A Short History of Americans and Brown Sauce

Travel Blog  •  Eva Holland  •  07.08.10 | 1:05 PM ET

Over at The Atlantic’s food channel, Andrew Coe looks into the origins of Chinese brown sauce and the undying American appetite for the stuff. Here’s Coe:

Color matters in Chinese food. You can tell the difference between, say, Sichuan and Cantonese restaurants by the palette of dishes at their tables. Sichuan dishes are often tinted by the red sheen of chili oil, while the many clear sauces of Cantonese cuisine allow the natural colors of meats and vegetables to stand out. But on the steam tables of the more than 40,000 Chinese-American restaurants that dot this land, the predominant color is brown, as in the ubiquitous beef with broccoli drenched in a brown sauce. According to the Chinese food maven Michael Gray, there’s an ancient epigram that describes what these steam tables offer: “100 dishes, all with the same taste.”

Tags: Food, History Travel, Asia, China, North America, United States, News and Briefs

Eva Holland is co-editor of World Hum. She is a former associate editor at Up Here and Up Here Business magazines, and a contributor to Vela. She's based in Canada's Yukon territory.


1 Comment for A Short History of Americans and Brown Sauce

Expat American 07.10.10 | 12:17 AM ET

Seeing what Americans consider “Chinese” food is always a shock to me when I’m in the US—and you can imagine how perplexing it is to my wife, who’s Chinese and a foodie. Lots of stuff Americans think is Chinese food was actually created in the US, like General Tso’s Chicken and, of course, the Fortune Cookie (created by Japanese in San Francisco).

Some co-workers and I were joking that it would be fun to create fortune cookies here and get them to be served with American food, so that when Chinese tourists travel to the US they will wonder why they don’t get a fortune cookie with their burger, the way you’re supposed to.

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