a farm near the city of Chengdu in Sichuan Province. She and her mother used to make their own soy sauce! I am not worthy.

The Schreckers, however, had Mrs. Chiang, and they were quick to introduce their friends to her handiwork. They also performed yeoman work as avant-garde Chinese foodies. A major change in US immigration law in 1965 opened the door to a new wave of Chinese immigration. Some of the same cooks who had moved from the mainland to Taiwan in the 1940s moved again to New York in the 1970s. The Schreckers led groups of their friends on regular trips to whatever restaurant was rumored to feature the work of one of those new arrivals.

I bought this cookbook in the 80s, and while the recipes were indeed great, I always felt rather bad that while the title was Mrs. Chiang's Szechwan Cookbook, Mrs Chiang herself wasn't given author credit. Even Ellen Schrecker's husband John was! Ellen describes how she obtained the recipes by following Mrs Chiang around the kitchen. This is exactly how cookbooks "written" by famous restaurant chefs are produced. A collaborator will chase those chefs around the kitchen, watch what they do and transcribe it for the book. And whose name is listed in big letters as the author? That's right: the famous chef.

(The following story originally appeared in the Spring 2016 issue of The Cleaver Quarterly, a gloriously designed print magazine devoted to Chinese food that sadly only lasted eight issues. It has never before been available online. Some portions of it may feel repetitive to regular readers of The Cleaver and the Butterfly, but given how many times I have referenced Mrs Chiang\u2019s Szechwan Cookbook in these pages, I thought it might be useful to republish my reporting on this crucial text!)

I can hardly believe what I am doing. I am sitting in a diner on the Upper West Side of Manhattan having coffee with Ellen Schrecker, the co-author of Mrs. Chiang\u2019s Szechwan Cookbook. It is a weak-in-the-knees moment. Twenty years ago, Mrs. Chiang\u2019s not only taught me how to cook authentic-tasting Sichuan dishes but gave me the confidence necessary to tackle cooking in any cuisine. I even ended up remodeling my entire kitchen so as to more efficiently stir-fry. I should be effusive in my thanks!

And yet, there I am, halfway through the interview, recklessly suggesting to Schrecker that Mrs. Chiang\u2019s recipe for dry-fried string beans (ganbian sijidou) can be substantially improved if you substitute pickled mustard greens from the Sichuan city of Yibin (Yibin yacai) for the pickled mustard tuber (zhacai) that her recipe stipulates.

But Schrecker doesn\u2019t protest. She shrugs. While she is tickled that her long-out-of-print cookbook, first published in 1976, has become something of a \u201Ccult classic\u201D with Sichuan-loving foodies in the US (\u201CIt\u2019s cute!\u201D she says, with a grin), her identity is hardly wrapped up in whether the cookbook is fully up to date with the latest Inter- net-facilitated ingredient availability.

The cookbook, after all, was a one-off, something she knocked out while simultaneously raising two small boys and writing her dissertation at Princeton. Now in her mid-seventies, Schrecker has enjoyed a distinguished career as an American historian specializing in McCarthyism. She still regularly cooks Sichuan in her own kitchen, but she doesn\u2019t feel any particular need to keep up with newer, English-language Sichuan cookbooks, like Fuchsia Dunlop\u2019s Land of Plenty (2001), or the massive, exquisitely illustrated, supposedly authoritative compendium published by the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine in 2010: Sichuan Cuisine in Both English and Chinese.

Like myself, Ellen has never even visited Sichuan province, a fact we acknowledge to each other with a sigh. Because if you care about authenticity, about the zhen wer (\u201Ctrue taste\u201D) of Sichuan food, the Upper West Side can seem like a long way from the original source. Shouldn\u2019t we be having this conversation in Chengdu?

Maybe. But it\u2019s not required. Because after spending 20 years trying to reproduce the most authentic Sichuan cuisine I can achieve in my home kitchen in Berkeley, California, I finally realized \u2013 just about at the time I interviewed Ellen Schrecker \u2013 that the pursuit of absolute authenticity is a hopeless quest to pin down a constantly moving target. Thanks to Mrs. Chiang and Ellen Schrecker and Fuchsia Dunlop, and, not least of all, years of my own ad hoc experimentation with cleaver and wok chasing the elusive ganbian sijidou memories of my youth, I no longer worry about whether whatever I\u2019m stir-frying would make the grade in Chengdu. The true zhen wer isn\u2019t frozen for all time in anyone\u2019s recipe; it\u2019s ultimately judged best by one\u2019s own tastebuds.

