Category – Chefsway Sauceries

written by Maria Thomas

Date – October 15, 2018

On any given day in an Indian metropolis, foodies are spoiled for choice. There’s now Japanese-Peruvian cuisine, French patisserie, Mexican tacos and more.

But all these choices haven’t taken away the crowds inside the scores of Chinese restaurants that dot every city, with names like China Bowl, China Pearl, Chung Wah, Wangs or Zhangs. From fancy establishments to neighbourhood joints, countless restaurants serve what is now recognised as quintessentially Indian Chinese food: spicy gravies, saucy noodles and the legendary chicken or vegetable manchurian – always batter-fried and doused in chilli garlic sauce – all of which bear very little resemblance to the food actually eaten in China.

“It’s like a comfort food for us,” Priya Bala, the author of Secret Sauce: Inspiring Stories of Great Indian Restaurants, told Quartz. “We don’t even think it’s Chinese, it’s very familiar and comforting.”

So much so that even restaurants serving Indian food will usually include a Chinese section on the menu. This will feature all the usual favourites – fried rice, chilli chicken, sweet corn soup – and many will think nothing of ordering a dish or two.

But how did Chinese food become so beloved in India? Like many great stories of food culture around the world, it begins with immigrants and the interaction between different communities, which over the centuries produced a hybrid cuisine that took on a life of its own in India.

Calcutta calling

The story of Indian Chinese food begins in 18th century Calcutta (now Kolkata), which the British East India Company established as the capital of colonial India. Located in the midst of a thriving trade route through which items like tea and silk were transported from China to Britain, Calcutta soon began to draw communities of skilled and unskilled Chinese workers.

The very first Chinese migrant is believed to have been a tea trader named Yang Dazhao, popularly known as Yang Atchew, who arrived in 1778 and set up a sugar mill on land given to him by the British, bringing people from the mainland to work for him.

By 1901, the census recorded 1,640 Chinese people living in the city, researchers Zhang Xing and Tansen Sen write in a chapter on the Chinese in South Asia in the Routledge Handbook of the Chinese Diaspora. By the end of the Second World War, they say, the number had surged to at least 26,250.

These Chinese immigrants came from different regions but could broadly be categorized as Cantonese carpenters, Hakka shoemakers and tannery workers, Hubeinese dentists, and Shandong silk traders, Zing and Sen write. These immigrants would lay the roots for India’s obsession with Chinese cuisine.

“[For] every community, wherever they go, food is an important way to create a sense of belonging and familiarity,” said Jayani Jeanne Bonnerjee, associate professor at the OP Jindal Global University, Haryana, who has studied the history of Calcutta’s Chinese community. In the city’s centrally located Chinatown, immigrants cooked their own food and peddlers began selling them on the streets to fellow Chinese workers.

Then, in 1924, Calcutta’s first Chinese restaurant, Nanking, opened up, serving Cantonese food that reportedly went on to draw the likes of yesteryear Bollywood stars Raj Kapoor and Dilip Kumar, besides a host of other Indians and Europeans living in the city. Several other Chinese-owned restaurants would open up over the following years, not just in Calcutta but in Bombay, too, where there was another sizeable community of immigrants. But it was in Calcutta where the cuisine would begin to evolve, catering more to Indian tastes.

From Chinese to Indian Chinese

There isn’t a lot of academic work on how exactly Chinese food began adapting itself to Indian tastes, but various accounts place its starting point in Calcutta’s second Chinatown, located in Tangra, where the Hakka Chinese set up leather tanneries. The restaurants they went on to establish in the area began incorporating techniques to make food more appealing for Indian customers, notably using a lot more of chilli.

How the idea of Indianised Chinese food spread from Tangra to the rest of the country is also a bit unclear. What we do know is that in about 1974, India’s first Sichuan restaurant opened up at the Taj Mahal hotel in Bombay, introducing locals to a type of Chinese food they had never experienced before: fiery hot.

“So people started going to lesser establishments and demanding that kind of Chinese food,” journalist and food writer Vir Sanghvi told Quartz. To cater to this growing demand, he explained, the owners of Chinese restaurants set out to create a cuisine that incorporated these tastes.

“They didn’t have ingredients like Sichuan peppers and all the things that the Taj had access to, so they improvised,” Sanghvi said. “Basically the principle was that you deep-fried meat and you put it in a gravy that had been thickened with cornstarch, and for spices you used Indian spices as much as possible.”

The evolution of Chinese food in India was accelerated by several such innovations, among them the invention of chicken manchurian. A man named Nelson Wang, the son of Chinese immigrants in Kolkata, is most often credited with its creation. The story goes that Wang ended up in Bombay in the 1970s, working as an assistant cook at another Taj restaurant, Frederick’s. One day, he happened to experiment with mixing garlic, ginger, and green chilies – quintessentially Indian ingredients – with soy sauce and cornstarch to thicken the gravy. The result was the now ubiquitous chicken manchurian.

The manchurian-style preparation of chicken or vegetables is now found in almost every Chinese restaurant in India. Photo credit: Sanya1492/Wikimedia Commons [Licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0]

Wang would go on to run a handful of Chinese restaurants in Bombay, but he’s best known for China Garden, a legendary space that took Indian Chinese food from the streets to the glamorous world of fine-dining, complete with monogrammed napkins and elegant and sophisticated service.

“It was just simply the place to be,” Bala said. With its attached members-only Piano Bar, China Garden would go on to attract the who’s who of Bombay high society, including Bollywood stars and socialites. The Hollywood star Goldie Hawn also stopped by for a visit, besides Pakistani cricketer (and now prime minister) Imran Khan.

