Jump to content
  • Welcome to the eG Forums, a service of the eGullet Society for Culinary Arts & Letters. The Society is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of the culinary arts. These advertising-free forums are provided free of charge through donations from Society members. Anyone may read the forums, but to post you must create a free account.

Any English-language Chinese cookbooks that routinely include MSG?


Shalmanese

Recommended Posts

I'm sick of even purportedly "authentic" Chinese cookbooks engaging in a culinary whitewashing by completely omitting MSG from their recipes. It reinforces the stereotype that MSG is dangerous, unhealthy or a crutch for low quality cooking. More importantly, it causes dishes you've tasted from authentic Chinese eateries impossible to replicate. By omitting MSG from the culinary lexicon, there's no way to teach how to use it properly, how to diagnose improper use, where it's regarded as essential and where it's regarded as optional.

Hunting through my stack of Chinese cookbooks, I find:

Barbara Tropp - Modern Art of Chinese Cooking: Says she doesn't use it, doesn't include it in any of the recipes.

Irene Kuo - Key to Chinese Cooking: Finds it "distasteful", doesn't use it.

Fuchsia Dunlop - Assorted: Admits that most Chinese cooks use it but avoids using it as she finds it "at best unnecessary and at worst, a cheat"

Ken Hom - Taste of China: Mentions it negatively 3 times, no recipes include it.

Kenneth Lo - Chinese Regional Cooking: No mention of it, not included in any recipe I could find.

Robert Delfs - Good Food of Szechwan: No mention of it, not included in any recipe I could find.

Ellen Schrecker - Mrs Chiang's Szechwan Cookbook: Is actually honest and admits MSG tastes good. Justifies not including it by saying it's a restaurant technique, not a home cook one.

Pei Mei - Chinese Cookbook Volume I: No mention of it, not included in any recipe I could find.

So there you go. I consider myself to have a pretty deep bench of Chinese cookbooks and I couldn't find a single one that includes MSG in a single recipe. Oddly enough, my 1961 copy of the New York Times cookbook includes 9 recipes with MSG, not all of them Asian. It's not even that I use MSG that often or disagree with most people that it can be a crutch. It's just that I find the complete elimination of it from Chinese culinary history disappointing.

  • Like 4

PS: I am a guy.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

 It's just that I find the complete elimination of it from Chinese culinary history disappointing.

 

From your list it seems MSG is being eliminated from English language versions of the history. It has certainly not been eliminated from Chinese culinary history in China.

 

 

Justifies not including it by saying it's a restaurant technique, not a home cook one.

 

Nonsense. Every home cook I know in China (and I know a lot) uses it, It is available in every supermarket and corner shop. Right next to the salt, usually.

 

The Chinese language cookbooks I mentioned in this thread all use MSG.

 

Perhaps, some English language cookbooks don't include it on grounds of limited availability.

Edited by liuzhou (log)

...your dancing child with his Chinese suit.

 

The Kitchen Scale Manifesto

Link to comment
Share on other sites

From your list it seems MSG is being eliminated from English language versions of the history. It has certainly not been eliminated from Chinese culinary history in China.

Yes, I meant the English account of Chinese culinary history is inaccurate because of this.

 

Nonsense. Every home cook I know in China (and I know a lot) uses it, It is available in every supermarket and corner shop. Right next to the salt, usually.

The book was published in 1976 when MSG was still a fairly recent invention. Perhaps that's why? I don't know what Chinese cooking was like then. Still, it doesn't justify the more modern books on the list omitting it.

Perhaps, some English language cookbooks don't include it on grounds of limited availability.

Doubtful, MSG powder is widely available in the west, it's no rarer than say, shaoxing wine or doubanjiang.

PS: I am a guy.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yup, it's in every grocery store and "dollar" store in this area ......available by the pound (or two) at Sam's Club and the like.

~Martin :)

I just don't want to look back and think "I could have eaten that."

