The United States of Chinese Food

Canned tomatoes are a perfect winter food. As you'll know from our tomato episode, the beautiful fruits in fresh aisle of the supermarket are mostly flavorless outside of the summer season—but the tomatoes that get packed in a can are cheap, readily available, and, most important ...  Show more

The season for holiday baking is upon us, and before you spice up your cookies and pies, you’ll probably want to know: is most of the cinnamon on grocery store shelves actually fake? That’s one question we’re investigating this week on behalf of you, dear listeners, in the latest ...  Show more

Today Chinese restaurants serve some of the most popular cuisine in the United States, with more than 41,000 restaurants scattered around the country. Yet in the 1900s these restaurants were so controversial that labor unions, hate groups and even politicians joined forces in ...

In 1971, the New York Times called the Taiwanese-Chinese chef, Fu Pei-Mei, the “the Julia Child of Chinese cooking.” But, as Michelle T. King notes in her book Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-Mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food (Norton, 2024), the inverse–that Julia Child was ...  Show more

Nearly every major city in the world has one- a district where Chinese immigrants have settled to live, work and eat. This week in a collaboration with BBC Radio 4’s ‘The Food Programme’, Dan Saladino takes you on a tour of Chinatowns around the world. From one of the oldest, in ...  Show more

It’s slightly reminiscent of your friendly neighborhood ‘Oriental Palace’, but where is the General Tsao’s Chicken and florescent pink sweet and sour pork? Though the smells and greasy tables feel strangely familiar, this isn’t the Chinese take-out of your memory. This podcast ...