The first collections of recipes for Chinese dishes, written for an Australian audience, were not published until immediately after the Second World War. 50 Recipes for Famous Chinese Dishes, by Mrs Sie was published in Melbourne in 1946. Little is known about Mrs Sie. Her offering is a slim pamphlet, of which there was only one edition as far as is known, published by the Australia-China Association. This was quickly followed by perhaps the best known early Australian-Chinese cookbook, Roy Geechoun’s Cooking the Chinese Way, published in 1948.[1] Roy Geechoun was born in Bendigo in 1905, and, by the time he published his cook book, was a well-known Melbourne business-man as well as a prominent and active member of the Australia-China Association. Cooking the Chinese Way was expanded and reprinted and was still in print the late 1950s. Both Mrs Sie and Geechoun dedicated their books to the furtherance of Australia China friendship.
The timing of these publications was no accident. The period immediately after WW2 was a difficult time for Australian-born Chinese, naturally concerned about their status and their future in the community given that they were still restricted by the White Australia policy and now anxious about regime change in mainland China. Their Australian neighbours were also increasingly uncomfortable with the political machinations in mainland China. Gastro-diplomacy was one way of fostering better understanding.
Chinese Recipes for Home Cooking by Yep Yung Hee, published in 1951, also carried an endorsement from the Chinese Consul-General proffering hope that this book might foster ‘both an appreciation of Chinese cookery and of the ancient traditions of China’.[2] “Yep Yung Hee” was the nom- de-plume of Alwyn Darley Tet Ting Quoy, born in Sydney 1916, and a member of the well- known Quoy merchant family.[3] His compilation ran to several editions and remained in print until the late 1960s.
The last of the early publications was Chinese Culinary in Plain English, by William Sou San.[4] Sou San was born in Cairns 1901, the eldest of a large family. At the time he published his first book he was a merchant at 253 Wickham Street, Brisbane selling a variety of imported products including all the requisites for cooking – ingredients, kitchen tools and crockery. Probably self-published and intended largely a promotion for his business, Chinese Culinary was sold at his shop and through those businesses he supplied. There is evidence that first edition was available in 1950, and a second translation was published in 1965. [5] Of the four authors Sou San is perhaps the least well known but his books are particularly interesting.
What can these books tell us about Chinese food in Australia? And more importantly what they can tell us about Chinese food in Australia at a significant time in our culinary history - when Chinese cooks have already been active here for the best part of 100 years, but our food culture is yet to encounter other Asian cuisines or indeed Chinese food other than that brought here by the people from the Pearl River delta. Chinese restaurants are just about to really explode in the suburbs and eating out in general is becoming more popular. These books are important both because of their place in the history of English language Chinese cookbooks and because they give the best glimpse of how Chinese immigrants had adapted their foodways to take account of local conditions and produce an Australian version of Chinese cuisine.
Perhaps the first and most obvious point to make is that these recipes are Australianised simply by being written down. What is generally recognised as the first English language Chinese recipe book was published in Detroit in 1911[6]but English language books devoted to Chinese recipes were still few and far between in the late 1940s, possibly less than 100 and these available mainly in the United States, which makes these early Australian publications all the more important.[7] The main barrier to publication was the difficulty of translating Chinese cooking for non-Chinese cooks.
Traditionally Chinese cooks did not have written recipes with directions that stipulated cooking temperatures, times, and quantities of ingredients. As one writer put it ‘[r]ecipes descended like heirlooms from one generation of cooks to another’.[8] Chinese cooks, whether professionally trained or self-taught, learnt by watching, listening, tasting, and smelling.[9] Apart from the obvious language barrier, there was no common culinary vocabulary. Early English language recipe compilations did not follow any standard transcription of the names for ingredients or dishes – sweet and sour pork could be called sweet and pungent pork, or simply fried pork with pineapple sauce, pineapple chicken was also common in contemporaneous recipe books and may or may not have included vinegar. The term ‘stir-fry’, to describe the process of quick frying cut up material with wet seasoning, over high heat with minimal oil and constant stirring, was not coined until 1945 (in Buwei Yang Chao, How to cook and eat in Chinese, New York: John Day).