Outside China Garden, too, Indianised Chinese food was becoming increasingly popular, which food writers say was because it appealed to the country’s gravy-loving palate and was packed with delicious flavors. The secret to its success was the use of a “holy trinity” of ingredients – tomatoes, soy sauce, and chili – that offered Indian customers a taste of something they couldn’t often find in local food.

“Indian [food] is one of the few cuisines that has very few umami flavours…That was the one taste that Indian cuisine was lacking, and the creation of Chinese cuisine satisfied that,” Sanghvi said. But how Chinese food became embedded into India’s culinary identity also has a lot to do with the country’s eating out culture in an era when a restaurant meal was still reserved for special occasions.

Comfort food

Today, around 60% of Indian millennials eat out over three times a month, and spend about 10% of their income on buying food from restaurants, caterers, and canteens. In comparison, Gen-X Indians, aged between 35 and 50, spend only about 3%. The popularity of dining out has meant that metropolises are packed with restaurants and cafes, and food-delivery apps such as Swiggy are doing booming business catering to those who don’t want to cook at home. All this represents a huge change from the way things were before.

“In the 1980s and 1990s, going out to eat meant going to a Chinese restaurant,” Bonnerjee said. “Now you have everything, but I think the first cuisine that sort of opened up the taste buds to the others is the Chinese.”

With all its rice and gravy-based dishes, Chinese food was the ideal combination of foreign and familiar for Indians, according to Bala. So for many, eating Chinese food taps into the nostalgia of growing up in this country at a time when dining out was very different from the way it is today.

These days, though, the Chinese restaurants across the country are mostly Indian-owned and have Indian cooks. As for the Chinese community, things were never the same after the 1962 war between India and China. During this conflict, thousands of Chinese in India were suspected of being spies and sent to a detention camp in Rajasthan, where they were reportedly kept under brutal conditions for years. Many were even deported.

After that, the Chinese community began to dwindle significantly as its members emigrated to places like Canada. Now, only a few thousand remain in Kolkata. As for India’s historic Chinese-owned restaurants, many are either gone or simply not what they used to be.

At the same time, Asian fusion food is exploding in every metropolis, and urban Indians are savoring much more exotic dishes like ramen, khow suey, and char siu bao. But to this day, there are few who can turn down a plate of crispy honey chili potatoes or chicken manchurian, because nothing quite hits the spot like Indian Chinese food.

Category – Chefsway Sauceries

written by Indrajit Lahiri 

Date – August 9, 2021

Chinese food has almost become a religion for us, Bengalis. And after Biryani, chow mien-chilly chicken is what we love the most. Please correct me if I am wrong, but I strongly feel that way. And quite regularly, I come across a typical question- regarding the authenticity of this cuisine. I somehow feel (not being to china till now) that this cuisine, what we enjoy, is not a typical Chinese cuisine- but an Indianized version of the same. And we can call it Indo-Chinese cuisine. And as with any cuisine, this has stories- need to be told. So, without wasting more time, ladies and gentlemen, let’s explore this enigma named Indo-Chinese cuisine. 

So, how did the Chinese land up in India?

In the late 18th century, one broke businessman Mr. Tom Atchew landed in, what we know as Acchipur today. And once Governor-general Mr. Warren Hastings granted them land for setting up a sugar factory, the first Chinese settlement in India was born. Before this settlement had settled, there was hardly any documented usage of refined sugar in Bengal sweets. However, the history of Bengali sweets deserves a separate mention and will be dealt with later. When Atchew wanted land for setting up a sugar factory, he was given approval by the British. The British felt that any shift in the market which will stop the monopoly of West Indies would significantly help in boosting the profits of East India Company in the sub-continent. This is how Chinese Sugar got introduced into Indian Tea. Because of its origin in China, Locals named it “Chini”.

However, It seems Mr. Atchew couldn’t run his factory well and it got closed down. Naturally, the workers moved towards the nearest big city- Calcutta. They got themselves settled in the current Tiretta Bazaar area and this was the oldest Chinese ghetto in Kolkata. One of the primary businesses there, was tannery. Now, tanneries in the midst of the city were probably becoming an eyesore of the British government, and the same was shifted beside the eastern wetland. And, thus the new-age Chinatown or Tangra came into existence.

They learned their native language and used their skills in carpentry, leather, dentistry, etc., and started thriving in their new homeland. Slowly none remained in Atchepore rather now we can call it Achipur but the generation of Chinese who remained back in the city never forgot their place of origin and still visit Achipur and its temple during Chinese New Year. And, it’d be interesting to know that though the oldest documented Chinese restaurant was “Nanking”, the oldest operating Chinese (or rather Indo-Chinese) restaurant today is Eau Chew in Ganesh Chandra Avenue, running for the last 90+ years.

But where did the Chinese population come from to Kolkata?

The Chinese who were carpenters by profession came from West Guangdong Province and spoke Cantonese. This Chinese community stayed in the Tiretti Bazar area and set up their carpentry shops which still exist to date. At a much later stage, the Cantonese went into the business of restaurants.

The Tanners came from East Guangdong Province and spoke Hakka. Since their work involved dealing with rawhide, they set up their business in the then outskirts of Kolkata near Tangra which was then mainly marshlands.

A group of Chinese who were by profession Dentists and came from Central China (Hubei Province).

This group of Chinese who were laundrymen came from Shanghai. They set up laundry and dry cleaning business and that is the reason why one can see many Shanghai Laundry & Dry Cleaners around the city

The first set of Chinese immigrants was mainly menfolk. They formed their own groups which were usually from the same village or the same trade. Such Group formations were not uncommon as within mainland China also workers from one province who would have traveled to another province for work would form groups.

