"Authentic"

It doesn't mean what you think it means

Last year, when Soleil Ho took over the role of restaurant reviewer at San Francisco Chronicle, she published a piece about words she’d never use in her reviews. I was glad to see that one of those words was “authentic”.

The word “authentic”, when used in the context of a culture and cuisine, gives me goosebumps the same way rubbing pieces of styrofoam together does. Unfortunately, I can no longer read Ho’s rationale for avoiding that word (because SF Chronicle doesn’t allow non-US-credit card holders to subscribe – Hello, SF Chronicle, 2020 is calling…) but she does explain in this Serious Eats interview :

[I]t doesn't make sense. What's authentic for me is not authentic for you. It's not authentic to the next person. And so as a critic, it's not a very helpful term. And really, what it says is that I am very sophisticated and I know the way things are supposed to be and you might not know. That doesn't seem very welcoming.

If you don’t write or talk about food for a living, this probably seems petty to you, because everyone kind of “gets” that authentic means it tastes like it’s from the country it says it’s from. For the sake of illustration, I’m going to use China (and notice that “authentic” is rarely used for the cuisine of dominant cultures/colonisers like the UK or US – people will rarely say a burger tastes “authentic” – this alone tells you that the word is loaded, and is just a cousin of that other annoying word, “ethnic”.) Say a person went to Guangzhou last year for the first time. They go home, and immediately find a Chinese restaurant opened by recently immigrated Cantonese people, and call it authentic because the food evokes those recent memories of Guangzhou, which is great, I get that. But what if I visited China forty years ago, and went to Beijing? The food I had would have been completely different, firstly because of the geographical and agricultural differences, but secondly because of social, legal and cultural shifts through time. In Hong Kong, for instance, wood and charcoal-fired ovens no longer exist because of changed health and safety laws; in Beijing forty years ago, foreigners were only allowed to visit certain businesses, which served a specific kind of foreigner-friendly Pekingese food. As Ho says in the quote above, “What's authentic for me is not authentic for you,” the idea of authenticity, at least in food, is married to both time and place, which depend on your individual experience, and as a word published and intended for a public readership, is pretty useless. Plus, it suggests exoticism, which is frankly just yucky.

Many years ago, I was at TEDxHongKong talking about this very idea (btw, be careful of the people behind TEDxHongKong and related TEDxs, they’re very scammy. I’ve heard good things about other TEDxs organised in Hong Kong, though, so don’t confuse them!). My example in that talk was the spring roll, first mentioned in the Eastern Jin Dynasty (around 300-400AD) as chunbing 春餅 ‘spring cake’, a rolled pancake of vegetables and aromatic herbs like leeks and shallots. Tang dynasty poet Du Fu wrote around 700AD that people would eat spring rolls around the Lunar New Year – they’re still eaten in northern China today. Fast forward to the 1800s, and they were apparently brought south during the Tai Ping Rebellion, by soldiers fighting in the southeastern Chinese province of Fujian. They were struggling to find food to offer to their ancestors for grave sweeping festival, so they wrapped what scraps they could find in pancakes and presented them like the spring rolls they have for New Year.

Hop across the sea to Taiwan, and further south into the Philippines and Malaysia, and you see spring rolls as described in these early legends – pancakes wrapped around various fillings. In Hokkien, the Fujianese dialect, there are similar rolls called popiah and loon bian; Western Visayas in the Philippines is famous for lumpiang ubod – very fresh heart-of-palm sautéed with garlic, pork and shrimps, in a paper-thin wrapper, with perhaps a scallion stalk jauntily tucked in; in Central Java, loenpia semarang are rolls featuring bamboo shoots, coconut sugar and shrimp. But my favourite part of this story of spring rolls is Australia’s Chiko Roll.

Along with Vegemite and meat pies, the Chiko Roll is considered an Australian food icon. Most of you probably don’t know what a Chiko roll is. It was invented by a gentleman named Frank McEnroe. He was at the footy – Australian football – and he noticed a Chinese stall selling chicken spring rolls outside the stadium. He liked the idea of a portable snack, but thought the wrapper of a spring roll too brittle, too crisp, and therefore, too messy. He wanted to be able to hold his snack in one hand, and a beer in the other. So he invented the Chiko Roll, which made its debut at the agricultural show at Wagga Wagga in 1951. Since then, this doughy, mass-produced deep-fried thing has been found in fish n’ chip shops, milk bars, and wherever else you expect to find deep-fried, junky things, all across Australia.

Is your deep-fried yum cha spring roll a more or less authentic spring roll than the Jin Dynasty pancake? How about an egg roll from a Chinatown stalwart? Or a Chiko Roll? The first person who made a deep-fried spring roll was probably committing cultural blasphemy. Frank McEnroe is probably seen as guilty of bastardising the already “bastardised” dim sum spring roll. But to a young me, craving a snack after school while waiting for the bus home, a Chiko roll was about as authentic as experiences come. So instead of using a lazy, loaded word, why not actually, you know, describe the food instead?

What I read

I read some great HK-Chinese-related writing from The New York Times this week:

First, a piece on what wok hei (breath of the wok) is, and how to replicate it at home, by Kenji Lopez-Alt. I’ve wanted to write about the science of wok-based stir-frying for a while, but this kind of covers it!

Second, a beautifully written op-ed by my friend Daisann McLane about how pandemics have shaped how Hongkongers eat, then and now. So many editors based outside of Asia assign stories like these to writers they personally know but don’t live in the place they’re talking about. By contrast, Daisann’s piece oozes with intimate knowledge of the minutiae of Hong Kong life and brings it to a global audience without alienating locals. It’s an art – I could only dream of being able to write like this.

What I listened to

Definitely check out this episode of BBC’s podcast The Food Chain, which is all about ammonium nitrate, the chemical that caused the devastating explosion in Beirut recently. What’s it got to do with food, you ask? Ammonium nitrate is one of the most important synthetic fertilisers in post-modern agriculture.

What I ate

I just came back from an indulgent lunch at Celebrity Cuisine (you kind of know I’ve been out when newsletters are sent late on Sunday, hehe). Great classic Cantonese, especially the deep-fried stuff like chicken wings stuffed with birds’ nest and whole crispy chicken. Cantonese restaurants have been hit especially hard recently in HK due to the two-person rule (it’s hard to eat Cantonese food with just two people), but hopefully with the slight relaxation to four, things will pick up.

I was super excited to go to Kowloon City, because that’s where why favourite egg tarts are – Hoover Cake Shop. They’re as soft and flaky as I remember, and they had just come out of the oven when I got there!

Swung into Amber for a work lunch after a long hiatus, and it’s as delicious as ever, especially the amuse bouche of tomato panna cotta – it was sooooo rich with tomato. And yes, yes, sea urchin and caviar is still there, people, stop telling me Amber is too “healthy” for you, I’m so over that, because a) that’s not really even the case, and b) if something is “healthier” and also tastes amazing, why hate on it?

This week, I also ate at Ying Jee Club for the first time ever for a media tasting – it’s a fine choice for Cantonese in Central, and kind of underrated. I’d go back for the XO sauce cheung fun anytime – covering it in batter to make it crispy and embedded with XO sauce goodness all around is pretty genius!

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