Unsupervised, rebellious, radical agrarian experimenter, minimalist penny-pincher, and adventurous cook. Crotchety, cantankerous, terse curmudgeon, non-conformist, and contrarian who questions everything!

The best thing about a vegetable garden is all the meat you can hunt and trap out of it!

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Pure conjecture here, but I'd say it probably has a lot to do with sales. English-speaking Westerners, for the most part, have been fairly well convinced that MSG is "bad." The authors (and publishers) want to sell those books to English-speaking Westerners. So including MSG in the recipes would likely reduce book sales. I have Gloria Bley Miller's "Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook" (I don't use it a lot, but I like to read it at times) and she says, in part, "There are two schools of thought on its value for home cooking: one that it heightens flavor, the other that it's not necessary when food is of good quality and well-prepared." I can't find it in a recipe in the book but I'm assuming it's there because she includes MSG in her glossary and her list of "Ingredients Used in Chinese Cooking."

Link to comment
Share on other sites

"There are two schools of thought on its value for home cooking: one that it heightens flavor, the other that it's not necessary when food is of good quality and well-prepared."

 

That could also be said for salt.

~Martin :)

I just don't want to look back and think "I could have eaten that."

Unsupervised, rebellious, radical agrarian experimenter, minimalist penny-pincher, and adventurous cook. Crotchety, cantankerous, terse curmudgeon, non-conformist, and contrarian who questions everything!

The best thing about a vegetable garden is all the meat you can hunt and trap out of it!

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

What prevents someone from making a recipe, tasting it, deciding if it needs a bit more 'depth'/umami and adding a small pinch of MSG to get it (even if that is not part of the original recipe)?

Edited by Deryn (log)
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yes, I meant the English account of Chinese culinary history is inaccurate because of this.

 

The book was published in 1976 when MSG was still a fairly recent invention. Perhaps that's why? I don't know what Chinese cooking was like then. Still, it doesn't justify the more modern books on the list omitting it.

Doubtful, MSG powder is widely available in the west, it's no rarer than say, shaoxing wine or doubanjiang.

 

Balderdash.  MSG was readily available in the US in the 1960's and 1970's.  And was more popular then than (thankfully) it is now.  Even I used it to great excess.

 

In the 1960's I spent some time living in a house with four or five other college students.  Two of us were responsible for the cooking duties:  myself and a Chinese student (eg. someone who had emigrated from China).  Only one of us used MSG.

Cooking is cool.  And kitchen gear is even cooler.  -- Chad Ward

Whatever you crave, there's a dumpling for you. -- Hsiao-Ching Chou

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Indeed MSG was first isolated (not 'invented')  in 1908. I wouldn't call that 'recent' in terms of 1976.

 

However, it remains hard to find in many places in the west. It's fine in larger cities in the UK, especially those with significant East Asian populations, but I can assure you it is not easy to find in smaller towns. I'm guess it is the same in the USA. When I was living in London I sent regular batches of Chinese ingredients to my sister in Scotland. 

 

Of course, that was before on-line shopping (on-line anything - when I was a kid on-line meant hanging up your washing to dry!)

...your dancing child with his Chinese suit.

 

The Kitchen Scale Manifesto

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm reasonably certain that MSG is the principal constituent of Accent Flavor Enhancer, which is quite common in USA grocery stores. I'll have to check the next time I'm looking at a shaker of the stuff. I remember when my mother first discovered it in the 1960's - it was quite the rage back then. (Liuzhou, you forgot the other meaning of "on-line" back then: it meant Dad was coming home with fish. :-D)

Nancy Smith, aka "Smithy"
HosteG Forumsnsmith@egstaff.org

Follow us on social media! Facebook; instagram.com/egulletx; twitter.com/egullet

"Every day should be filled with something delicious, because life is too short not to spoil yourself. " -- Ling (with permission)
"There comes a time in every project when you have to shoot the engineer and start production." -- author unknown

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm reasonably certain that MSG is the principal constituent of Accent Flavor Enhancer, which is quite common in USA grocery stores. I'll have to check the next time I'm looking at a shaker of the stuff. I remember when my mother first discovered it in the 1960's - it was quite the rage back then. (Liuzhou, you forgot the other meaning of "on-line" back then: it meant Dad was coming home with fish. :-D)

 

Yes, I think Accent is mainly, if not entirely MSG. 