Huiguan- the Chinese clubs

These social groups were referred to as Huiguans (“Voi-Koon” in Cantonese and “Fee Kwan” in Hakka) which actually would translate as “meeting place” in English. Thus the Chinese workers who had come to Calcutta started forming these Huiguans. These were actually social clubs which had facilities like that of a school, games like Mahjong, some had basic beds while some had proper boarding facilities for newly arrived workers from the mainland.

Whenever a new immigrant would come from a particular province he would first head straight to his community Huiguans. Here other than meeting his own people he would also be in groups who had similar skill sets like carpenter, dentist, tanners, etc. This way it would also be easy for them to find a job by word of mouth. Another important role for these Huiguans was to make funeral arrangements. When a Chinese immigrant would die here in this city then most likely he would have been alone here without his family. Since it was impossible to send the body back home to Chania they would have to be buried here in the city and with no relatives around it was these very Huiguans that would do the necessary funeral arrangements.

Chinese newspaper in Kolkata??? 

At least till 2005, India’s only Chinese newspaper ‘Overseas Chinese Commerce of India’ was a handwritten paper whence the calligraphers dipped their pens in black ink and went on with writing the day’s edition. The newspaper was established in March 1969, by Lee Youn Chin who was a community leader was also a tanner. Written Chinese was not based on alphabets. Instead Chinese characters were glyphs whose components may depict objects or represent abstract notions. At that time they did not have computers with Chinese keyboards, so the only option that remained was to publish handwritten newspapers. Later the uniqueness of the ‘Overseas Chinese Commerce of India’ departed with the availability of Chinese keyboard and it was now composed on the computer like any other newspaper.

The figurative quill pen and cursive handwriting in Chinese ink had given way to the keyboard and the mouse. Editor K.T. Chang, a retired tannery worker, and his “helper”, Helen Yang, are the only two “journalists” who run the newspaper. The Tangra building of the Chinese Tannery Owners Association that houses the office has white signage with a scrawl in Mandarin atop the entrance. They usually work for three hours – between 8.30 and 11.30 am. In that duration, they compose proof and wrap up the four-page tabloid getting information from various Chinese news agencies and other websites.

The first page of the newspaper features international news; followed by a mix of China-specific and city news relating to the Chinese exodus on the second page. The third page of the tabloid is reserved for articles related to beauty and lifestyle.  Major news from cities like Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan gets featured on the final page. They publish only 200 newspapers daily, but only 180 are sold at a price of Rs 2.50 each.

The story of the Hakka community in the story of the Indo-Chinese community

 Cantonese and Hakka are the most dominant subgroups living in Kolkata. Additionally, there were also migrants from Hubei, Shandong, and Fujian provinces. Hakka migrants were able to establish their niches as shoemakers and tannery owners due to the Hindu caste system that relegated any work dealing with leather to the untouchables. By the end of the Second World War, there were around 300 Hubeinese owned dentistry businesses in India. Indian customers were attracted to the Hupak or the Hubeinese teeth setters because of their reputed skills and most importantly low fees.

The Cantonese carpenters had a big reputation as hardworking, cordial, and highly skilled so they were pursued both by the local Indians and the British living in Kolkata. At first, they were engaged in part-time work but after learning English and Indian languages, they were able to gain many subcontracts from large carpentry factories. It was at a much later stage that the Chinese community of Kolkata moved to open restaurants.

Chinese food to this spicy Indo-Chinese food of today

 As the population of Chinese grew in the city, there was a growing demand for the availability of their local cuisine.  This initiated the journey of Chinese eateries at Kolkata. The first Chinese restaurant to open was Nanking in 1924 by Auyue Shoon of the Au family on the ground floor of Toongon Church or Chinese Temple established by Cantonese migrants from Koon Toong.

Initially, the Chinese eating houses were for the Chinese only. Thus they made authentic Chinese food suited to the palate of the Chinese community only. But the business couldn’t survive on that alone.  And, the native residents of Kolkata opined the food to be “too bland” and “raw”. The business started falling in and some genius chefs thought of adopting THE Indo-Chinese cuisine.

The Noodles were made using Indian and Chinese sauces, spices, green chiles, and Ajinomoto. The Chili chicken saw the addition of extra red chilies along with the original ingredient of Soya Sauce.  Soon the number of Indian customers increased. They were forced to admit that food was nothing like they had ever tasted before, and yet close enough to home in that it was spicy and tangy just like their own Bengali cuisine. Soon, Bollywood sensations Raj Kapoor, Dilip Kumar, and Sunil Dutt became regulars at the joint based on favorable reviews. Indo-Chinese food started becoming the rage… 

Hong family of Eau chew and invention of the Bengali styled Indo-Chinese food

 Eau Chew is currently the oldest surviving family-owned Indo-Chinese restaurant in India, run by the community which settled in India from mainland China.  Achumpa Huang started Eau Chew back in 1927 with his original utensils which were brought to the city from south China’s Moi Yen village. It started as a low-priced eating house and tiffin provider to Chinese immigrants in the city. Literally, Eau Chew means Europe in Mandarin. It tells about the mindset of the family and once the outlet also had and pork chops on its menu for its European clientele.

Facts On the Indo-Chinese food that we love today

The Hong family was the inventor of “Schezwan sauce”- now a fixture of every Hakka-styled Indo-Chinese kitchen in India. Schezwan—an Indian pronunciation of “Sichuan”—is a sauce made from onions, ginger, garlic, a mix of Indian spices, and large amounts of oil. The dishes with this name in fact usually bear very little resemblance to ones from China’s Sichuan Province. In every case, it sometimes contains Sichuan peppercorns.

