Solving The Broccoli Beef Mystery

Even as Chinese food in the United States becomes more and more authentic, there also seems to be renewed interest in Americanized Chinese food, as indicated by the invitation I received to be interviewed about Americanized Chinese food on the Jim Jefferies podcast, which I declined as it involved going into a radio studio during the lockdown.  As I have explained in the past, there were two separate and distinct sources to today's Americanized Chinese food.  There's the category of food which was rooted in the Toishanese immigration to the United States, from the time of the Gold Rush in the mid-19th century until the late 1960s repeal of discriminatory anti-Chinese immigration laws in the United States.  Basically this was rural Cantonese food as adapted to ingredients available in the United States, as well as to the taste buds of the American public.  In this original category one finds classics such as chop suey, egg foo young, sweet and sour pork, and wor won ton soup, which most of America erroneously believed representative of food eaten throughout China.

However after the change in American immigration laws, Chinese people of different backgrounds began to come to the United States.  In the 1970s these were the urban Cantonese from Hong Kong and the Mandarin speaking Taiwanese, most of whom themselves had evacuated the Chinese mainland to Taiwanese as the mainland fell to the communist regime.   Taiwanese chefs, many of whom had arrived in Taiwan from Hunan and Sichuan provinces two decades previous, arrived in New York and starting serving what they remembered as Hunan and Sichuan food.  But since they were serving these dishes to native New Yorkers, not natives of Hunan or Sichuan, of whom there were very few in the United States at that time, new styles of Americanized Chinese dishes became featured--mu shu pork, General Tso's chicken, and sizzling rice soup to name a few.  

While we're now used to seeing a mashup of Cantonese and non-Cantonese dishes at Americanized Chinese restaurants these days, the difference between the two was originally like night and day, except perhaps for the presence of white rice at both styles of restaurants.  Furthermore, since during the first half of the 20th century, there was little migration from China, and what migration there was consisted almost exclusively of friends and relatives of the Toishanese already here, Chinese restaurant menus during this period were remarkably stable.

Which leads to my mystery of broccoli beef.  This dish is not found on Americanized Chinese restaurant menus in the early 20th century.   Yet, it had become a standard dish in Americanized Chinese restaurants before the second wave of Americanized Chinese food in the 1970s.  Plus as a mild stir fry mixture of meat and vegetable, it clearly fell into the Cantonese style of cooking.   So why did this dish arise during a period of time where there was little evolution in Chinese food in America?

As it turns out, there was a simple reason there was no broccoli beef in the early 20th century.  It was because there was no broccoli, period, in the United States at that point in time.  Broccoli did not arrive in the United States until 1920s when it was brought by Italian immigrants.  And it didn't become a mainstream vegetable in the United States until the 1940s.  So it was an evolution in American food, rather than anything specifically due to Chinese food or the Toishanese community, that led to the introduction of the classic broccoli beef.