A friend was getting a leg of lamb ready for the oven when his wife asked him why he always cuts an inch or so from either end of it. Because that's how you do it, he said. I don't, she said. Well, my mother does, he replied, and she cooks some of the best roast lamb in the home counties.
Mocked, my friend rang his mother: she said she trimmed the lamb that way because that's what her mother, another celebrated lamb roaster, did. He sounded out his older relations until he found a great aunt who told him that although her sisters and their daughters had always trimmed the ends of a leg of lamb, she had never bothered. She knew that their mother only did it because she had been brought up in a house with a particularly small oven.
There are many culinary myths: some inexplicable, some daft. There are cooking dicta that, although their origins are ancient and unaccountable, clearly deserve to be challenged. Why must polenta be stirred anticlockwise? (Was there once a great polenta chef with an arthritic wrist?) Does boiling an octopus with a wine cork tenderise it? Is a boiled soup really a spoiled soup? It shouldn't be too hard to find out. And you might also ask: in the average professional kitchen, as the number of cooks increases, at what stage does the quality of the broth begin to deteriorate? Could we see the curve?
Of course, some kitchen fables should not be investigated, for fear of harming them. Did Garibaldi liberate Italy on a diet of the squashed fly biscuits that now bear his name? I hope so. Some deserve to be spread, like Roald Dahl's contention to his children that breakfast cereal is made from "all those little curly wooden shavings you find in pencil sharpeners." When you get to the origins of food names, things get very murky. Was carpaccio—now a catch-all term for any raw food sliced thinly—really thus named because the red of a filmy strip of raw beef resembles the rich scarlets deployed by the 16th-century painter? If so, Gordon Ramsay might do better to name his carpaccio of pineapple for a master of yellows—hockney of pineapple, say.
These fables spread and mutate like viruses. It is not true—as I was recently told—that mayonnaise was invented by Hannibal's brother Mago, when a Carthaginian invasion fleet stopped in Minorca on the way to Rome and found an excess of egg yolks. But the rumour is not baseless: the name is derived from the Minorcan city Port Mahon, which in turn was named after Mago.
Leftovers fit for pigs
The naming of chop suey—one of the first globalised dishes, though never eaten in China—is perhaps my favourite food myth. Ask any Chinese chef and they'll tell you that the words come from the Mandarin zasui, meaning odds and ends—and not in a "delicious leftovers" way. Rather, zasui is something you might put in a bucket for the pigs.
The genesis of chop suey goes back to the late 19th century and the growth of cheap restaurants serving the Chinese labourers who migrated to the west coast of the US. London's first Chinese restaurant opened in 1908, and by the 1930s there were nine, all serving "that monstrosity, chop suey," according to one young visiting Chinese, Pêh Der Chen. In Cambridge in the late 1930s, according to another account, at the Chinese-American-run Blue Barn you could eat a chop suey of "stewed meat and cabbage awash with tomato sauce." Only two other dishes were served: chow mein and fried rice.
Pêh Der Chen wrote up his experiences in Britain in Honourable and Peculiar Ways, a hilarious travelogue that was very popular when it was published in 1932. Here is Pêh's version of the origin of chop suey: "When our venerable viceroy, Li Hung Chang, reached Washington on his imperial mission abroad, he suffered ungladly the familiarities of the American newspaper reporters. One day one of the more stubborn pests climbed onto the roof of the Legation and, peering down a skylight, saw our mighty mandarin taking his dinner. The next day the impudent bamboo-worm asked what his Excellency was eating, all chopped up small. 'Chop suey!' replied our caustic viceroy. Pleased as a mighty explorer, the dishonourable spiller of ink spread the name large over his equally unworthy newspaper. He had spread 'Dirty mixed fragments.' And this coinage has survived the abuse of a generation of Chinese patriots…."
I was pleased when I found this in Honourable and Peculiar Ways. I thought I'd tracked one food nomenclature fable to its source. But in JAG Roberts's scholarly study of the globalisation of Chinese food, China to Chinatown (2002), there is a slightly different story, concerning a viceroy named Li Hongzhang who stayed at the Waldorf Hotel in New York in 1896. Spurning American food, he got his personal cooks to prepare a dish for him from what they could find in the hotel's kitchens. And so he invented chop suey.
But that's myths for you—it's usually not worth poking too far. What is true, as Pêh Der Chen concludes, is that, "If, primed with London-acquired knowledge of food, you went to China and asked for chop suey, you would not be understood and, if you were, you might be thrown out."
