Henry Chung, Who Helped Bring Hunan’s Flavors to America, Dies at 98

[JSngry]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/us/henry-chung-hunan-dead.html?_r=0

When Mr. Chung was growing up on a farm in Tao Hua, a village outside Liling, in southern Hunan Province, food preparation was a two-woman job: His mother, Wang Shao Yi, chopped the ingredients, then added wood to the fire as his grandmother, He Xiang Tao, had instructed.

The elder woman “loved to use fresh ginger, hot pepper, black beans, black pepper, garlic, scallions, vinegar and good white wine as flavor builders,” Mr. Chung wrote in “Henry Chung’s Hunan Style Chinese Cookbook” (1978).

“She was often choked by strong smells and she would say, ‘This is a mighty good dish!’ ” He added, “Her cookery was early injected into my blood.”...

Finally, in 1974, when he was in his mid-50s, he started Hunan, a tiny restaurant on Kearny Street in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where he introduced diners to hot, peppery Hunanese food, a departure from the milder Cantonese cuisine that many Americans were more accustomed to....

One diner dazzled by Mr. Chung was Tony Hiss, a staff writer for The New Yorker, who was walking by the restaurant on Thanksgiving in 1976 and lured in by its rich aromas. A few weeks after eating Mr. Chung’s onion cakes and chicken and garlic sauce, he declared in the magazine that Hunan was “the best Chinese restaurant in the world.”

People clamored to eat at Hunan, partly because of Mr. Hiss’s praise. Mr. Chung moved from his original spot to a larger space in 1979 and later opened several more restaurants around San Francisco that are known as Henry’s Hunan. His son Howard said in an interview that some less adventurous customers were shocked by the garlic, spice and ginger of his father’s dishes and demanded something tamer.

“If someone said, ‘I want moo goo gai pan,’ he’d say, ‘That’s Cantonese!’” Howard Chung said. “I was a waiter for many years, and people would walk out. They’d ask for dishes we didn’t have. They’d say, ‘That’s not what we had in the Midwest.’”

[JSngry]

It might be hard for some to remember the impact of the introduction and then popularization of non-Cantonese Chinese food. Between that and the more-or-less parallel invasion of Tex-Mex and jalapenos, it set in motion a revolution of the American palate that continues to this day. My folks used to think that basic Italian food was "spicy", just because of the garlic. I myself used to think that jalapenos were "hot", albeit pleasantly so. Our collective flavor options have expanded almost exponentially in less than half a century. It's another form of the Information Revolution, because what is flavor if not information?

[OliverM]

Interesting share! Hunan cuisine is really the most spicy in China, while Sichuan cuisine is tingly due to sichuan pepper. Shousi baocai, duo jiao yutou and maoshi hongshao rou are favorites!

Edited May 15, 2017 by OliverM