Is Chinese food as American as apple pie?
Jennifer 8. Lee discusses the strange evolution of everyone’s favorite ethnic food. By Nina Lalli Mar. 11, 2008 | As a teenager, New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee was crushed to learn that fortune cookies weren’t Chinese. She likens that moment to “learning I was adopted while being told there was no Santa Claus.” She became obsessed with answering the specific question of where the cookies did originate and the bigger question of how Chinese food became, as she says, more American than apple pie. The quest led her to her first book, “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles,” which took her around the world and all over the United States to dig up some of the missing links between the food her Taiwanese mother cooks at home and the boneless, saccharine dishes she preferred (to the dismay of both her parents) as a kid growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She searches rural Hunan for the origins of America’s most beloved Chinese dish, General Tso’s chicken, only to find the people
