Food Trivia Question from the Oriental Oasis Newsletter
TRIVIA QUESTION: Born in Shanghai, I grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where my mother's Chinese restaurant quickly attracted a large crowd from the nearby universities. Among numerous other accomplishments, my mother created her own line of cookware, and was the first Asian to have her own television show. It was always my mother's dream that the two of us would write a mother-daughter cookbook. Unfortunately this never happened, but my own cookbook (published in 1994) is a tribute to her. Who am I?
TRIVIA ANSWER: Helen Chen. Helen's mother, Joyce Chen, is well known for introducing Americans to Chinese cooking. In the 1960's she had her own television show, "Joyce Chen Cooks." It is Joyce Chen who coined the term "Peking Ravioli" for pan-fried pot stickers: her restaurant was located in a largely Italian neighborhood, and she wanted a name that would help customers understand what the dumplings were like. Her frustration with trying to use a round-bottomed wok on western stoves led her to invent a flat-bottomed wok. Helen Chen's cookbook, Helen Chen's Chinese Home-Cooking, is filled with memories of her mother, along with the recipes she learned from her.
