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What is American Chow Mein?

4K views 19 replies 10 participants last post by  genemachine 
#1 ·
I saw it the other day on the Chinese buffet and it was just a glob of brown stuff.  I have no idea what's in it.  Chow means stir fry, mein means noodles.  But it looked like it was just boiled thickened globby brown stuff.
 
#4 ·
Adding a textual aspect like fried noodles to a classic chow mein is something I personally like to do. Crispy is also known as hong kong style. And steamed style .its such a evolved dish that it differs from one side of the country to the next .no right or wrong way of making one really .sometime you see chop suey poured on top of fried noodles and they call it chow mein .so I think chow mein should more reflect the restaurant serving it and not the whole of America ." steve and bob's chow mein' lol. Not amarican style chow mein @ steve and bob's ;)
 
#8 ·
@eastshores,

Boy does that pic bring back memories. We had an eccentric old man in our family that everyone called papa and he had a wonderful spread on the beach in Martha's Vinyard. We road our bikes to the dock to buy lobster and he would have us dig clams for meals. As kids, this wasn't so great . BUT, when it rained he made this big deal about making chow mien sandwiches. The parents would go somewhere to eat and Papa would tell this story over and over how he invented this sandwich when he spent all him money to buy the property. thanks for the memories.
 
#11 ·
Hey! That beckons my childhood. "Chicken Chow Mein" in fact. It's not terrible as canned food goes, but to have chicken chow mein, you must have chow mein noodles! haha

Yeah that's the stuff. My mom always added stuff to it to help extend the food for our family.

I was an adult before I realized those soft dumplings in the Suey were actually undissolved cornstarch my mom used to thicken it with. YUCK!!!
 
#12 ·
Both the La Choy Chow mein and Chef BoyArDee pizza kits bring back very bad childhood memories for me.  I always wanted to eat them but m Mom (Dad, probably) wouldn't even consider it.. no matter how much I asked, whined, and begged.  We only ate "real food".  I'm now nearing the end of my life and have never eaten either one of thse products and probaby should keep it that way.
 
#13 ·
The chow mein definitely wasn't as bad as some canned products back in the day. At least it had a decent serving of vegetables and decent canned chicken meat. Probably the sauce was loaded with corn syrup and sodium but I never looked and figure it didn't matter with me splashing soy sauce all over it!

With four kids and my dad, my mom added something to stretch it too... Rice! Lots and lots of rice! hahaha. She really did a good job of providing meals for us for so many years. She made a lot of things from scratch but as she had to work an assembly line job on her feet all day, then do her best to keep the house clean laundry done and feed us kids some nights were chow mein nights! I never complained, I rather liked the stuff.
 
#15 ·
In my family several of us kids took over supper cooking duty early on. My oldest sister did when I was 4, when I was 9 I took over skipping the middle sister who can burn water. I learned to make corn starch gravy before my older sister, and a lot of other foods by watching mom cook on her days off. Both my parents worked full time and with 5 kids we all had to pitch in. That included hunting for food many days. Chicken chow mein with some squirrel added was not to bad a meal...
 
#16 · (Edited)
The local reception of foreign cuisines is a fascinating thing. When I grew up in the late 70s and the 80s in rural Germany, there was, well, not very much. Italian restaurants had a foothold, of course - but those were all "pizzerias" which couldn't put a decent Italian menu together anyway. Then some Greek and Balkan-style restaurants showed up, mostly focussed on chargrilling stuff to utter dryness. People ate it up.... Foreign restaurants mostly related to the regions where people would go on holiday mostly. Europanized Chinese showed up in the mid 80s around here. My mother used to fry rice, pork loin and canned champignons and sprinkle it with a premade "chinese spice mixture" back in the day. We didn't know any better. Still have to find a decent Chinese restaurant outside of the large cities. Only since the mid-late 90s I have seen a broader movement of people actually interested in unadulterated foreign cooking.

EDIT: Addendum - this was not really ment to denigrate the guys back then. We are so damn lucky to have all the interesting information at our fingertips these days.
 
#17 ·
A friend of mine was a teacher at an American army base in Southern Germany back around 1990. A "Mexican" restaurant opened up in the town, so of course her had to try it. Nothing at all like what we have here in the US, he said it was horrid.  He did take us to a Balkan style place, though, that was very good. The meat was well flavored and only a little overdone.

mjb.
 
#18 ·
A friend of mine was a teacher at an American army base in Southern Germany back around 1990. A "Mexican" restaurant opened up in the town, so of course her had to try it. Nothing at all like what we have here in the US, he said it was horrid. He did take us to a Balkan style place, though, that was very good. The meat was well flavored and only a little overdone.

mjb.
Grafenwöhr? Hohenfels? That's the big bases where I hang around.
 
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