Pou Chong is one of Kolkata’s last standing Chinese sauce factories, their legendary green chili sauce is used to top up chow mein, is eaten with samosas, and remains central to street food across the country. As informed by the family, when they first made the green chili sauce, they gave it to some street-side vendors to use with their snacks. A cucumber seller began to put it on his slices and sell it to children. They loved the sauce, so they on making more and soon it became an accompaniment with rolls, salads, chops, sandwiches, cutlet, finger chip, samosa, and momo.

In the 1970s, chefs from Tangra began moving into Bombay and New Delhi to spread the cuisine among the big city populations. At China Garden, one of Mumbai’s first Chinese restaurants, chef Nelson Wang invented the “Manchurian” style of cooking—which is now found across the world. Wang, then the caterer of Chinese food at the Cricket Club of India, took cubes of chicken, covered them in flour, deep-fried them, and dipped them in a spicy peppery sauce.

Wang not only invented Manchurian Chicken (in which he threw together ginger, garlic, green chilies, soy sauce, coriander, and cornflour), but a host of other dishes that are now considered an inimitable part of the Indo-Chinese pantheon. Creamy Corn Soup, Chicken Lollipops, Date Pancakes, Hot and Sour Soup, and more.

The Chinese use ingredients like chow sum, bok choy, watercress, Sichuan pepper, tofu, and more in their food. Whereas capsicum, cabbage, carrots, baby corn, black peppercorn, vinegar, and soya sauce are used in Indo-Chinese food using sauces like Oyster, Szechwan, Black Bean, Hoisin, Sweet and Sour, and what not… And these, if you remember correctly, are integral parts of an “authentic” Indo-Chinese food. 

In a nutshell, we can say that Chinese cuisine as we see today, apart from a few premium specialty joints, doesn’t have its origin in China anymore. Rather Kolkata has made them evolve into Indo-Chinese cuisine. chilly chicken tossed with Green chilies and even fried rice has never seen china. But whatever it is, we love them and probably that’s what matters. Do let me know your Indo-Chinese food experience. Let’s share stories. 

Category – Chefsway Sauceries

written by Anaanda Rathi  

Date – October 12 , 2016

Growing up in Bombay, my absolute favorite go-out-to-eat cuisine was Indian-Chinese—dishes with oddball names like vegetable Manchurian, Hakka noodles, chilli paneer, and American chop suey were hot, spicy, greasy, and tangy, with an indescribable X factor, that made them so supremely satisfying.

When I was getting ready to move to the U.S. twenty years ago, I was certain I’d get my weekly fix, knowing how large the Chinese population was. Imagine my shocking devastation, then, when I walked into a Chinese restaurant somewhere on the East Coast to find that neither the server, owner, nor chef had heard of any dish with “Manchurian” in the title. Neither had any other Chinese restaurants nor any Chinese home cooks.

Soon I came to know that there were many Indians like me, who were feeling similarly disappointed, with another thing to add to the long list of what we missed about home. As Megha Agrawal, the Social Media Director of Inchin’s Bamboo Garden Franchising, the largest Indian-Chinese restaurant chain in the U.S., wrote to me, “we created IBG (Inchin’s Bamboo Garden) with the idea that it would satiate appetites that missed the local Indian-Chinese food in India.”There were many Indians like me, who were feeling similarly disappointed, with another thing to add to the long list of what we missed about home.

So what is Indian-Chinese exactly? Call it Chinese food adapted to Indian tastes, or the merger of Chinese ingredients like soy sauce and vinegar with garlic, ginger, and chile peppers used in generous quantities—not as a means of seasoning, but as primary ingredients—to create dishes with uniquely amped-up flavor profiles.

According to Fazal Rahmani, assistant general manager of Red Hot Chili Pepper, a popular Indian-Chinese restaurant in the San Francisco Bay Area, it’s defined by “bold flavors that mix Chinese spices with traditional Indian ingredients.”

Indian-Chinese cuisine originated in India and is a uniquely South Asian phenomenon, drastically different from the Cantonese Chinese cuisine available in the U.S. Towards the end of nineteenth and start of the twentieth century, Hakka-speaking Chinese immigrated to the eastern Indian city of Kolkata (formerly known as Calcutta) to work in tanneries, ports, and railways and soon established the country’s only Chinatown.

Like immigrants have been doing for centuries, these Chinese settlers, too, adopted and adapted to their resident country’s practices, customs, rituals, and eating habits. As Chinese ingredients were manipulated to suit the spicy, fried food-craving palates of Indians, a food fusion took off, with new restaurants spring up around Kolkata to satisfy the demand for this supposedly-foreign cuisine with a spice like their own.

The invention of Chicken Manchurian in 1975 by Nelson Wang, an Indian chef and restaurateur of Chinese descent who’s often called the pioneer of this cuisine, serves as a later example of how Indian-Chinese food must have come about decades before.

“Call it Chinese food adapted to Indian tastes, or the merger of Chinese ingredients like soy sauce and vinegar with garlic, ginger, and chills.”

At the time, Wang was working as a caterer at the Cricket Club of India in Bombay. When asked to create an off-menu dish by a customer, Wang deep-fried cubes of cornstarch-coated chicken, then started a sauce with basic Indian ingredients like garlic, ginger, and green chili peppers sautéed in oil. But instead of going the full Indian route with onions, tomatoes, and garam masala, he added soy sauce, cornstarch, and, finally, the fried chicken.

