I remember the first time
I had real (American) Chinese food
with Chinese hot mustard. (Of course
back in the 70's my mom
occasionally made chop suey from
a can and mixed it with ground beef, but that qualifies for Chinese
food about as much as Spagettio's qualifies as Italian--but we never
had hot mustard with it that version of chop suey.) Early
in my career, I went with some co-workers
to a Chinese restaurant where we started lunch
with some eggrolls. Following everyone else's
lead, I unwittingly dipped my
eggroll into a generous portion of Chinese mustard. Seconds later, a
volcano rolled through my sinuses
and I grabbed my water
to douse the flames. But what I found
really amazing was that I immediately
wanted more!
And so began my love
affair with hot Chinese mustard and its cousin,
wasabi. In fact, wasabi became the real
reason I love sushi. I love the rush and the feeling of
risk that maybe this time I might
have taken too much... then “Ahhhhhhh!” the sweet release
as it flushes out my
sinuses. In much the same way that you
should never eat at a barbecue restaurant tif you
can't smell it from a mile away--if
you didn't have a runny nose when you leave a
Chinese restaurant, you should cross it off your
list.
Way
back then, when I first came to love hot mustard, I didn't
even care about the eggrolls; I just needed a
vehicle for dipping into that
awesome, gratifying, sinus-clearing hot stuff. You could have
given me a plate of cardboard toilet paper rolls
and I probably would have declared them
"fantastico!" if the mustard was
good.
Flash forward to the
present. Because of our recent long, drawn out moving process and
having to take care of two houses for a while, we spent a lot of time
on the road which meant we didn't feel much like cooking. And
so we have had more pizza and Chinese food delivered in the past year
than in all previous years combined. This
has made us experts on eggrolls and Chinese hot mustard. But after a
few deliveries, I began to notice that the "mustard
effect" wasn't quite what it used to be; it was taking more and
more mustard to get a decent fix. Had I developed a tolerance,
like a meth addict?
We switched to a different
Chinese restaurant for
delivery but nothing changed, the
mustard didn't seem hot at all. In fact, upon
close examination I realized that the mustard looked
and tasted more like the yellow mustard I had
eaten growing up than it did the Chinese
mustard I had come to love. In desperation
we bought a dry hot mustard mix from
the grocery store, but this too tasted
bland and heatless.
Where oh where had my hot
mustard gone?
Sadly,
it appears to have undergone the slow but inevitable Americanization
process that many original foods and flavors fall victim to. We don't
appreciate cultural or regional differences when it comes to food.
You can find the same chain restaurants,
in virtually any city in any state.
PopEyes is considered authentic New Orleans fare to many of us. And
Taco Bell is "Mexican" food. But we don't want surprises in
our food. And we want a Taco Bell bean
burrito to taste exactly the same wherever we go whether we're in
Anchorage or Albany. With this homogenization,
some foods slowly morph together,
and the masses get what they want. Thus, Chinese
restaurant owners have undoubtedly, over time, catered to the
non-adventurous American tongue by subbing familiar mild yellow
mustard for their authentic, fume-inducing Chinese one.
I suppose it's democracy
at its best but the victory of plain, banal yellow mustard over
Chinese mustard makes me weep, the way a
good dose of Chinese mustard used to.
Guess I'll go make myself a chopped ham sandwich.