Language barriers led to misunderstandings and Australianisms. Sou San explains that the terms Long Soup, for soup with noodles, and Short Soup, for soup with dumplings, arose because Chinese restaurateurs struggled with how to interpret their names for these dishes to their customers, and of course vice versa:
In many cases the illiteracy of the proprietor prevented him from interpreting his menu, hence the birth of Long and Short Soup. The former is egg noodles, and the latter is minced pork and prawns wrapped in pastry, boiled and served in chicken soup. [10]
Similarly, Yep Yung Hee explains that what passes for dim sims in Australia are called shiu mie by the Chinese and that dim sim is not the correct name for any particular type of pastry, although he admits that Australian born Chinese, including himself, refer to shiu mie as Dim Sims.[11]
Australian born, Geechoun, Sou San and Quoy had, in the main, learnt about what constituted Chinese food from watching, listening, tasting, and smelling in Australian kitchens.[12] Their experience of Chinese food was largely Australian Chinese food, so that their own tastes and the food they prepared for themselves were already ‘Australianized’. None of these authors were trained cooks. Alwyn Quoy is the only one who admits to having spent any length of time in China studying food preparation, although many of the observations in Sou San’s books suggest that he had a thorough knowledge of methods and ingredients and probably some experience of cooking.
While we might assume that the main aim of these books was to introduce non-Chinese cooks to the mysteries of Chinese cooking, William Sou San was also concerned that many Australian born Chinese had neither learnt to speak the language of their parents nor taken much interest in cooking their own food. He intended his work would assist those ‘who had a yearn for the food they had so long ago tasted, now almost forgotten’.[13] He was also no doubt aware that many of the Chinese ‘cooks’ who were sponsored to come to Australia and exempted from the dictation test, on the basis of being non-competitive labour, were in reality family members and other young men who had little or no kitchen experience. By the 1950s, the majority of cooks in Chinese restaurants, whether Australian-born or not, had likely learnt to cook from their elders in Australia, who in turn were reconstructing the food they remembered from home using what was available to them here.[14] Sou San’s book is significant in that it gives us a unique glimpse of not just the flavours that Australian Chinese yearned for, but also a record of what Chinese restaurants may have served to both their Chinese and non-Chinese customers.
Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 11 September 1952, p. 18
All the authors admit that some substitution or compromise when it comes to ingredients is inevitable but insist that the end result is no less ‘Chinese’. The use of sherry or brandy instead of Chinese rice wine for example is common (which suggests that it may not have been available here). Others, such as the suggestion silver beet is a substitute for Chinese cabbage, or essence of anchovies might be an alternative to oyster sauce are not so much concessions to Australian tastes as acknowledging the availability of specific ingredients outside the shops in Chinatown.
Sou San claims that Chinese noodles were unknown in Australia before WW1 and spaghetti was sometimes suggested as an alternative until manufactured noodles became available in Chinese stores. Yep Yung Hee provides a compromise recipe for Pork with Broccoli and spaghetti – stir fried pork and broccoli in a sauce flavoured with soy sauce, ginger and garlic, served over lightly fried cooked spaghetti which is a fully Australianised version of chow mein.[15]
Perhaps the most adventurous use of available vegetables is Sou San’s Veal and Brussel Sprouts of which he says: ‘Brussel sprouts are sensitive vegetable’ and cautions never cook more than time specified, otherwise outcome 'disagreeable flavour’.[16] Similarly he warns never to overcook cauliflower or ‘a sloppy taste occurs’.[17] Sou San also hints at other issues Chinese cooks faced in making dishes the way they might have preferred when he notes that ‘Spare-ribs in Australia the butchers as a rule do not sell as it goes with pork-chops’ but ribs could be obtained through a direct approach to the butcher.[18]
Recipes for dishes using beef or lamb are more obvious examples of Australian-Chinese developing new tastes. Sou San claims that his beef dishes were not know in China when his forefathers came to Australia and so they developed them here, echoed by Yep Yung Hee who claims that beef was not normally eaten because the taste and odour are too strong.[19] Both comments point to the Cantonese ancestry of most Australian Chinese at this time and perhaps also to the state of Chinese agriculture when the gold rush Chinese migrated here.
For the most part the recipes provided by these authors are quite simple – they use a minimum number of ingredients and rely on subtle flavours, and of course the technique of stir frying. The purpose of these books was to demystify Chinese cooking and overcome suspicions and prejudices, not just about cooking in the home but eating in Chinese restaurants. This meant a balance between maintaining the mystique of the exotic and recipes that were approachable. For example, there are recipes for bird’s nest soup but not for chicken feet, nor much mention of offal which was fast disappearing from Australian kitchens. Before these books were published recipes for Chinese dishes had appeared sporadically in Australian newspapers, magazines and in other cookbooks and so ideas of what constituted both typical Chinese dishes and those that Westerners might be interested in – like chicken with almonds, fried rice, chop suey, eggs foo yung, and sweet and sour pork - were already well established.