This dish went the equivalent of viral in that analog age, through word of mouth, and spurred Wang to establish his own restaurant, China Garden, in Bombay. A reputed fine-dining restaurant even today, Wang’s China Garden has expanded to other Indian metros, too. Chicken Manchurian became a must on each on every Indian-Chinese menu, irrespective of class, location, and clientele. Vegetarian alternatives called Vegetable Manchurian or Gobi (cauliflower) Manchurian popped up, too.

While Indian-Chinese food had a longstanding presence in Kolkata, it wasn’t until the 1980s that it took off in the entire country. According to a 2007 survey, it’s now India’s favorite “foreign” cuisine, second only to local food, especially among the youth, and it easily exceeds the newly proliferating Italian and Thai food in popularity. It’s available in fine-dining restaurants, food courts, boardwalks, food stalls, fast food restaurants, and even food carts with names like Hungry Eyes and Dancing Buddha. Many of the fast food eateries that once existed primarily to sell quick “tiffin” (snacks) items like dosa and idli have expanded to serve Indian-Chinese like Vegetable Noodles, Vegetable Manchurian, and, here’s the kicker, “idli chilli”—pieces of idli, a steamed dumpling made of soaked and ground rice and lentil dough, stir-fried with soy sauce, garlic, ginger and chile sauce.

One reason Indian-Chinese food is so popular is that the Hakka Chinese catered their dishes to the eating habits of Indians, upping the heat, spice, and grease and making plenty of vegetarian options available. The Hakka settlers who started Indian-Chinese restaurants took care to roll out a sizeable vegetarian menu to suit the Indian population, 31% of which are vegetarian (with an even larger percentage abstaining from meat on certain days or in certain months for religious reasons). Every meat dish has a vegetable counterpart. Not only that, but there is a Jain variation excluding garlic, ginger, onion, and potatoes, too.

Along with the original chicken Manchurian, 

other popular dishes include: Hakka Noodles: udon or soba cooked with vegetables stir-fried with soy sauce, ginger and green peppers

Vegetable Manchurian: deep-fried balls of finely cut vegetables, ginger, all-purpose flour, and cornstarch in a sauce of vinegar, soy sauce, chili sauce, tomato paste.

Gobi Manchurian: cauliflower florets battered in all-purpose flour and cornstarch and deep-fried, then stir-fried in a sauce made of vinegar, soy sauce, chili sauce, tomato paste

Szechuan Fried Rice: rice, vegetables, and/or meat stir-fried in Szechuan sauce (made out of dry red chili peppers, shallots, sesame oil, garlic, ginger, soy sauce, and Szechuan peppers)

Most are eaten with rice and accompanied by condiments like chili-garlic sauce, soy sauce, green peppers marinated in vinegar, and sometimes baby onions marinated in vinegar.

This cuisine has so penetrated the culinary DNA of India that it is mingling with long-established dishes and spawning offspring, like Szechuan Dosa—where vegetables stir-fried in soy sauce and spicy Szechuan sauce are used in place of the traditional spiced potato filling—and Chinese Bhel—a riff on the Indian street food bhel puri. Deep-fried noodles are mixed with julienned fresh vegetables like cabbage, bell peppers, and carrots and a chile-garlic-tomato sauce.

And as Indians have settled around the globe, Indian-Chinese cuisine has spread to Kenya, Australia, Malaysia, and Singapore and slowly to the U.S, as well. The I.T. boom in the 90s brought many first-generation Indians to the U.S., and within the last fifteen years, Indian-Chinese restaurants have opened in New York City, Chicago, San Jose, San Francisco Bay Area, Cleveland, and Los Angeles. These restaurants have a clear target audience: the Indians, who are craving a slice of home, a throwback to Indian restaurants forty or fifty years back. In the current culinary landscape bubbling with enthusiasm for fusion cuisine, it should not take as long for Indian-Chinese cuisine to delight food adventurers.

Category – Chefsway Sauceries

written by Conchita de Souza

Date – May 19, 2021

China and India are the world’s first, and second largest populations respectively. These nations share a hotly-disputed border, located at the north-most point of India with tensions and skirmishes taking place in mid-2020. I have never been to China,  but I assume that, much like India, it is a diverse nation with many cultures, languages and traditions developing from a history that goes back to ancient times.

It can go without saying that in many parts of India, the most popular ‘foreign’ cuisine is that of Chinese cuisine. Street stalls, dhabas and even fancy restaurants boast an array of finger-licking ‘Chinese’ dishes that are increasingly popular with India’s younger generation. These so-called ‘Chinese’ dishes look, smell and taste very different from the western understanding of Chinese food because they are essentially a fusion of the popular base ingredients in Chinese cooking with the spicy and complex flavours of Indian food added in. The term ‘Indian Chinese’ or ‘Indo-Chinese’ therefore refers to the adaptation of specific Chinese dishes to cater to the average Indian palate that is easily tempted by spicy foods. 

This fusion has its origins in the 18th century and to British India’s then capital city, Calcutta, located in the east of India. Many members of the Hakka Chinese community migrated from China to Calcutta and established themselves in the community setting up thriving enterprises. They were silk traders, dentists, leather tannery owners and shoe shop owners. Their involvement in the community was integral in setting up India’s first Chinatown and more importantly, setting the culinary foundations for what would become India’s favourite cuisine. 

Adapting Cuisines 

The first Hakka Chinese restaurateurs would have recognised the importance of fresh and ground spices in Indian cuisine. So they took their traditional elements of Chinese cooking and modified the sauces to incorporate essential Indian ingredients like chilli, ginger and garlic and spices in general. In Indo-Chinese cuisine, use of condiments such as that of cumin seeds, coriander seeds and turmeric is common and not authentic to Chinese cuisine. 