Yes, the fish idea crossed my mind, but my Dad was never a fisherman. 

  • Like 1

...your dancing child with his Chinese suit.

 

The Kitchen Scale Manifesto

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I don't think that MSG was deliberately "whitewashed" from culinary history. It's become unpopular so it's not found in readily available cookbook editions. Most people aren't interested in culinary history when they buy cookbooks. They want something tasty to cook. Even if the book originally contained MSG in recipes, I bet the MSG was omitted in later editions. As for the recipes being authentic--or not--we've had many discussions on EGullet about "authenticity." It's like beauty in the eye of the beholder.

 

For finding your MSG recipes--

 

MSG appears in recipes in The Chinese Cookbook by Craig Claiborne and Virginia Lee (1972). Googlebooks preview here:
https://books.google.com/books?id=eiw-EnIm0g4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=chinese+cookbook+claiborne+lee&hl=en&sa=X&ei=J-S1VN-hHIqBygSAtoFg&ved=0CB8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=chinese%20cookbook%20claiborne%20lee&f=false

 

MSG is also used in The Pleasures of Chinese Cooking by Grace Zia Chu (1969). (The foreword was written by Craig Claiborne--I see a pattern here.) I own this book, though I can't dig it out right now. It's in a box. The food reminds me of the Chinese restaurant food of my childhood (1960s, 1970s), although I don't use MSG and neither did my parents for their home cooking.

 

I surmise that MSG started disappearing from American cookbooks in the 1970s. If you're serious about this line of research, you can go to a used book site like abebooks.com or alibris.com and do a search for keyword "chinese cookbook" with advanced search option of publishing date before 1970 or thereabouts. Oldies and maybe goodies will show up in the search. (For advanced search, click "more search options" in abebooks.com search box. Click the red magnifying glass icon on the alibris.com search box.)

 

If you don't want to buy the books, then you may find them in the SF public library catalog, including the Link+ system. Interlibrary loan through Link+ is free via the SF public library.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I just ordered the Craig Claiborne and Virginia Lee based on the recipe excerpts in the link above.   I use MSG often when cooking, my rule of thumb is usually 1/4 to 1/2 as much MSG as salt, and I add it when I don't feel the recipe gets enough of that flavor from other ingredients (don't want to add it to miso soup, but a little in hamburgers along with salt and pepper is a regular thing for me).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I wonder....when I first visited Japan around 1980, MSG was a normal kitchen condiment, but that hasn't been true here for a long time. Of course, it's in instant foods and seasoning mixes, but the bottle of MSG lined up beside the salt and soy sauce(s) has gone from kitchens. You can buy it, but not everywhere, and I haven't seen it listed in a recipe for decades, perhaps. Wouldn't be surprised if it were no longer as common in China either.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

I'm reasonably certain that MSG is the principal constituent of Accent Flavor Enhancer, which is quite common in USA grocery stores. I'll have to check the next time I'm looking at a shaker of the stuff. I remember when my mother first discovered it in the 1960's - it was quite the rage back then. (Liuzhou, you forgot the other meaning of "on-line" back then: it meant Dad was coming home with fish. :-D)

 

You are correct - Accent, which has been around almost forever, and is found on supermarket shelves everywhere.

 

While many people eschew the product, and MSG in general, for health reasons, believing it contains excessive amounts of sodium, it actually contains less sodium than salt.

 

 

 ... Shel


 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

×
×
  • Create New...