Laughter and Tears--Chinese Food on the Sapphire Princess Antarctic Cruise

Since we and everyone else began to take cruise ship vacations again after COVID, I have noticed that the percentage of Asians, primarily first generation Chinese Americans and Chinese Canadians, has been significant.  As such, on the two Mexican Riviera cruises we took out of Los Angeles about a year ago, there was quite an offering of Chinese food, some good, much not so good,  but at least conspicuously present and recognizable at most meals.

Likewise on last month's Sapphire Princess cruise starting in Buenos Aires, cruising four days in the Antarctic, and ending in Chile, there was like a high quotient of Chinese passengers on the boat.  And overall this was the best vacation trip I have gone on.   However on this trip, when it came to Chinese food it was pretty uniformly gruesome.  The overriding feature was the large number of dishes with familiar Chinese names that neither looked nor tasted like the real thing.  

 

Hot and sour soup looked like chicken rice soup and tasted like chicken broth with some pepper added.  

 

Kung pao chicken was big chunks of chicken white meat in tomato sauce.  Peppers?  Peanuts?  What are those?

Sweet and sour pork was unbreaded pork strips of pork (fajita like) in a clear sauce.  (Sorry, no picture.  I couldn't bear to photograph it at the time.)  Sesame chicken looked like McDonald’s chicken nuggets with a dipping sauce.  And mind you, this dish was in the main dining room, not the buffet.

 

They had char siu – in cutlet form in a goopy sauce.  Another day it was the carvery item (without the goopy sauce.

 

Shanghai beef fried rice (what’s that?) looked more like Spanish rice.  

 

And how could you come up with a head scratching version of jook?  Well, by making it greenish yellow, I guess.

 

And unlike the Indian food, which had it’s own section at lunch and dinner every day, the “Chinese” food was very sporadic.  There was one “Mongolian night”, but the only notable feature about that was that it was cooked to your order.  You’d choose from beef, pork, chicken or vegetables, then either chow mein or rice, then spicy or nonspicy.  Oh, and this was the last dinner on the cruise so they wanted to do something special for the Chinese passengers.  (Note that dishes were for "Display Purposes Only.")  Why bother?

 

I posed the question to myself during the cruise "What Chinese recipe book were they working from?"  However, now it's clear to me that Princess did not have a recipe book for their Chinese food.  They gave the names of Chinese dishes to their cooks, and told them to make something up from scratch based on the name.  That's the only possible explanation.