Soon enough, restaurants serving this modified cuisine became widespread across Calcutta and infiltrated to other cities and regions in India. The cuisine’s popularity can be attributed to the creation of food with familiar flavours/sensations but prepared in an entirely different way. The versatility of the ingredients meant that Indo-Chinese dishes were easily adapted to the large vegetarian population. 

Legend tells of Nelson Wang, an Indian chef of Chinese Hakka descent who is credited for inventing the Manchurian preparation of cooking in the 1970s. Mr Wang was a caterer at the Cricket Club of India in Bombay and was asked by a customer to create an off-the-menu dish. He obliged and cut up cubes of chicken, coated it in cornflour, deep-fried it and added it to a sauce cooked up with garlic, ginger and chilli and then finished off with soy sauce and vinegar and thickened again with cornstarch. The dish was a major hit and not long after, Mr Wang went on to open the restaurant China Garden in Bombay before branching out to other cities across India. 

Many Indians perceive Indo-Chinese food as authentic Chinese food, and are often surprised (and perhaps disappointed) when they experience ‘real’ Chinese cuisine which is usually a lot healthier, at times bland and usually meat-focused. The Indian diaspora has acknowledged the popularity of this unique hybrid cuisine and access to Indo-Chinese food is available outside of India where large communities of Indians reside. This is made possible by the demand of nostalgic Indians abroad who crave the simplicity and spiciness of their favourite ‘foreign’ cuisine.
The food fusion continues to evolve to this day with the creation of dishes like Schezwan dosa, chilli idli and Chinese bhel. This is a testament to both the popularity of Indo-Chinese cuisine and its ability to adapt to the local cuisine. 

Top Indian Chinese Dishes

Some Indian restaurants have a section of their menu dedicated to Indian Chinese, and next time you go to your local Indian restaurant, you can check it out. 

I, along with a dear friend, went to Amaravathi Restaurant in Harris Park (known as Sydney’s Little India) and we ordered Dry Chicken Manchurian, Vegetable Chop Suey and Schezwan Egg Fried Rice. We also ordered plain paper dosa for good measure. The food took me back to my time in Delhi, when my housemates and I would finish our groceries after a day at the office and just outside the grocery store would be numerous street food stalls, some of which would sell Indo-Chinese items. We would munch on the likes of Hakka Noodles and Manchurian as a quick evening snack before heading home to prepare dinner. 

Chop Suey – Also called American Chop Suey, this is a mild dish that brings together noodles that are fried until they are crunchy and then topped with a thickened sauce made of cornstarch and thinly sliced vegetables. 
Sweet Corn Soup – A mildly-spiced vegetable soup that gets its sweetness from the addition of corn kernels and is tempered by sourness of the vinegar and saltiness of the soy sauce. 

Manchurian (cover image) – Much can be said about the Manchurian style of cooking, which draws comparison to the deep-fried Indian snack pakora or bhajia. Pieces of meat, seafood or vegetable are battered and then fried in a brownish-red sauce consisting of ginger, garlic, onion and chilli to which soy sauce and vinegar are also added. Popular vegetarian variations include paneer (Indian cottage cheese) and gobi (cauliflower) Manchurian (the latter being one of my favourites). You can order this dish dry (the sauce is reduced) or wet (a thickened gravy). 

Chow Mein – Thin noodles stir-fried with finely chopped veggies like capsicum, carrots and cabbage. The sauce that brings this together is a carefully balanced combination of contrasting flavours such as sourness from vinegar, saltiness from the soy sauce and spiciness from the fresh green chillies and pepper.

Hakka Noodles – Similar to Chow Mein above in terms of the ingredients and seasoning used.  The ‘Hakka’ noodle is even available at Indian grocery stores. 

Schezwan Rice – Schezwan refers to the spicy sauce made from dried red chillies soaked and then cooked in a paste of ginger, garlic and onions to which vinegar and soy sauce is added. It should probably read Sichuan to correspond with the landlocked province located in south-west China and famous for producing peppercorns. Cuisine from the Sichuan province is noted for pungent flavours and it is common for spices like garlic, ginger, chilli peppers and star anise to be used in the preparation of dishes. 

Category – Chefsway Sauceries

written by Nayantara Dutta

Date – 17 September, 2020

Three months ago, I moved back to my hometown, Kolkata, looking forward to spending time with my grandma and practicing my Bangla. But mostly, I was excited for the food. I had been craving gobi manchurian (spicy and tangy fried cauliflower) and hot and sour soup, two of my favorite dishes.

Kolkata is the birthplace of Indian Chinese food, which traces back to Hakka Chinese traders who settled in the city in the late 1700s, when it was the capital of the British empire in India. At that time, Chinese immigrants were largely silk traders, dentists, carpenters, and leather tannery owners, and started cooking their food using local ingredients. After selling street food, they opened Indian Chinese restaurants in Tiretta Bazaar and Tangra, the two Chinatowns in Kolkata.

The cuisine is an Indian interpretation of Chinese food, which combines the deep-fried, spicy flavors Indians love with a Chinese twist, through ingredients like soy sauce and vinegar. Indian Chinese food has its own distinct flavors like Schezwan sauce (the Indian spelling of Sichuan), which uses dry red chiles (spelled “chillies” in India) as a substitute for Sichuan peppercorns. There’s also Manchurian-style cooking, where meat and vegetables are battered and fried in a spicy soy-based sauce with classic Indian ingredients like garlic, ginger, and green chiles.