The use of supposedly ‘non-Chinese ingredients’, such as tomato sauce and tinned pineapple in sweet and sour, are often conjured as examples of concessions to western sensibilities. Pineapple however was an established commercial crop in the east by the end of the nineteenth century and Jessie Norton’s Chop Suey cookbook from 1911 included a recipe for chop suey specifying a can of imported Chinese pineapple, which she described as ‘very fine in flavor’.[20] The adoption of tomato sauce and Worcestershire sauce is perhaps not so surprising since these products are themselves based on borrowings from the east. To imagine that Chinese food was somehow unchanging is to deny the fact that Chinese dishes had evolved over centuries through contact with non-Chinese sources absorbing both ingredients and methods of cooking. And of course it wasn’t just Chinese food that adapted to Australian conditions but pretty soon Australian food became ‘Chinesified’, to the extent that the Australian Women’s Weekly sanctioned the inclusion of soy sauce in the great Australian meat pie.
Chinese restaurant food has been much maligned as a bastardised version contrived to suit western tastes and bearing little relation to the food Chinese eat themselves. These books give us a glimpse of how Chinese Australians were able to sustain their food culture and adapt to their circumstances by shaping their own tastes. William Sou San believed that ‘half the interest of experimenting with Chinese cooking lies in adapting to your own judgement and its needs and taste’.[21] Roy Geechoun assured his readers that while the Chinese abroad may not always have all the ingredients he is used to, he still ‘manages to stick pretty closely to his national dishes’. Through adapting, he claimed ‘very tasty dishes can still be prepared with whatever foods are available, cooked in the Chinese way’ and overtime ‘these adaptations will be looked upon as true Chinese dishes’.[22]
[1] Roy Geechoun (1948), Cooking the Chinese Way, Melbourne: W. D. Joynt.
[2] Yep Yung Hee (1951), Chinese Recipes for Home Cooking, Sydney: Associated General Publications. Revised and enlarged (from 95 to 144 pages) in 1953 to include introduction covering Chinese customs, table etiquette, table setting, food service, conduct of banquets, role of food in celebrations, tools used in Chinese kitchen; Yep Yung Hee (1953), Chinese Recipes for Home Cooking, 2nd ed., Sydney: Horwitz. Reprinted annually from 1955 until 1963, then 1965, 1967 and ‘deluxe edition’ 1968
[3] See entry for Yip No Hung in Australian Dictionary of Biography https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/yip-ho-nung-12087. Quoy served in the Airforce in World War II and received the OAM in 1997 for services to the community as foundation president of the Kittyhawk Squadron branch of the Royal Australian Airforce Association for over 40 years, and president of the 77 Squadron Association.
[4] William Sou San (1952), Chinese Culinary in Plain English, Brisbane: W. R. Smith and Patterson; William Sou San (1965), Chinese Culinary in Plain English, 2nd trans., Brisbane.
[5] First advertised Courier Mail (Brisbane), 13 October 1950, p. 4. Revised and enlarged (104 pages) 1952, ‘second translation’ (216 pages, completely rewritten). Details of Chinese ingredients, glossary with Chinese names, advice on utensils and how to eat. Richard Beckett (1984), Convicted Tastes: Food in Australia, Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, p. 164, ‘This engaging work sold as far as I know only in Chinatowns in various cities’
[6] Jessie Louise Norton (of the Chicago Inter-Ocean) (1911), Chinese cookery in the home kitchen, being recipes for the preparation of the most popular Chinese dishes at home, Detroit, Mich.; Chino-American Publishing Company.
[7] See Jacqueline M. Newman collection www.flavorandfortune.com.
[8] Sara Bosse and Onoto Watanna (1914) Chinese and Japanese cook book, Chicago: Rand McNally and Company.
[9] Anne Mendelson (2016), Chow Chop Suey: Food and the Chinese American Journey, New York, Columbia University Press, pp. 104-5.
[10] Sou San (1965), p. 157. See also Julia Robinson https://slll.cass.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/andc/DICT_OZWORDS_OCT2015.pdf, suggests misunderstanding on part of customers.
[11] Yep Yung Hee suggests the term originates from the Cantonese dimsum which refers to an assortment of pies, buns and snacks served at the ‘Heart of the hour’. (1951, p. 40; 1953, pp. 73–74).
[12] Geechoun on the other hand worked with a chef to put together the recipes for his book and ensure that quantities of ingredients and cooking times were accurate. Geechoun (1948), p. 2).
[13] Sou San (1952), p. 11.
[14] Barbara Nicol (2012) ‘The Breath of the Wok: Melbourne’s Early Chinese Restaurants’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, p. 263.
[15] Yep Yung Hee (1953), p. 98.
[16] Yep Yung Hee (1952), p. 67.
[17] Yep Yung Hee (1952), p. 22.
[18] Sou San (1952), p. 43.
[19] Sou San (1952), p. 37; Yep Yung Hee (1951), p. 68; (1953), pp. 112.,113; Geechoun (1954), pp. 35, 37, 38, 43, 45.
[20] See also Mendelson p. 121, re. canned pineapple.
[21] Sou San (1965), p. 12.
[22] Geechoun (1954), pp. 5,6.
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