Ellen Schrecker\u2019s breakthrough exposure to Sichuan food came during two stints in Taiwan, first in 1961 and then again in 1969. Both times she was accompanying her then-husband, John Schrecker, a Chinese historian, as he polished his Chinese language competence.

I caught up with John Schrecker a week after talking to Ellen. My own memories of living in Taipei in the 1980s summon up a frenetic, chaotic metropolis, where seemingly everyone drove a motorcycle and was on a fast-track escalator to a better life. So it was amusing to hear him reminisce about a peaceful \u201Csmall-town atmosphere\u201D where the bicycle was the primary mode of transportation. But one thing we agreed on: The food was astonishing, a happy accidental result of the Chinese Civil War. The millions of mainlanders that Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek brought with him to Taiwan had few obvious ways of making a living, outside of starting their own restaurants, or, in Mrs. Chiang\u2019s case, working as a cook for visiting American families. (Mrs. Chiang, via an email from her grandson, declined to be interviewed for this story.)

When the Schreckers returned to the United States, they brought Mrs. Chiang with them to serve as cook and nanny to the Schreckers\u2019 two young boys. They immediately confronted a sad reality shared by generations of Americans who have had their tastebuds radicalized by a stint in East Asia. Up until that moment, the vast majority of Chinese immigrants to the United States had come from a small region of southern China. So if you didn\u2019t like Cantonese food or the Americanized oddity of \u201Cchop suey,\u201D you were out of luck.

One such friend, dating back to their days together at Harvard, was Ray Sokolov, an aspiring critic who had gone straight from the Harvard Crimson to Newsweek. The Schreckers introduced him to one of their favorite new restaurants, a place called \u201CA Kitchen\u201D tucked away in a gas station in Princeton. Solokov wrote about the restaurant as a \u201Ctryout piece\u201D when he auditioned for \u2013 and won \u2013 the job of top New York Times food critic, replacing Craig Claiborne. He then did his part popularizing Sichuan food to the larger general public.

This origin story was a revelation. Mrs. Chiang\u2019s Szechwan Cookbook occupies a huge, but very personal, psychic space in my head, as a key connecting point between my present in California and my past in Taiwan. But who knew that when placed in the proper context, the cookbook also reflected changing global immigration flows and the globalization of Sichuan cuisine \u2013 and even the career paths of New York Times food critics?

There are moments in your life that stay ever-present in your memory in surround-sound hi-definition, even as the years between them fade into foggy incoherence. One such flashpoint was my first meal on my first day in Taipei in 1984, when a couple of more experienced expats took me to a hole-in-the-wall restaurant called Emei and introduced me to Old Lady Ma\u2019s Doufu (mapo doufu), Pork in the Style of Fish (yuxiang rousi) and Dry-Fried Stringbeans (ganbian sijidou). Having never eaten Sichuan food before, I was overwhelmed \u2013 in the best possible way. The mala shock of hot chilli peppers and numbing Sichuan pepper. The garlic-ginger-scallion-soy-chili explosion of flavor that defines yuxiang. The limp, exquisite texture of those fried string beans! Yeah, no wonder I stayed four years.

Another such moment came almost 15 years later, after I had lived in Berkeley for a decade. I had long since left behind my passion for China studies in exchange for a career as a technology reporter. I had also, tragically, given up hope I would ever find anything comparable to the food I had loved in Taipei. The New York Sichuan scene might have been hopping, but the same was not true of the San Francisco Bay Area, where Cantonese still ruled supreme. I was particularly disgruntled by my inability to find anything close to an authentic ganbian sijidou. Those beans weren\u2019t supposed to be bright green and crisp \u2013 they should be brown and limp to exhaustion!

Then, one evening in 1998, my friend, mentor, and boss at Salon, Scott Rosenberg, invited me to dinner at his house and served up a dish of noodles with pork sauce. I took one bite and was instantly transported back to my favorite night market near Shida University, where, late at night, if you were lucky, a married couple would set up a bare-bones stand and make fresh noodles with pork sauce for the crowds exiting the local bars and nightclubs. (I say \u201Clucky,\u201D because for weeks at a time the couple would vanish. It turned out they preferred gambling at mahjong in the south of Taiwan to serving up noodles in the big city. But when they gambled all their money away, they had no choice! It was time to head back to Taipei and earn some cash.)

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