Indian Chinese food has become popular all over India, especially in Mumbai, but its roots have always been in Kolkata. It’s a huge part of the culture here, so much so that many Indians believe that the food is authentically Chinese. It’s colloquially referred to as Chinese food, and is so widespread that it can be hard to distinguish its influences. “I get confused about which ingredients are Chinese versus Indian,” admits Freddy Liao, who runs the restaurant Golden Joy in Tangra with his family.

Although there are restaurants which serve traditional Chinese dishes, they’re not common. “We have a mixture of Indian Chinese and we have authentic Chinese too, like steamed fish and roast duck,” says Liao. “A lot of people who have visited China understand what the food is like, and sometimes come to Golden Joy to look for authentic food.” But most visitors are caught off guard when they taste traditional Chinese food for the first time. My grandma loves to tell the story of how we went to Beijing and she was shocked to taste the chicken and noodles, after being used to their spicier versions in Kolkata.

It’s fascinating to see the subtle ways in which Indian Chinese food has become a part of local culture. Chinese noodles are generally referred to as chow here, because of the popularity of chow mein, and many cafés have at least four cuisines on their menu (usually Chinese, Indian, Italian, and Thai). At the supermarket, there are Manchow soup packets and hakka noodle spice mixes beside the saunf and saffron. 

Whenever I visit Kolkata, I’m always delighted to see how the food keeps evolving. “Every year, chefs keep coming up with creative new items, like golden fried prawns,” says Liao. “Sometimes, Chinese chefs create them, but it’s also Indian chefs.” Although the cuisine came from the Chinese community, Indians also own many of the fusion restaurants, leading to popular menu items like Chinese bhel and Schezwan dosa. Some of the newest inventions include honey-coated wontons from Chowman, which taste like darsaan (deep-fried Indian Chinese honey noodles) and are filled with chicken. There’s also Bombay chili chicken from Golden Joy, which is full of masala. Green chile, garlic, garam masala, ginger, and soy sauce remain the baselines for the distinctive yet familiar flavors.

Despite the popularity of Indian Chinese food and the Chinese community’s roots in India, there is still prejudice, including politicians who have suggested boycotting Chinese food in the country. “We have four generations over here,” says Liao. “We are Indian. I don’t even hold a Chinese passport. I hold an Indian passport.”

Over the years, as members of Kolkata’s Chinese community have moved abroad, they’ve taken the traditions of Indian Chinese food with them. Inchin’s Bamboo Garden has become the largest chain in the U.S., with 25 locations from Atlanta to Seattle. You can also find lots of restaurants in the Northeast—New Jersey is home to a large concentration of Indian Chinese restaurants in Edison and Iselin, and New York City has Spice Symphony and Tangra Masala. The cuisine has also spread to Singapore and the U.K, with well-known restaurants like Hakkaland and Indian Tiffin Room and even Bengali spots like Darjeeling Express featuring classic Tangra dishes. As the cuisine has moved around the world, it’s reinvented itself in every location. At Spice N Ice restaurant in England, a dish named Hakka Chong Yee combines Bengali sea fish with the Cantonese flavors of ginger, wine, chile garlic, and black bean sauce. The flavors may differ around the world, but wherever you eat them, they still taste familiar—and always transport me right back to India.

Category – Chefsway Sauceries

written by Sanjiv Khamgaonkar

Date – 12th July 2017

While the Chinese have been visiting India for millennia in search of Buddhist teachings, Yang Tai Chow was the first recorded Chinese to migrate to India for better material prospects. In 1778, he put down roots in Kolkata. Known at the time as Calcutta, it was the then-capital of British India and the most easily accessible metropolitan area from China by land.

Over the years, many like him came, mostly Hakkas, and by the early part of the 20th century, a Chinatown had developed in Kolkata and it thrived and buzzed with enterprise. Chinese served with distinction as dentists, tannery owners, sauce manufacturers, beauticians and shoe shop owners, but it was as restaurateurs that the Chinese found their fame and glory in India.

As all immigrant communities tend to do, the Chinese assimilated Indian sensibilities and beliefs. They even acknowledged one of our goddesses, Kali, as their own, and offered noodles, chop suey, rice and vegetable dishes in rituals as a sign of unity.

And so it was with food that the Sino-Indian cultural fusion began.

About 85 years ago, the Indian culinary world was affected by a new cuisine. The first Indo Chinese restaurant Eau Chew opened in Kolkata. Presumably hordes came out satiated and impressed, beaming their approval to the next lot of people who hadn’t tried this new fangled cuisine of foreign origin, yet spicy and tasty like their own.

New restaurants mushroomed all over Kolkata, and legends like Fat Mama and Kim Fa were born, offering newer dishes with fancier combinations and names like August Moon Rolls and Fiery Dragon Chicken. Before you knew it “Indian Chinese” had tickled the taste buds of folk in every small town and city across India. No small feat for a foreign cuisine.

Indian Chinese food wasn’t just served by restaurants big and small, but also by handcart owners, highway food stalls and mobile Chow Mein vans boasting imaginative names like Hungry Eyes and Dancing Stomach. Classic Mumbai street food now even has Chinese versions with “Chinese bhel” and “Sichuan dosa.”

Why is it so popular?

What is it that makes Chinese food so spectacularly popular? The answer lies with Indian food.

Quick to figure out that Indians love spicy, oily preparations, the Chinese merely masala-fied and greased their cuisine into a glutinous, winning combination.

Paneer (Indian cottage cheese) turned into Sichuan paneer with Chinese spices. Chicken curry was substituted with chili chicken. Aloo bhindi? Kung Pao potatoes with okra in a sweet and spicy tomato based dry sauce cured the craving and the curiosity. Pepper chicken reminded people of south Indian style fried chicken.

Non-vegetarian pakoras (batter fried dumplings) chicken or lamb or prawn Manchurian, dry or gravy. And since there’s usually at least one vegetarian in an Indian family, Manchurian sauce was poured over gobi (cauliflower). To some, Gobi Manchurian is the outer limit of Indian-Chinese food friendship.

But wait a minute. Manchurian? Is that even a dish?

Not in China, no. But in India, it’s practically synonymous with Chinese food. The result of a request by a customer at China Garden, Mumbai’s original Indian Chinese restaurant, to create something different from the menu, and owner Nelson Wang (then caterer of Chinese food at the Cricket Club of India) took cubes of chicken, coated them in corn flour and deep fried them. Wang then prepared a red sauce with onions, green chillies and garlic, and slapped some vinegar and soy into it.

He popped the fried chicken dumplings back into the sauce and gave it a quick stir so that the flavors came together and served it with steamed or fried rice. The customers loved it. As Nelson says, “word of mouth” spread the acclaim of this dish and today it is found in almost every menu that serves Chinese food in the country.

This word-of-mouth publicity inspired Nelson Wang to start his own restaurant China Garden, which is a veritable Mumbai institution, even today.

Nowadays his son Eddie, a third generation Chinese Indian, spearheads the restaurant’s expansion to Delhi, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Pune and Goa. Not bad for a man who began his career eking out a modest living doing odd jobs, including limbo dancing at clubs in Kolkata, which, by the way, he was also very good at.

The feel-at-home comfort of Indian Chinese food is accentuated by the garnishes. Most dishes are covered with fresh coriander leaves, and depending on the dish, sliced onion rings too.

But it’s the ingredients that distinguish Indian Chinese food from real Chinese food.

While the cooking methods remain the same, what goes in is quite different. Besides the use of locally available vegetables and meats, it’s the use of condiments like garam masalas (a selection of hand pounded or whole spices used to cook Indian meat dishes), corn flour for thickening and coating, monosodium glutamate to enhance the “Chinese” flavor, an overdose of chilli, garlic and ginger, and generous portions of soy sauce to top it all off — which is what gives Indian Chinese food that special robust, spicy flavor.

Who needs the bland original Chinese food when you’ve got a pungent chili garlic prawn in front of you? Or hakka noodles? Noodles tossed with garlic, lots of chillies, cabbage, capsicum, carrots, ajinomoto, soya, Worcestershire sauce, vinegar and garnished with spring onions. Or a chicken lollipop? Chicken wings artfully stuffed with more meat, dipped in a red batter and deep fried. Or crispy fried shredded lamb with red chillies camouflaged so well that there’s danger in every bite.

Firmly established in the Indian culinary milieu now, these dishes define the Indian Chinese food experience. Today, restaurant menus also offer a selection of dishes from different regions of China — steamed and delicate like the original, but there’s always the Indian Chinese touch sitting on the same page.

As the second and third generation of Chinese Indians grew up they migrated to other parts of the world. And they did what they knew best. Cook Indian Chinese food. Even in Europe and America these days, if you want that extra punch from your home delivery boxes, the recipe probably originated in Mumbai or Kolkata.

Blame it on Yang Tai Chow. Or thank him. Depending on how much you like your mouth breathing chili garlic fire.

Category – Chefsway Sauceries

written by RHCPCA

Date – 26 th April  2021

Food, roots of which trace back to the southern part of the Asian continent, is rapidly gaining ground and popularity in foreign lands. With the cuisines gaining humongous popularity, especially amongst the Americans, it is an opportunity to look back at the rich history of it, to see how it traveled from in the east to in the west. We here at Red Hot Chilli Pepper Fremont are here to take care of that.

But let’s begin with the simplest question. What is Indo-Chinese cuisine? It is the fusion of two of the most flavored cuisines across the globe. It includes a combination of Chinese cooking techniques with Indian flavors to produce a mouth-watering exquisite dish. This fusion can be dated back to the nineteenth century when the highly famous Chinese Hakka Noodles were brought to the Indian sub-continent to the town: Kolkata. It was widely accepted as the first blend in the culinary culture of the two that ultimately led to the birth of the first Chinatown of India – Tangra. Accompanying it was the adoption of the Indian culture by the Chinese in their daily lives that ultimately led to a change in their style of cooking with a pinch on Indian-ness to it. It was followed by the creation of the world-famous Chinese Manchurian by Nelson Wang in the 1970s, as the dish gained traction in the country.

This type of cuisine is distinguished by a sense of sour and spicy taste. These include spices like the five spice-powder (star anise, cinnamon, cloves, Szechuan pepper, and fennel), ginger, garlic, vinegar, spring onions, the list goes on. As the shift towards vegetarian food increased, so did the introduction of this spicy food in the market. It ultimately led to increasing the fame for this cuisine and creation of more dishes which have become quite famous in today’s world viz.: the Hakka Noodle, Cauliflower or Chicken Manchurian, Chilli Chicken, etc.

These dishes have been designed even for the vegetarian palate and have gained massive popularity in Indian cuisines. Overall, the cultural fusion of the culinary between the two has resulted in some bold flavors. It led to yielding spectacular dishes that have been gaining widespread traction all over the world.

We here at Red Hot Chilli Pepper Fremont bring you the best Indo-Chinese fusion you would have ever seen or tasted. It would leave one craving for more! So what are you waiting for: satisfy your cravings today!